As progress revealed on Android port to the open ISA.
Canonical has brought its Ubuntu Linux operating system to another RISC-V system: this week, Sipeed’s LicheeRV single board computer.
The announcement marks the software house’s latest investment in the open, royalty-free ISA. To date, Ubuntu runs on numerous RISC-V systems, including those from SiFive, Clockwork, Microchip, StarFive, and now Sipeed. We’re also happy to note that other flavors of Linux, such as Debian, run on RISC-V hardware, too.
The LicheeRV dev board is very modest, performance wise, and aimed at embedded electronics, Internet of Things, and low-power machine-learning applications. The diminutive system can be found online for less than $17 and is powered by a 1GHz Allwinner D1 processor with a single 64-bit RV64GCV C906 core and 512MB of DDR3 memory.
The CPU core itself is open source and was developed by Alibaba’s T-Head division. Notable features include an integrated Tensilica HiFi4 digital signal processor and support for 4K H.265 video decoding.