RISC-V (riscv64)

[Arwen]

RISC-V is open. But, any company that makes modifications and sells the results, does not have to share the results upstream. That is one of the main differences that GPL people point to as non-open source. However, this allows a company to embed a RISC-V processor in a device, (Western Digital and nVidia comes to mind), and not have to disclose the design modifications to their competitors.

As for the BeagleV, it's not completely suitable as a replacement desktop. Here are what I think it's missing;

• The HDMI is 1080P@30FPS but some computer monitors support 50 to 76hz, so it would not work on those
  
• Storage via SD card only is a bit limiting. A single SATA DOM port or eMMC connector would have been a good improvement
  
• Using a combo slot of UFS/SD would have better than just a SD slot
  

It would have been nice to also have >1Gbps Ethernet. Like use a 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps chip. Having higher speed wired network would allow faster network share access. Or even booting off network share. At 5Gbps, that's about 500MBytes per second, so assuming your NAS can do that, makes this anywhere from 10 to 100 times faster than a SD card. Plus, MUCH longer endurance.

I do have to give it props for using;

• USB 3.x for all ports
  
• 8GB of RAM
  
• Having both WiFi & Ethernet
  
• And of course using USB-C for power
  

Now we have to wait til end of summer for general availability. (The April 2021 release is a limited pilot run for the community.)

PS UFS, (Universal Flash Storage), is one replacement for eMMCs inside smaller devices, like phones & tablets. Their is a "card" version that can be used in a UFS/SD combo slot.