The way the Sophgo SG2000 chip works, you can select to use either the 1 GHz RISC-V core or the 1 GHz ARM core, but you cannot use both at the same time.
I thought it was maybe a FPGA with a switchable personality. But I can't confirm my thought.
"I'd like a heterogeneous architecture sbc please"
They have played us for absolute fools.
The award for "WTF Design" goes to...
So you get either a mediocre ARM or a mediocre RISC-V, plus an even worse RISC-V, plus an 8051 core.
I've seen a lot of crazy, stupid SOC designs in the last decades, but this is extraordinary.
And the board has USB2, 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi and/or(?) BT, and 512MB RAM. With no real support on the software side, and to small to run a modern Linux efficiently. If this board costs more than $10, it is doomed.
Reminds me of my Commodore 128. You could boot it into 64 bit mode for legacy programs. I had exactly one C-128 game (which was a super complicated combat flight sim) so I only used it in C-64 mode.
I can think of one valid use case for this unsolved by any other solution:
Lets say a company has an SoC board base product currently currently base on ARM. They want to eventually migrate to RISC-V based solution.
If a company has a product currently written to use ARM compiled code, but wants to transition to RISC-V (which isn't ready yet), they could deploy this board which could run today's ARM implementation, and it would be future-ready when the RISC-V implementation would be released without having to replace hardware.
But why?
To experiment, I guess
Experiment how? What on earth could this possibly be useful for?
To learn about new architectures, now as they grow significance more and more, I’d say
Oh thats so strange. This is a really odd chip https://milkv.io/chips/sg2000
I thought it was maybe a FPGA with a switchable personality. But I can't confirm my thought.
"I'd like a heterogeneous architecture sbc please"
They have played us for absolute fools.
The award for "WTF Design" goes to...
So you get either a mediocre ARM or a mediocre RISC-V, plus an even worse RISC-V, plus an 8051 core.
I've seen a lot of crazy, stupid SOC designs in the last decades, but this is extraordinary.
And the board has USB2, 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi and/or(?) BT, and 512MB RAM. With no real support on the software side, and to small to run a modern Linux efficiently. If this board costs more than $10, it is doomed.
Reminds me of my Commodore 128. You could boot it into 64 bit mode for legacy programs. I had exactly one C-128 game (which was a super complicated combat flight sim) so I only used it in C-64 mode.
I can think of one valid use case for this unsolved by any other solution:
Lets say a company has an SoC board base product currently currently base on ARM. They want to eventually migrate to RISC-V based solution.
If a company has a product currently written to use ARM compiled code, but wants to transition to RISC-V (which isn't ready yet), they could deploy this board which could run today's ARM implementation, and it would be future-ready when the RISC-V implementation would be released without having to replace hardware.
But why?
To experiment, I guess
Experiment how? What on earth could this possibly be useful for?
To learn about new architectures, now as they grow significance more and more, I’d say