BeagleBoard.org and Seeed Introduce the First Affordable RISC-V Board Designed to Run Linux

SHENZHEN, China & ROCHESTER, Mich.--January 13, 2021 -- Seeed and BeagleBoard.org® have announced an official collaboration with the leading RISC-V solutions provider, StarFive, to create the latest member of the BeagleBoard.org® series, BeagleV™ (pronounced Beagle five). BeagleV™ is the first affordable RISC-V board designed to run Linux. BeagleV™, pushes open-source to the next level and gives developers more freedom and power to innovate and design industry leading solutions with an affordable introductory price of $149 followed by lower cost variants in subsequent releases.

BeagleV™ will be available for early access in March with larger availability in September. The early access version encompasses StarFive Jinghong 7100 SoC with powerful AI performance (3.5T NVDLA, 1T NNE), built-in ISP, 1 Gigabit ethernet, and a dual core 64-bit SiFive U74 RISC-V CPU with 8GB of LPDDR4 memory. It also has a dedicated hardware encoder/decoder supporting H.264 and H.265 4k@60fps, making it a perfect edge computing device with powerful AI capability. Supported by mainline Linux and a Debian-based BeagleBoard.org® open-source software image, BeagleV™ is ready for development out-of-the-box and prepared for the future.

BeagleV™ supports a high-level of flexibility in development, which gives Linux users, Kernel, and BSP developers more flexibility from silicon to hardware. The social and community value of this development board is to elevate open-source to the next level, and the three parties are embracing this and pushing it further to enable the evolution of science and technology industries. BeagleV™ marks the first time that hardware development has ever achieved this level of freedom and openness, and the significance of the revolutionary collaboration is the shared purpose of the three parties, which is to make the open-source community stronger and more sustainable.

BeagleV™ provides the open-source community with the opportunity to build projects with a higher performance development board. Our vision is to help and enable the RISC-V ecosystem to grow, to productize RISC-V based projects, and to contribute much more open hardware in the global developer community. The three companies with special business models have worked closely together to deliver a revolutionary platform that completely opens up computer equipment and makes it available to users. BeagleV™ acts as a milestone to the world of open-source and provides a stronger and more flexible way for developers to extend their projects and to make a much more thriving community.

BeagleBoard.org® and Seeed look forward to strengthening the continued partnership with StarFive and the RISC-V community, especially around StarFive's upcoming production Jinghong 7110 SoC this summer with Quad-core 64-bit SiFive U74 RISC-V processor.

For further updates visit BeagleV.org

Issued by Branding PR on behalf of Seeed and BeagleBoard.org®. For more information or images, please contact branding@seeed.cc or Christine Long at christi@beagleboard.org.

About Seeed

As a long-term advocator and supporter of the open-source community, Seeed has devoted 12 years to the open-source hardware field to serve the global developer community by providing affordable and accessible hardware components and devices that integrate the manufacturing supply chain resources in Shenzhen. Seeed will soon launch industrial grade turnkey Fusion services around BeagleV™ for customization from software, enclosures, expansion boards, mainboards, all the way to silicon solutions.

About StarFive

StarFive is the leader of RISC-V technology and ecosystem development. The company offers a complete and silicon-proven portfolio of RISC-V CPU IP series. It also provides platform-based software and hardware full stack chip solution. StarFive products are widely used in smart home appliances, traffic management, wearable devices, solid-state storage, network communications and edge computing, etc.

About BeagleBoard.org®

BeagleBoard.org® (501(c)(3) non-profit) founded in 2008 has created over 10 open hardware single board computers (SBCs) focused on providing education and collaboration around the design and use of open-source software and hardware in embedded computing. BeagleBoard.org®’s forum of tens of thousands of developers encourages and supports the use of open-source software and hardware with the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experience. The BeagleBoard.org® community collaborates on the development of open-source computing solutions in all industry segments and enables customization and ownership by all users.