[Currently in review] Sipeed: Lichee Pi 4A

[dusan1710]

Ever since we've taken a look at the VisionFive 2, we've had a bit of a fascination with RISC-V. Development is going at a rapid pace, and only a few years after we've gotten RISC-V chips physically capable of running the Linux kernel, the market's already filling with consumer-grade RISC-V boards with software support not unlike what the initial Raspberry Pi models had to work with back in 2011 - after over a decade of development of Linux for ARM.

The Lichee Pi 4A module in its carrier board

Lichee Pi 4A.jpg (181.4 KiB) Viewed 328 times

The Lichee Pi 4A is Sipeed's consumer-oriented RISC-V SBC, which features a T-Head TH1520 SoC, is a huge step forward in terms of speed. Sipeed claims it can outperform the Raspberry Pi 4B when using an optimized compilation toolchain, and even with the generic RV64GC one its performance should not lag behind the RPi 4 by much.

With its module-and-carrier-board design (the Lichee Pi 4A is really just a Lichee Module 4A SoM on its reference carrier board) and Sipeed designing several other devices which can utilize the SoM, including a 7-slot cluster board, there's some real scalability to be had.