Pine64 has made a name for itself in recent years by offering low-cost hardware including smartphones, laptops, mini-PCs and various ARM-based developments. Now submitted a single board computer for the RISC-V platform.

In case you don’t know her, say she’s Fr the most promising hardware architecture when searching for «Open Source chip«. The project is the responsibility of the RISC-V Foundation of the same name, and since its birth in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, the number of sponsors has been growing. Today, it has as platinum members such important companies as Google, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung, Western Digital, IBM or Micron and welcomes others as important as Microsoft.

His goal is to develop a new design open source chip based on the RISC architecture, which offers a more economical (and open) way to manufacture semiconductors for today’s applications and all the new technologies that are coming for autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, virtual reality or data centers.

According to the announcement, the SBC for RISC-V board will offer performance comparable to the Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor that the company uses for its next development, the Quartz64. The integrated graphics will be an Imagination Technologies BXE-2-32 with “entry level” capabilities.

Pine64 says the board will have a form factor about the size 133 x 80 x 19 mm. Slightly larger than the Raspberry Pi Model B, but with extra space for a PCIe slot and additional I/O connectors. It will be available in versions with 4 or 8 GB of RAM and will have support for USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet.

The Pine64 model will be the next to come to market and will be for testing and development for now, but getting more manufacturers involved is important. And expand its use to more “consumable” devices such as smartphones. He’s on his way.