PINE64 Becomes the Latest to Adopt the Unusual Sophgo SG2000 Multi-Architecture Chip in Its Oz64
Packing Arm, RISC-V, and Intel 8051 cores, plus a proprietary NPU, the Oz64 will be PINE64's most unusual board yet.
Open-hardware specialist PINE64 has become the latest to design a single-board computer around Sophgo's unusual SG2000 system-on-chip — combining Arm, RISC-V, a proprietary NPU, and an Intel 8051 clone on a single device.
"The Oz64 is a low cost single-board computer based on the Sophgo SG2000 SoC with dual T-Head C906 64-bit RISC-V cores, an ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit RISC CPU core and an 8051 eight-bit core supported by 512MB of embedded DRAM memory," the company explains of its latest hardware design, "with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio interfaces."
Brought to our attention by CNX Software, the Oz64 is the latest in a string of devices from companies including Sipeed and Milk-V to adopt the Sophgo SG2000, launched by the company back in February. As PINE64 says, the chip is unusual for the number of architectures it implements: the part includes 1GHz application-class cores based on proprietary Arm Cortex-A53 and open-source T-Head C906 RISC-V designs, a second 700MHz C906 core, and a 300MHz microcontroller core based on Intel's vintage 8051 architecture — plus, if that weren't enough, a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 0.5 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads.
To this, PINE64 has added 512MB of DDR3 memory, a choice of eMMC module or microSD Card storage, a single USB 2.0 Type-A port, a Fast Ethernet port with optional Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities, a 3.5mm analog audio jack, two dual-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and an optional dual-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector, and a 26-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
PINE64 concentrates on finalizing the hardware designs before moving onto software, and the Oz64 is no exception to the rule: the device is currently a work-in-progress, though what the company describes as a "community effort" has seen the release of a build of the NuttX real-time operating system (RTOS).
More information on the Oz64 is available on the PINE64 website and wiki; the company has not yet announced pricing nor general availability.