Milk-V Continues Its Breakneck Pace, Launches Raspberry Pi 4-Style 2GHz RISC-V Meles SBC

Mere days after announcing a new system-on-module, RISC-V specialist Milk-V has updated its Raspberry Pi-inspired single-board computer lineup with a new higher performance model: the quad-core Meles.

"Milk-V Meles is a credit card-sized, single-board computer (SBC) based on the [Alibaba T-Head] TH1520 [system-on-chip]," the company explains of its latest hardware design. "It is powered by a quad-core RISC-V 64GCV C910 [processor], capable of running up to 2GHz. This SBC is packed with rich interfaces and boasts powerful computing and AI capabilities, making it an ideal RISC-V intelligent hardware platform for hobbyists, makers, engineers, teachers, and students."

Roughly mimicking the footprint of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, though with one full-size HDMI port rather than two micro-HDMI ports, the Meles includes 4k60 support, a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector, a two-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector, four USB 3.0 ports, a USB Type-C port for power and USB 2.0 Device operation, a gigabit Ethernet port, I2S audio, microSD and eMMC storage, a Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 radio, analog AV jack, and a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header with up to three UART, two I2C, and one SPI bus, an analog-to-digital convert (ADC), and eight general-purpose pins.

The TH1520 system-on-chip at the heart of the Meles is a move away from the StarFive JH7110 common to the board's rivals, opting instead for the T-Head TH1520 — packing four 64-bit C910 RISC-V cores running at up to 2GHz. The biggest difference between the two: T-Head has released an open source version of the C910 core IP, dubbed OpenC910, where the JH7110 uses proprietary cores from RISC-V pioneer SiFive. The chip also includes a neural network coprocessor offering four tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision and a graphics processor with OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenCL 2.0, and Vulkan 1.2 support, with Milk-V adding a choice of 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR4x RAM.

The new board comes hot on the heels of the unveiling earlier this week of the Mars Compute Module, a direct competitor to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) based on the Raspberry Pi 3-style Mars, announced earlier this year. Other devices announced by the company include the 64-core high-performance Pioneer, its first, and the low-cost microcontroller-centric Duo development board.

More information on the board, which has yet to go on sale, is available on the Milk-V website; the 8GB variant will launch at $99 with the 16GB version not yet priced.