Milk-V Goes After the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with a Pin-Compatible RISC-V Alternative
The Milk-V Mars Compute Module includes dual-4k video outputs, four 1.5GHz RISC-V cores, a GPU, PCI Express, and more.
RISC-V specialist Milk-V has announced yet another board design, designed for those looking to break into RISC-V development but who are already invested in the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) ecosystem: the Milk-V Mars Compute Module (CM) system-on-module (SOM).
"The Mars Compute Module is a system-on-module (SoM) based on a the StarFive JH7110 system-on-chip (SoC)," the company explains of its latest board design. "The Mars CM integrates the Central Process Unit (CPU), Power Management Unit (PMU), DRAM memory, flash storage and wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi 5 and BT 5.2) in a small form factor of just 55×40mm [around 2.17×1.58"]. The Mars Compute Module offers a cost-efficient solution out of the box for many different applications."
Most of those applications, it must be noted, are currently addressed by the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, which uses a Broadcom system-on-chip with four proprietary Arm processor cores. The StarFive JH7110, by contrast, uses four RISC-V cores from SiFive — though while the underlying instruction set architecture is open source, these too are proprietary designs.
The JH7110 SoC, which has previously been used on the PINE64 Star64 and StarFive VisionFive 2 single-board computers, includes four 64-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 1.5GHz and, unlike its predecessor the JH7100, an Imagination Technologies IMG BXE-32-4 graphics processing unit (GPU).
To this, Milk-V has added a choice of 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, SDIO 2.0 or eMMC storage, HDMI 2.0 and four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) video outputs, a gigabit Ethernet PHY, two two-lane or one four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), a single USB 2.0 port, one PCIe Gen. 2 lane, and up to 28 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins with eight supporting pulse-width modulation (PWM), six UART, seven I2C, SPI, and I2S buses.
The module's biggest selling point, though, is hidden underneath: a pair of 100-pin high-density connectors which are compatible with those used by the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 family. As a result any carrier board designed for the CM4, including Raspberry Pi's own open-hardware reference design, should be compatible with the Mars CM, making it a drop-in replacement — though only one HDMI port will be available, compared to two with a Raspberry Pi CM4.
This marks Milk-V's fifth product announcement in less than half a year. Back in May the company unveiled the Pioneer, a high-performance RISC-V motherboard with 64-core processor and support for up to 128GB of DDR memory; this was followed later in the month by the Mars, a single-board computer unashamedly inspired by the Raspberry Pi family.
In June the company showed off the Duo, a RISC-V microcontroller board mimicking the rough layout of the Raspberry Pi Pico, priced at just $9. August, meanwhile, saw the company's first move into a fully-finished product rather than a development board: the Vega 10-gig-E network switch, based on a RISC-V processor and designed to run an open source Linux-based operating system.
More information on the Mars CM is available on the Milk-V website, along with links to pre-order the board starting at $34 for a version with 2GB RAM, 8GB eMMC storage, and no on-board Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios.