The BeagleV Starlight Board Is Canceled, But StarFive Partners with Radxa for a Replacement Design
Initial prototypes not heading to production, with a replacement RISC-V design to be unveiled early next year — after Radxa's replacement.
The BeagleV Starlight RISC-V single-board computer, developed by BeagleBoard.org and Seeed Studio around a StarFive RISC-V system-on-chip, has been canceled — but StarFive has promised an equivalent is on the way from Radxa, to launch in the third quarter of this year.
The BeagleV, at the time lacking the Starlight moniker, was unveiled earlier this year as a $149 open source Linux-capable single-board computer built around a RISC-V system-on-chip — itself implementing SiFive's U74 core with two 64-bit RISC-V cores running at 1.5GHz, a Tensilica-VP6 vision processor, an NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA), and a neural network engine.
Orders opened at the start of the year for units produced as part of a pre-production test batch, but seven months on the project has been canceled before heading to the planned mass production stage.
"The BeagleV Starlight prototype will not be going into mass production," BeagleBoard.org's Drew Fustini confirms on the BeagleBoard.org forum, "but we are continuing to work on board designs with other RISC-V SoCs. BeagleBoard.org and Seeed Studio hope to have a new BeagleV community board available early Q1 [2021]."
No reason was given for the cancellation beyond an inability to "reach our goals", but any planned successor design may get beaten to the punch: StarFive, which provided the SoC around which the board was built, has already signed a deal with Radxa to build a new board to ship by the third quarter of this year.
"Although the BeagleV Starlight joint development board is no longer in mass production," StarFive's Selina Zheng writes on the RISC-V International blog, "we completely respect our partner’s decision and appreciate the contribution of all developers in the BeagleBoard community. We look forward to collaborating again in the near future, and will continue to uphold our attitude in creating mutually beneficial open source collaborations."
"Joint[ly] with Radxa, we will launch a new open source single-board hardware platform using the same JH7100 vision processing chip. At this stage, all related development, debugging, production, and testing work are progressing steadily. The single board computer will be officially released by the end of Q3 2021, and the next-generation JH7110 chip with new GPU feature support will soon be mass produced. Work related to the development platform has been fully carried out."
The specifications of the new board are expected to match the BeagleV Starlight prototype, though have yet to be formally confirmed — and it's not yet known whether Radxa will be able to match or beat the original design's $149 target selling price.