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Chinese Hardware Stuff

Lots of stuff that's interesting to me is coming from Chinese companies. For example, Sipeed are doing a lot with RISC-V chips, where the CPU core and the SoC itself are developed in China.

I've written a bit about the Longan Nano, and plan to write about their K210 based boards, but what caught my attention recently is their drive to produce an ESP32 type of board, based on RISC-V, with entirely open documentation and software (apparently, there's an easily reversible .a, possibly for legal reasons).

These folk put effort into reversing and documenting the chips they use, to try to open them as far as possible. With the Longan Nano that I wrote about elsewhere, this was one of the most clearly documented SoCs I've encountered (admittedly, it's a relatively simple SoC, but still), and I'm even taking into consideration that a lot of the documentation was either in Chinese, or badly translated. That's a bit of a poor reflection on the mainstream 'western' vendors, with all their NDA and blob shennanigans.

So, this ESP32 equivalent will cost less than $1. Way less, we're told. It will come with about 300K RAM, 128K ROM, 2MB flash, SDIO slave, SPI, UARTx2, I2C, PWMx5, 10bit DAC, 12bit ADC, 2 comparator, PIR, IR. And 2.4GHz WiFi + bluetooth (BLE 5.0).

One statement that stood out was that WiFi might have been provided by the Hi3861 WiFi chip, were it not for sanctions against China by the US. They will use something else (BL604 perhaps), but it drives home the stupidity of sanctions like this against China.

These folk at Sipeed are knowledgeable, competent, and ambitious. I see companies like this, somewhat ironically, as the likely source of the first properly open platform. Sanctions are just driving this faster. The XuanTie C906 (RV64GCV) is a 64-bit RISC-V chip with MMU, and comes with interfaces such as HDMI, RGB, GMAC (Ethernet), has reached Sipeed in physical form, has QEmu support, and as I understand it is from a very open-source friendly company.

In the case of the C906, initial testing has suggested it's around the Cortex-A53 level, which is already easily capable of running a Linux kernel with ease. It feels like a huge step in an accelerating race, and while it's obviously behind the 'state of the art', it's tantalisingly close to being generally useful (rather than a toy for hackers).

China is the only country producing stuff that I'm genuinely excited about. While I don't believe that they're puerile, wanting 'stick two fingers' to the west, I do think they're pragmatic enough to mitigate the arrogance coming from some quarters, and the result will be the same regardless, namely progress.

Interesting times.