London, England and Shanghai, China – 22nd February, 2021 – Imagination Technologies announces that StarFive, an industry-leading provider of RISC-V processors, platforms and solutions, has licensed the IMG B-Series graphics processing unit (GPU) IP to support the development of its latest RISC-V single-board computer (SBC). Imagination's GPUs are designed to work with all processor architectures. The collaboration will help grow the RISC-V ecosystem.
As much as I want to like RISK-V, at least this StarFive led effort seems like a step backwards over ARM/x86 hardware that can be run with a nearly fully libre software stack.
risc-v is licensed under cc, so there’s going to be a lot of progress in chip designing and manufacturing by more entities participating, which means more likely there will be someone making libre hardware, as opposed to an x86 duopoly
even if beagle-v in particular is going to end up really locked up for whatever reason (i personally don’t think so), it will pave the way for libre hardware potential in the future, at least in my opinion
As much as I want to like RISK-V, at least this StarFive led effort seems like a step backwards over ARM/x86 hardware that can be run with a nearly fully libre software stack.
risc-v is licensed under cc, so there’s going to be a lot of progress in chip designing and manufacturing by more entities participating, which means more likely there will be someone making libre hardware, as opposed to an x86 duopoly
even if beagle-v in particular is going to end up really locked up for whatever reason (i personally don’t think so), it will pave the way for libre hardware potential in the future, at least in my opinion