Affordable RISC-V single-board computer with dual Ethernet

The Chinese company Shenzhen Xunlong is expanding its range of “Orange Pi” single-board computers. The Orange Pi RV2 is equipped with the previously unknown RISC-V SoC “Ky X1”, which combines eight CPU cores with a GPU and numerous interfaces. These include PCI Express 2.0, USB 3.0 (3.2 Gen 1), two Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, MIPI DSI and CSI as well as common embedded system interfaces such as I2C, SPI, UART and GPIO.

The Orange Pi RV2 with 2 GByte LPDDR4X RAM is available from the Chinese online marketplace AliExpress from around 50 euros. There are also versions with 4 or 8 GB RAM.

Chip puzzle

We have not yet been able to find a manufacturer of the Ky X1. There are some indications that it is a variant of the SpacemiT Keystone K1 from the Hangzhou-based company Jindie Space-Time (进迭时空). For example, both SoCs each have eight RISC-V cores with a maximum clock frequency of 2 GHz. They are each said to calculate around 30 percent faster than the ARM Cortex-A55, announced eight years ago. The AI computing power of the SoC – is presumably 2 tops when processing Int8 values –.

The SpacemiT P1 voltage converter chip (PMIC) is also located on the board.

Some results of the preview version of the Geekbench 6.4 benchmark for RISC-V can be found for a developer board with SpacemiT K1. According to this, one of the RISC-V cores achieves 119 points, but all eight together only 552 points. This puts the SpacemiT K1 well behind the six-year-old Broadcom BCM2711 of the Raspberry Pi 4 (256/625 points, 4 × ARM Cortex-A72) and delivers only a fraction of the computing power of a Raspberry Pi 5 (896/2175 points, BCM712 with 4 × ARM Cortex-A76).

The performance of the SpacemiT K1 should easily be sufficient for a Gigabit Ethernet network filter, but a Chinese processor with Chinese firmware is probably not the best choice for this task.

Many connections

The two Gigabit Ethernet ports are connected via PHY chips of the Motorcomm YT8531C-CA type. The HDMI socket should output a maximum of 1920 × 1440 pixels. Some three USB 3.0 ports are connected to the Genesys Logic GL3523 hub chip. It is not entirely clear how many PCIe 2.0 lanes are connected to the two M.2 sockets, but a 2230 SSD fits on the top of the board and an M.2 2280 at the bottom. An Everest ES8388 with I2C/SPI and I2S serves as the sound chip. WLAN and Bluetooth are handled by an Ampak AP6256 (SDIO). For mass storage, there is a MicroSD reader (SDIO 3.0) and an eMMC port.

(ciw)