Pine64 StarPro64 is a single-board PC with an EIC7700X RISC-V processor featuring a 20 TOPS NPU

by · Liliputing

Pine64 is a company that’s best known for making cheap, hacker-friendly laptops, smartphones, single-board computers, and other products powered by ARM-based processors. But for the last few years the company has been dabbling in products featuring RISC-V chips. And the new StarPro64 is the company’s most powerful RISC-V device to date.

The upcoming single-board computer features an ESWIN EIC7700X processor with four 1.8 GHz RISC-V RV64GC processor cores, a 3D GPU, support for 8K video at up to 50 frames per second, and a neural processing unit with up to 19.95 TOPS of AI performance.

The board uses the same Model-A format as existing Pine64 products including the Pine64 A64 and ROCKPro64, which means it should measure 133 x 80 x 19mm (5.24″ x 3.15″ x 0.75″), making the board larger than a typical Raspberry Pi Model B (about 85 x 56mm), but still pretty small by desktop computer standards, while offering plenty of room for I/O and other features.

Some of those features include:

  • 2 x Ethernet ports
  • 1 x digital video output
  • USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports
  • 1 x PCIe x4 lane (probably PCIe 3.0, as that’s what the chip EIC7700X supports)
  • 1 x eMMC socket
  • 1 x microSD card reader
  • GPIO headers
  • Onboard WiFi and Bluetooth

Since the board is the same size and shape as existing Pine64 Model-A board and has heatsink mounting holes in the same place, it’s likely that cases and other accessories for the ROCKPro64 and similar boards should work with the StarPro64.

According to Pine64, the board will be available with up to 32GB of LPDDR5 memory, although there will also be lower-cost 16GB and 8GB options. Pricing and availability hasn’t been set yet, but we probably won’t have to wait too long, because Pine64 says a first prototype of a 32GB board arrived late last month and the company is “pleased with how it turned out,” so as long as it passes a raft of tests, developer units could be ready to ship in a matter of week.

via Pine64 September 2024 Update