The RISC-V platform continues to advance and may one day be an alternative to established architectures like x86 and ARM. There is still a long way to go, but the foundations are being laid. PineTab-V, the first commercial RISC-V tablet of which we have news will arrive this month.
And it will do it hand in hand with Pine64, a manufacturer well known for its developments with ARM chips and Linux systems, such as the PinePhone mobile or the Pinebook laptop, and which recently debuted in RISC-V with the Star64, a single-board computer similar to a Raspberry Pi, but with this type of hardware, the most promising in the search for the Open Source processor.
The PineTab-V is a basic tablet with a screen of 10.1 inches and native resolution 1280 x 800 pixels. It ships with a detachable keyboard cover and supports up to 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage capacity.
Your processor is a StarFive JH7110, which features four 1.5GHz SiFive FU740 64-bit RISC-V processing cores, Imagination BXE-4-32 graphics, and an integrated 32-bit RISC-V E24 CPU core. This chip should be able to deliver performance similar to a Rockchip RK3566, the industry’s most widely used 4-core ARM SoC on SBC boards.
Pine64 will release this PineTab-V on the same day as the PineTab 2 with ARM. Two tablets that changing the processor are practically the same. In hardware, because in software it is something else. If the ARM model installs an Arch Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop environment ready to run with thousands of applications, the RISC-V model has no known operating system.
Like everything that has come so far for the platform It is not intended for the end user but for developers who want to get started with RISC-V. If you are interested and dare with it, the tablet will cost $159 with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB for storage, while the top version with 8 GB and 128 GB will cost $209.
We leave you with the Pine64 video where he talks about the two tablets and the update of his product catalog.
