from Hacker News

Lichee Pi 4A

by simjue on 12/26/22, 12:37 PM with 81 comments

• by c0l0 on 12/26/22, 1:22 PM

  No matter any given SBC's hardware platform's apparent attractiveness: Give me mainline Linux support for all included devices/features, or give me (this particular product's eventual) death.

  Is there any info on how this make and model fares? The spec sheet speaks of "Debian / OpenWRT / Andriod" (sic!), but two misspellings in three names don't exactly inspire confidence... If I can only ever hope to install some manufacturer-bastardized spin of Ubuntu 14.04 with a heap of custom patches on top, I'll have to forever stick to Raspberry Pis instead, unfortunately.

• by psychphysic on 12/26/22, 1:25 PM

  Oh well better get out the old credit card.

  So this isn't the same RISC-V CPU as from VisionFive2 and Pine64. It's an Alibaba core I believe[0].

  Hopefully this doesn't cause worse fragmentation and slow much needed software and distro support.

  My worries previously on HN[1].

  [0] https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/04/alibaba-t-head-th152...

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105528#34106450

• by mmatants on 12/26/22, 5:27 PM

  I also want to mention the Lichee Pi Nano, though it is much smaller and targeting a different use case: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/08/17/licheepi-nano-cheap-.... Made an embedded distro Buildroot config for that one some time ago (https://github.com/unframework/licheepi-nano-buildroot).

• by teleforce on 12/26/22, 4:17 PM

  This board is based on Sipeed LM4A and it can support up to 16GB RAM and 64GB flash [1].

  [1] Sipeed LM4A – T-Head TH1520 RISC-V module to power Raspberry Pi 4 competitor and cluster board:

  https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/12/14/sipeed-lm4a-t-head-t...

• by forinti on 12/26/22, 1:37 PM

  It's nice that it offers 8/16GB of RAM. I could actually use one for work.

• by sircastor on 12/26/22, 1:59 PM

  I was just reading an interview with Eben Upton about RISC-Vs potential, and his response was that there aren’t any competitive-to-Cortex-A7 chips out there, and the OS support isn’t there. I guess we gotta start somewhere. Looking at the product page through, it seems like the designers are positioning this as a networking peripheral (at least with the expansion board)

• by tyingq on 12/26/22, 4:49 PM

  "4 / 8 / 16 GB 64bit LPDDR4X-3733"

  That's impressive in a dev board.

• by robert_foss on 12/26/22, 1:25 PM

  What GPU is it built with? PowerVR?

• by dark-star on 12/26/22, 3:45 PM

  I wonder what the board will cost. I'm guessing around 100$ for the 8G variant?

• by davidcollantes on 12/26/22, 4:18 PM

  Is the preorder button working for anyone? Clicking it does nothing for me.

• by yjftsjthsd-h on 12/26/22, 3:25 PM

  Does anyone know why the sudden increase in boards with 2 Ethernet ports?

• by sylware on 12/26/22, 4:20 PM

  can we get a noscript/basic (x)html page?

• by agumonkey on 12/26/22, 1:53 PM

  Curious to know power consumption too

• by atdrummond on 12/26/22, 9:57 PM

  I can’t wait to get a cluster of 7 of these and run HaikuOS in a crazy modern BeBox.

• by znpy on 12/26/22, 4:20 PM

  Dual gigabit ethernet is cool.

• by irusensei on 12/26/22, 3:57 PM

  It has 2 NICs and an optional router case. So another router board without encryption hardware extensions eh. Why people keep doing this?