I agree, there’s something like this under the hood I guess. This feeling started for me with RPi5.
The RP1 southbridge found on the RPi5 sounded To me like this: “now that we have thrown away from Broadcom SOC all the peripherical management, we just need the CPU/GPU only stuff. And be aware that ARM solutions is not the only alvailable way To go”.
Now that Raspberry.com has developped his own RISC-V microcontroller chip, this feeling gets even stronger.
@tunagenes , did you get specific Zynthian hardware to work with your board:
I had trouble answering some of your questions yes or no:
We currently do stereo audio out via the mini-jack on the VisionFive2 board which is driven directly by the on-chip DAC of the JH7110 SoC. I don’t know any reason an I2S sound card would be an issue. But we haven’t tried it. And we’d like to be able to use multiple sound cards - that’s a long discussion and includes PipeWire.
Nope - we currently have ZynCoder effectively no-opped, and we’re using an Akai APC Key25 mk2 and @oscaracena 's wonderful driver for all knobs and switches. We plan on a more custom keyboard-knobs courtesy of Leafcutter Labs in a next prototype. But it will probably USB attach as well. Of course there’s no reason we couldn’t attach mcp23017 to the GPIO pins on the VF2.
Yes! We’re using an “official” RPi 7 inch display. Flat Cable to the VF2 board. Don’t know if touch is working today.
also:
We have thought about and might try connecting a VF2 instead of RPi board in actual Zynthian hardware- both V4 and V5 would be fun-interesting. But we haven’t tried it yet.
Thank you for the answers.
some tweakings of the device tree overlay source file are needed I guess.
For now, on other ARM boards, I just get a simple pcm5102 DAC to work. I’ve tried To adapt the *.DTS file for my IQAudioDacPro but without any success yet. But I didn’t insist a lot to be honnest.
Zynthian’s hardware controls are one of the feature that makes Zynthian so particular.
RBPi official 7inch display is a bit expensive IMHO. But it is good To know it works on the VisionFive: there’s an existing working basis for inspiration when adapting to the 5inch display Zynthian use.
On the general RISC-V news front:
Apparently, Intel people who designed their chips left as a group to start a RISC-V core design firm.
Here’s an article:
and a R/edit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1f0j0kh/former_top_intel_cpu_architects_launch_ahead/
Are Intel doing a Boeing…?