The way the Sophgo SG2000 chip works, you can select to use either the 1 GHz RISC-V core or the 1 GHz ARM core, but you cannot use both at the same time.

Oh thats so strange. This is a really odd chip https://milkv.io/chips/sg2000

I thought it was maybe a FPGA with a switchable personality. But I can’t confirm my thought.

“I’d like a heterogeneous architecture sbc please”

They have played us for absolute fools.

The award for “WTF Design” goes to…

So you get either a mediocre ARM or a mediocre RISC-V, plus an even worse RISC-V, plus an 8051 core.

I’ve seen a lot of crazy, stupid SOC designs in the last decades, but this is extraordinary.

And the board has USB2, 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi and/or(?) BT, and 512MB RAM. With no real support on the software side, and to small to run a modern Linux efficiently. If this board costs more than $10, it is doomed.

Reminds me of my Commodore 128. You could boot it into 64 bit mode for legacy programs. I had exactly one C-128 game (which was a super complicated combat flight sim) so I only used it in C-64 mode.

But why?

I can think of one valid use case for this unsolved by any other solution:

Lets say a company has an SoC board base product currently currently base on ARM. They want to eventually migrate to RISC-V based solution.

If a company has a product currently written to use ARM compiled code, but wants to transition to RISC-V (which isn’t ready yet), they could deploy this board which could run today’s ARM implementation, and it would be future-ready when the RISC-V implementation would be released without having to replace hardware.