Milk-V debuts RISC-V Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative from US$34

Chinese company Milk-V has just unveiled a new SoM compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 IO board. The Mars CM sets itself apart from the droves of Raspberry Pi CM4 clones by using a chip based on the RISC-V architecture.

At the Mars CM's helm is the StarFive JH7110, a 1.5 GHz quad-core SoC, joined by up to 8 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 16 MB of NOR flash memory, and up to 32 GB of eMMC storage. According to the company, the module should be compatible with Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Debian.

The Mars CM comes with a pair of 100-pin board-to-board connectors, which provide signaling for a multitude of ports, including HDMI 2.0, MIPI display and camera interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, PCIe 2.0 x1, and up to 28 GPIO pins. Users can also opt for a model with an onboard AP6256 wireless module providing WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity.

Preorders for the Milk-V Mars CM have already begun, with shipments scheduled to follow on September 30. It starts at US$34 for the entry-level model with 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage and goes up to US$84 for the variant with 8 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC flash, and a wireless module.

Purchase the Milk-V Duo on Amazon