PinePhone Pro canned in pursuit of RISC-V business • The Register
Pine64 is moving from Arm kit to RISC-V. As a result, its higher-end open smartphones is for the chop – but not the lower-end model.
Pine64’s August community update has some surprising news about its smartphone offerings. The company is discontinuing its higher-end smartphone for developers and FOSS enthusiasts, the PinePhone Pro. When the PinePhone Pro started shipping, The Reg FOSS desk covered the news. That was nearly four years ago, and the spec hasn’t been upgraded, leaving it pretty low-spec for 2025.
That makes it more surprising that its forerunner, the lower-end PinePhone, will stay on sale for an estimated two further years. For this vulture, one of the most interesting things about the two devices was the add-on keyboard – we had a quick play with one, and it’s one of the best pocket-sized physical keyboards we’ve ever tried.
The bulletin was followed a couple of days later by a longer August news update, which has good news if you’re into RISC-V kit – or if, to use The Reg FOSS desk’s favorite neologism of the year, you’re a botlicker.
There are improved OS offerings for two of its tablets. The e-ink-based PineNote gets several Linux updates, with improved multi-touch support, more options for screen refresh handling, and stronger Wi-Fi. This device can now also run Arch Linux, postmarketOS, and NixOS. Its older, more conventional (and slightly higher-spec) color LCD tablet, the PineTab2 also gets some OS updates, including to Bluetooth support. Interestingly, there’s now also a very preliminary port of FreeBSD to the just-discontinued PinePhone Pro.
The shorter update mentions that the company is now focusing more on “other projects, including RISC-V and a little bit of AI.” It mentions some of the specific devices it means. We weren’t familiar with these, so we thought it might be worth clarifying what they are.
The Oz64 is a low-end RISC-V single-board computer (SBC). It costs $12.99, which gets you one Arm A53 core, two 1 GHz C906 RISC-V cores, and 512 MB of RAM. The Star64 is a higher-end RISC-V SBC with four 1.5 GHz cores, 8 GB of RAM, and a GPU, which costs $89.99.
We remain significantly more interested in chips from the Arm family in our low-end kit around here. True, we are nostalgic for Acorn kit of old. More to the point, Arm kit is quicker, and it runs a wider range of OSes. (It doesn’t hurt that this includes RISC OS, the still actively maintained original Arm OS.)
RISC-V still can’t even get close on performance, although we’ve been promised performance-competitive RISC-V silicon for so long that it’s starting to feel like nuclear fusion reactors – always 25 years away. In the meantime, though, Pine64 has something for you if you’re suffering from a nasty case of slopholm syndrome.
The StarPro64 is Pine64’s newest and highest-end SBC, with four 1.8 GHz SiFive P550 cores and a 20 TOPS NPU, but then, it does set you back $249.99. Meanwhile, the Alpha One packages one of these in a passively cooled case along with a 64 GB eMMC, complete with Docker containers containing two different LLMs. Just the thing if your business model derives from attempts to induce apophenia in your customers. ®
