PINE64 Unveils an OS for the PineTab-V, Promises the StarPro64 Will Run DeepSeek "Out of the Box"
Edge AI-focused single-board computer packs enough power for the seven-billion-parameter distilled version of the popular LLM.
UPDATE (4/24/2025): PINE64 has now opened orders for the StarPro64 RISC-V single-board computer, priced at $249.99 for a "Community Edition."
The most powerful RISC-V board the company has yet released, the StarPro64 comes with an ESWIN EIC7700X system-on-chip with four 64-bit SiFive P550 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, an Imagination AXM-8-256 graphics processor, and a neural network coprocessor providing a claimed 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT8 precision. The board includes 32GB of LPDDR5 memory and a 128Mb SPI boot flash, with support for microSD Card and eMMC on-board storage.
More information is available on the StarPro64's PINE64 store page.
Original article continues below.
Open hardware specialist PINE64 has announced that the PineTab-V now has a fully-functional Debian-based Linux operating system image available, bar a few minor exceptions — and promises that the StarPro64 edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) development will be up for sale "in the next two weeks," running DeepSeek-7B out of the box.
"We are happy to announce that the PineTab-V is back in the store! Last year we reported that the PineTab-V would be going on sale in October, unfortunately this did not happen due to there being no default OS [Operating System] to send to the factory," PINE64 developer "Caffeine" explains. "Thanks to our friends over at StarFive, they have kindly built a working image to send to the factory (thank you!). The image is based on Debian with a Gnome desktop."
Announced back in 2023, the PineTab-V was described as a "vaguely functional" variant of the company's PineTab 2 tablet platform — but based on the StarFive JH7110 RISC-V system-on-chip, rather than the standard variant's Arm-architecture core. Like most of the company's launches, though, the hardware was ready long before the software, with buyers warned that they would be expected to either contribute to the development effort or show considerable patience in waiting for full functionality from their device.
The new operating system, built atop Debian Linux by StarFive itself on PINE64's behalf, finally comes close: "much of the hardware is working," Caffeine claims, "including the cameras, Wi-Fi, and GPU acceleration." There are caveats, however: a battery level below eight percent disables some hardware, including the Wi-Fi network, and there's no support for hardware MEVC or MJPEG decoding in the Firefox browser.
At the same time, Caffeine also announced that the StarPro64 single-board computer "will be in the store sometime in the next two weeks." Announced in September last year, the StarPro64 is built around the ESWIN EIC7700X system-on-chip — featuring four SiFive P550 RISC-V cores running at up to 1.8GHz and a dedicated neural network coprocessor for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads delivering a claimed 19.95 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision.
This, Caffeine says, is enough to run the seven-billion-parameter "distilled" version of popular large language model (LLM) DeepSeek entirely locally — and to prove it, the board will come ready to run it out of the box.
More information on the company's announcements, and others, can be found in PINE64's April 2025 community update post.