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RISC-V based single board computers are getting there
- sylware 4y agohuho! Finally a RISC-V 64bits SOC with tons of GPIOs! But for a keyboard controller power would be provided via the usb-c from the host, it seems the mangopi expect power on a dedicated usb-c connector. Am I wrong?
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- magicalhippo 4y agoAccording to the schematics[1], both HOST and OTG ports have VBUS directly connected to the same VCCIN net, so either can provide power as far as I can see. [1]: https://mangopi.cc/_media/mq-pro-sch-v12.pdf https://mangopi.cc/_media/mq-pro-sch-v12.pdf (page 3 top left)
- sylware 4y agoThose are good omens. It is way overkill (wifi/bluetooth/gpu/video) for a keyboard controller, but at least, it does exists. If they follow raspberry on the same road, we may get a mangopi nano (hopefully with a with a risc-v 64bits cpu with a good bunch of GPIOs).
- bullen 4y agoThey need OpenGL ES 3, and apparently the Star64 will have that, remains to be seen how performant the GPU is: https://www.imaginationtech.com/product/img-bxe-2-32/ https://www.imaginationtech.com/product/img-bxe-2-32/ Anything between VideoCore 6 and Jetson Nano would make Risc-V interesting!
- smoldesu 4y ago> remains to be seen how performant the GPU is I think this is going to be the real make-or-break thing about RISC-V: early tests have shown super impressive SIMD/vector benchmarks compared to ARM/x86, but whether or not that will make it into production is another question entirely. I've got high hopes for RISC-V, but it's acceleration/HPC workload performance is going to determine whether it topples ARM or becomes the next Itanium.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoUnlike Itanium, RISC-V is an ISA and there are many many different implementations of the ISA. You cannot conclude anything about the former based on a few instances of the latter. Patience.
- sircastor 4y agoI'm not deep in on this stuff, but isn't Itanium essentially the only implementation is IA-64? Presumably Intel was pushing the envelope on their implementation of the ISA.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium this is actually clear as mud and it seems Itanium was both a family of implementations as well as ISAs (thus variants of IA-64?). It's also the _only_ implementations of IA-64. Going back to the original question (can RISC-V "become another Itanium"?), as long as there are people using/support/evolving it. Unlike Itanium, RISC-V has the support very many companies already and the membership list of RISC-V International just keeps growing. The only thing that could threaten it would be a better alternative appeared or if x86 or Arm suddenly got the same unrestricted license. The former is not impossible, but it would be huge undertaking and by definition we would be in a better place. The latter seems essentially impossible. As there's no technical reason why a RISC-V implementation couldn't have roughly comparably performance to an Arm core (iso-effort and technology) it's "simply" a matter of sufficient investment before we'll have the X1 etc equivalents. There are very many companies working on high performance implementations. One of the high profile ones is Rivos, but there are _many_ others.
- st3fan 4y agoRight now the only metric I care about is: does it actually ship.
- bmlw 4y agoHah, it does! Though the 2 production runs they've done sold out pretty quickly. I think some 3rd party stores on AliExpress snapped some up and are reselling them, though if you follow their official twitter (@mangopi_sbc) they post their official page when there's more stock. They recently posted a picture of new boards being manufactured so there's hope!
- st3fan 4y agoYeah AliExpress seems to have these. Only $40+ for the 512MB model :-/
- Cyberdog 4y agoIn this regard RISC-V has a whole lot of catching up to do if it wants to be something other than a footnote in the story of the ARM takeover of the world. I know the openness of the RISC-V platform is ideal to hardcore FOSS fans, but they're far outnumbered by those who will be satisfied with the cheap, fast, and plentiful ARM chips currently on the market, and the cheaper and faster ones sure to come.
- aarroyoc 4y agoI bought the Mango Pi MQ-Pro a month ago and while at first the software support was missing (only Tina Linux was available), later some ISOs started to appear. Right now I'm using the Armbian headless image based on Ubuntu 22.04[0] which works almost perfect and allows me to work on porting things to RISC-V. [0]: https://bret.dk/armbian-on-the-mangopi-mq-pro/ https://bret.dk/armbian-on-the-mangopi-mq-pro/
- bb88 4y agoI would like more SBC options, rather than the solitary RPi right now. My sdcard shield popped off the RPi I have, and I had to resolder it back on. Two years ago, I would have just trashed it and bought another.
- bmlw 4y agoYou have so many options! I have Raspberry, Banana, Mango and Orange Pi boards sat here. NanoPi, Rock Pi, Radxa, Beaglebone etc all have alternatives available too.
- guyomes 4y agoAlso Olinuxino from Olimex, chosen [1] to host the solar-powered website low tech magazine [2]. [1] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#server https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#serv... [2] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
- bb88 4y agoLoading octoprint on an RPi is a seamless experience today. Are other boards as seamless as the RPi?
- ephbit 4y agoAlso Odroid
- teraflop 4y agoI'm still bummed about the discontinuation of the H2. Every alternative that I've been able to find with comparable specs is at least twice as expensive.
- rvz 4y agoSo many options and alternatives from all of them, yet the Raspberry Pi has by far the most software support, technical support, documentation and hardware compatibility and updates compared to the alternatives. From the rest of the other boards it is just one kernel release (if you're lucky, 3 releases) and they have moved on to the latest SBC and dropped support and releases. The Raspberry Pi Foundation still continues to support older boards. It just seems that with the many Raspberry Pi users, the documentation and the ecosystem built around it seems to be its success rather than the technical specs.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoGreat to see alternatives. A tangent, but bear with me: after finishing the really good book The End of the World is Just Beginning, I think it makes a lot of sense to continue building cutting edge tech that requires international supply chains, BUT, also having locally manufactured tech good enough to power locally sourced computers, run tractors, etc. International supply chains have enriched many areas of the planet but to assume that they will last seems very risky. Always have a Plan B. EDIT: call this Plan B Tech
- javajosh 4y agoTo what extent do we need computers? They feel indispensable but we could go back to more labor intensive information systems. And that wouldnt be all bad.
- dragonmost 4y agoWe need chips in everything. Cars could work without them but would be much less efficient and bad for the environnement. Lots of very important medical devices rely on chips or full computers. I would like to see the media industry roll back to a lower tech leaving only the big and very bias information go through. Imagine how hard it would be to keep them accountable. Is it possible to live without computers? Yes, but you don't want to.
- viraptor 4y agoI feel like that's true, but the scale is misleading. We could run most of the things we need with very small chips production. A lot of usage could be removed (most of entertainment), lots of business use could be scaled down (how many businesses need basically a spreadsheet and a filing system equivalent). There will be special usage requiring hitech chips or course. But we can seriously scale down our electronics usage without a negative civilisation impact. The pocket device I write this on has enough power to run what an office of 10 people needs to properly run if we adjust the software to match.
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- FullyFunctional 4y agoThe C906 is very slow, but so is, it appears, the Pi Zero. The good news is that there are a lot of faster options right around the corner. The Pine folks is working on releasing Star64 (quad SiFive FU740 1.5GHz) [1] and I know of at least two other RISC-V SBCs in the pipeline. I'm not quite ready to declare "2022 is the year of the RISC-V desktop" yet though. [1] https://www.hackster.io/news/pine64-formally-unveils-the-starfive-jh7110-powered-star64-risc-v-single-board-computer-3917fae60eb9 https://www.hackster.io/news/pine64-formally-unveils-the-sta... Note, the FU740 is in-order dual-issue with a comfortable L2 cache.
- Narishma 4y agoThe Pi Zero uses the same SoC as the original 2012 Raspberry Pi, and it was already long in the tooth even then so that's not really surprising.
- moffkalast 4y agoYeah it's already legacy hardware, it should be comparing against the Zero 2 if anything, the original Zero was comically underpowered. But the speed is all but irrelevant, the issue with these alternative boards is always in software support. No point in using them even if they're twice as fast if I can't apt get anything and have to compile shit from source wasting 10 times as much time. Is there even an arch tag for riscv yet like armhf and arm64? I'd assume there is, but I can't find it and the support is likely to be abysmal this early on.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoDebian, Ubuntu, and Fedora have had distributions for many years. Others like FreeBSD, etc also exist. I often take a break and spend a day working entirely on a RISC-V host (BeagleV beta). Everything I care about work 100% the same, most notably Emacs and all the dev tools (Rust, C, Haskell). The only thing that I hit in the (old) Fedora 33/RISC-V is Firefox's lacking support for WASM, but that could be working in the latest version. If you want to try it for yourself under QEMU, I'd recommend following the instruction here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoKind of weird to perform extensive benchmarks against an outdated version. The Pi Zero 2 is a lot faster!
- bmlw 4y agoIt is, though these 2 boards are the closest in terms of specifications "on paper" as they both offer a single 1GHz core, 512MB of RAM (unless you go for the 1GB MQ Pro) etc. Comparing it to the RPi Zero 2 felt a bit pointless in a standalone head-to-head piece. There'll be a separate post in a few weeks comparing all of the "zero" style boards from the various vendors that may give you what you're looking for!
- KerrAvon 4y agoThe actual metric most customers will care about is price. Pick a Pi variant at the same price as the RISC-V board, how does the performance compare?
- brucehoult 4y agoOn the one hand I would say that RISC-V SBCs are not yet for anyone who cares only about price. RISC-V cores and SoCs with Linux SBC capability are in an early stage. RISC-V has already taken over a lot of the microcontroller world, based on price and freedom. On the other hand, I would say that the price of a number of these D1-based RISC-V boards are now within the range of a Pi Zero plus lunch at McDonalds, so if you only want one of them the price difference is basically irrelevant. A year ago a Pi 3 equivalent RISC-V board (the HiFive Unmatched) cost $665, which was a big drop from 2008's HiFive Unleashed plus MicroSemi expansion board for $2998 total. Since December there's been the VisionFive for about $180 (although with only 2 cores not 4). In a few months there will be the newly-announced Pine64 Star64 with an expected price of $60 with 4 GB RAM or $80 with 8 GB RAM (they've said "about the same price and performance as the Quartz64") That's pretty rapid price drops. RISC-V SBCs with considerably better performance than a Pi 4 (similar to the RK3588 boards that just came out a couple of months ago) will be demonstrated working in the next couple of months and probably shipping early next year. They will, again, probably be quite expensive at first, but existing is the hard part. Price is then just a matter of mass production economics.
- ffhhj 4y agoIs there some single board computer without RAM, but that allows addressing SSD space as such?
- punnerud 4y agoWouldn’t that kill the SSD after some time? HomeAssistant running SQLite on on a small cheap MicroSD card, kill it a couple of months. Each memory cell have a lifespan of ≈ 1000 write cycles, if I remember correctly.
- magicalhippo 4y agoI've had Home Assistant running on the same 32GB SD card for over 3 years now, and the DB is several GB thanks to several very chatty Z-Wave devices. Zero issues so far. So it's not a given it'll die in a couple of months.
- ffhhj 4y agoAn SSD hard disk instead of SD card? Maybe such computer should use some sort of treadmill allocation.
- magicalhippo 4y agoSD card and SSD's have a latency on the order of 500us, while even a Raspberry Pi 3 has a memory latency[1] of around 200ns. That's three orders of magnitude difference in latency, which would destroy performance. In addition, memory bandwidth is still at least an order of magnitude higher. [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/11296737 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/11296737
- ffhhj 4y agoSure, but old computers managed to get things done with much lower resources. What really seems missing in old computers is memory.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
- candiddevmike 4y agoWhat if I don't want a SBC and want the ability to upgrade the memory?
- rbanffy 4y agoThe focus seems to currently be on SoC. Even ARM is not easy to get in a memory-upgradable form.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Havoc 4y agoThat seems very good for a reasonably early attempt
- kragen 4y agoSome of the most interesting benchmarks here: Dhrystone 2: 253.2 on the Mango Pi MQ Pro, 202 on the Raspberry Pi Zero. I don't know what this number is; presumably it's not Dhrystone MIPS (VAX MIPS), because that should be closer to 1000 for both chips, and it can't possibly be Dhrystones per second, because a VAX MIPS is 1757 Dhrystones per second, so they ought to be about 1.8 million Dhrystones per second. Reading https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench/blob/master/UnixBench/src/dhry_2.c https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench/blob/master/UnixBe... leaves me no wiser. File Copy 1024: 124.4 on the MQ Pro, 86 on the Raspberry Pi Zero. The UnixBench README says this is measured in the number of characters that can be written, read, and copied in 10 seconds; if this were correct it would mean the MQ Pro were copying 12.4 bytes per second and the Raspberry Pi Zero W was copying 8.6 bytes per second. It seems inescapable that Bret's results are incorrect by several orders of magnitude here. C copy backwards: 1197.4 MB/s (not MiB/s as I previously read incorrectly) on the MQ Pro, 157.2 on the Zero W. Something went wrong here. Standard memcpy: 1200.9 MB/s on the MQ Pro, 424.8 on the Zero W. Standard memset: 2650.6 MB/s on the MQ Pro, 1699.9 on the Zero W. This seems surprisingly slow; you'd think an 8x-unrolled loop of SD instructions on a 1GHz RISC-V would memset about 5 gigabytes per second, if it got one instruction per clock, which it normally ought to. The XuanTie C906 core in the AllWinner D1 C906 is 64-bit, which is potentially an advantage for this; the analogous code for ARM6 can only write 32 bits per instruction. (The ARM has an STM instruction that stores multiple registers, but it doesn't actually run faster.) I'm not sure what happened to the extra factor of 2 in performance. Similar remarks apply to the memcpy results above. Amazon Basics 64GB MicroSD card: MQ Pro reads sequentially at 11.48 MB/s, writes sequentially at 10.77 MB/s; Zero W reads sequentially at 21.36 MB/s, writes sequentially at 19.6 MB/s. (I'm ignoring the random reads and writes because he doesn't specify the read and write size, yet he gives the results in MB/s instead of IOPS.) Note that these are six orders of magnitude faster than the 12.4 and 8.6 bytes per second given earlier. Unfortunately Weber doesn't link to the benchmark code or document his compilation and execution environment. Presumably the memset and memcpy results are largely measuring the performance of the libc functions, for example, so reproducing them would require knowing if he's using glibc, musl, or a C library he wrote himself. Mostly I feel like these benchmarking results are not well enough specified to be useful, which is a shame. I'd like to be able to use this kind of benchmark to predict the performance of a system within a factor of 5 or so, but these results are too irreproducible for that.
- what-imright 4y agoI’ve bought the Mango Pi and a few other cheap SBC’s on RISC-V. The performance is slow 1Ghz single core but enough for small hobbies. I was hoping the different ISA would make shellcode incompatible. But IMO RISC-V like many Berkeley products, is a pointless waste of resources to make a political point. There’s no compelling reason to recompile all our code to help out fabless design houses out of a license fee. And nobody save a privileged well educated and funded few are in need of a free ISA.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoI will remain cautious until any of these use mainstream kernel and kernel modules/drivers.
- blippage 4y agoI think the problem so far is that no RISC-V chip has offered any USP (Unique Selling Point), other than it's licence-free. For example, Raspberry Pis exploded in popularity because they were incredibly cheap and had a lot of support.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agobeing license free is a huge selling point though. arm makes over 1 billion usd in license fees per year. is riscv reaches anything like comparable maturity to arm, there are a lot of companies that would rather not pay their slice of that billion.
- matthews2 4y agoI've had a lot of fun with my StarFive VisionFive board, it has mainline Linux support so I don't need to worry about them disappearing. It does lack a GPU though, instead it has some kind of AI processing unit that I have no idea how to use...