3 ms·

This is cool but you know, 64 super wimpy cores isn't enough. For this workstation to be worth it I need the vector instructions to actually work and be support

This is cool but you know, 64 super wimpy cores isn't enough. For this workstation to be worth it I need the vector instructions to actually work and be supported by libav/ffmpeg because the amount of workloads that can be spread to 64 cores is so niche that either you deck out the maximum possible configuration of an x86 system because you can't afford to lose even a tiny bit of performance or it is very common but requires dedicated software/hardware support.

camel-cdr 3y ago
I think the target demographic of this isn't somebody who whats a workstation, but people who what to do riscv development, and start porting things like ffmpeg, make sure video drivers are working, and so on.
brucehoult 3y ago
Not that wimpy. I've been using the manufacturer's EVB for this chip since March and it goes really well. Streets ahead of anything else in the RISC-v world at the moment. And dual- and quad-socket boards are coming soon. Even on things that don't parallelise well it's still pretty good. For example on building riscv-gnu-toolchain (binutils, gcc, libc) for which the stupid GNU recursive makefile buildsystem means it only averages using about 9-10 of those 64 cores, it takes 34 minutes. This compares to 11 minutes on a 32 core Threadripper, 20 minutes on a 6 core Zen 2 laptop, 32 minutes on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with i7-8650u, and 102 minutes on a Pi4. On things that use all the cores, it's comparable to a 12-16 core current generation x86 -- which costs the same or more. It's a lot powerful than the Graviton 1 that became available on AWS in November 2018. The vector unit work great, that's been my main reason for testing one. There will be much much faster RISC-V SoCs with lots of cores in the next couple of years, but this lets you get software ported on a realistic machine right now.

camel-cdr 3y ago

I think the target demographic of this isn't somebody who whats a workstation, but people who what to do riscv development, and start porting things like ffmpeg, make sure video drivers are working, and so on.

brucehoult 3y ago

Not that wimpy. I've been using the manufacturer's EVB for this chip since March and it goes really well. Streets ahead of anything else in the RISC-v world at the moment. And dual- and quad-socket boards are coming soon. Even on things that don't parallelise well it's still pretty good. For example on building riscv-gnu-toolchain (binutils, gcc, libc) for which the stupid GNU recursive makefile buildsystem means it only averages using about 9-10 of those 64 cores, it takes 34 minutes. This compares to 11 minutes on a 32 core Threadripper, 20 minutes on a 6 core Zen 2 laptop, 32 minutes on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with i7-8650u, and 102 minutes on a Pi4. On things that use all the cores, it's comparable to a 12-16 core current generation x86 -- which costs the same or more. It's a lot powerful than the Graviton 1 that became available on AWS in November 2018. The vector unit work great, that's been my main reason for testing one. There will be much much faster RISC-V SoCs with lots of cores in the next couple of years, but this lets you get software ported on a realistic machine right now.