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Does anyone know a decent RISC-V developer kit that one can buy in the Bay Area today? Or rent somewhere in the cloud? I want to start porting our C libraries t

Does anyone know a decent RISC-V developer kit that one can buy in the Bay Area today? Or rent somewhere in the cloud? I want to start porting our C libraries to RISC-V.

LeonM 3y ago
There are plenty, SiFive and MilkV sell boards for example. You can also just run emulation.
- ashvardanian 3y ago
  There are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them. Emulation isn’t enough. I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead.
  - LeonM 3y ago
    > I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead. Do not expect good performance from RISC-V processors at the moment. Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment.
    - camel-cdr 3y ago
      This isn't true in my experiance, especially when dealing with the vector extension. But emulation doesn't offer any usefull performance insights anyways, except for maybe dynamic instruction count.
    - brucehoult 3y ago
      > Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment That's not true. qemu-user is a little faster than the single-issue HiFive Unleashed from 2008, but qemu-system is slower. Against either the dual-issue U74 cores in the JH7110 or the small OoO cores in the TH1520 and SG2042 qemu doesn't sand a chance on a core for core basis. It used to be the case that qemu could win on x86 by throwing more cores at the problem, but with the 64 core SG2042 in the Milk-V Pioneer that possibility has disappeared too -- not to mention that the Pioneer is $1500 for chip+motherboard (need to add RAM and storage), while a 64 core x86 is $5000 just for the chip.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    > There are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them. You probably can't walk into your local mall and walk out with one, but it's easy enough to buy boards on Aliexpress or on Amazon (it's usually the same company, shipping from China, either way) As for people using them, I guess most people simply don't advertise what they're using. I'm working at a very large company that is porting certain x86/Arm software to RISC-V. We're using the VisionFive 2 as the reference device. It's the best current combination of performance, price, and software maturity. I've also got the Lichee Pi 4A and the software works fine on that too (it would be shocking if it didn't) but it turns out that despite the specs on paper the VF2 is 20% faster anyway. If you need to use SIMD/vector rather than plain C then the only choice for RVV 1.0 at the moment is the CanMV-K230 which has a single 1.6 GHz core vs quad core on the other boards. It's also only just come out. My order made on October 29th hasn't arrived yet, though they claimed on November 12 that they'd received stock for it. Mind you the Pi 5 I ordered on September 29 only just arrived last week, so this is not unusual for brand new boards.
camel-cdr 3y ago
It depends, mostly on if you need vector support. Right now, I'd recommend the canmv kendryte k230 which has a C908 rvv 1.0 capable core. If you can wait a bit, mid/end 2024, I'd go for the vision five 3 (or whatever is will be called), as it will have RVA22+V (iirc) or for the sg2380 which has SiFive P570s and X280s both RVA22+V. If you don't care about vector, then currently anything based on jh7110 should be good. But if you have the time to deal with very slow execution and the potential need to report hardware bugs, I'd consider benchmarking on rtl simulation of open source cores. (BOOM, tenstorrent-bobcat, XiangShian, ...)
slaw 3y ago
You could try Lichee Pi 4A, CPU TH1520, 12nm, RISC-V 2.0G C910 x4 > https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a
snvzz 3y ago
If you want the least amount of trouble, VisionFive 2 has the most mature upstream support. Gets you RV64GC and Zba, Zbb. Low power, passive cooling is overkill. Performance somewhere between rpi3+ and rpi4.

Does anyone know a decent RISC-V developer kit that one can buy in the Bay Area today? Or rent somewhere in the cloud? I want to start porting our C libraries to RISC-V.

LeonM 3y ago

There are plenty, SiFive and MilkV sell boards for example. You can also just run emulation.

ashvardanian 3y ago
There are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them. Emulation isn’t enough. I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead.
- LeonM 3y ago
  > I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead. Do not expect good performance from RISC-V processors at the moment. Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment.
  - camel-cdr 3y ago
    This isn't true in my experiance, especially when dealing with the vector extension. But emulation doesn't offer any usefull performance insights anyways, except for maybe dynamic instruction count.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    > Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment That's not true. qemu-user is a little faster than the single-issue HiFive Unleashed from 2008, but qemu-system is slower. Against either the dual-issue U74 cores in the JH7110 or the small OoO cores in the TH1520 and SG2042 qemu doesn't sand a chance on a core for core basis. It used to be the case that qemu could win on x86 by throwing more cores at the problem, but with the 64 core SG2042 in the Milk-V Pioneer that possibility has disappeared too -- not to mention that the Pioneer is $1500 for chip+motherboard (need to add RAM and storage), while a 64 core x86 is $5000 just for the chip.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  > There are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them. You probably can't walk into your local mall and walk out with one, but it's easy enough to buy boards on Aliexpress or on Amazon (it's usually the same company, shipping from China, either way) As for people using them, I guess most people simply don't advertise what they're using. I'm working at a very large company that is porting certain x86/Arm software to RISC-V. We're using the VisionFive 2 as the reference device. It's the best current combination of performance, price, and software maturity. I've also got the Lichee Pi 4A and the software works fine on that too (it would be shocking if it didn't) but it turns out that despite the specs on paper the VF2 is 20% faster anyway. If you need to use SIMD/vector rather than plain C then the only choice for RVV 1.0 at the moment is the CanMV-K230 which has a single 1.6 GHz core vs quad core on the other boards. It's also only just come out. My order made on October 29th hasn't arrived yet, though they claimed on November 12 that they'd received stock for it. Mind you the Pi 5 I ordered on September 29 only just arrived last week, so this is not unusual for brand new boards.

camel-cdr 3y ago

It depends, mostly on if you need vector support. Right now, I'd recommend the canmv kendryte k230 which has a C908 rvv 1.0 capable core. If you can wait a bit, mid/end 2024, I'd go for the vision five 3 (or whatever is will be called), as it will have RVA22+V (iirc) or for the sg2380 which has SiFive P570s and X280s both RVA22+V. If you don't care about vector, then currently anything based on jh7110 should be good. But if you have the time to deal with very slow execution and the potential need to report hardware bugs, I'd consider benchmarking on rtl simulation of open source cores. (BOOM, tenstorrent-bobcat, XiangShian, ...)

slaw 3y ago

You could try Lichee Pi 4A, CPU TH1520, 12nm, RISC-V 2.0G C910 x4 > https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a

snvzz 3y ago

If you want the least amount of trouble, VisionFive 2 has the most mature upstream support. Gets you RV64GC and Zba, Zbb. Low power, passive cooling is overkill. Performance somewhere between rpi3+ and rpi4.