4 ms·

TH1520 with the XuanTie C910 core. Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level. And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too.

by my123 3y ago

nevi-me 3y ago
I was going to try the server out until I saw this comment. Which alternative board/computer would you recommend one buy? I'm learning RISC-V assembly with a friend, it'd be great for us to have a machine to tinker with (we'll use ESP-32-Cx for 32-bit).
- b9b10eb736 3y ago
  Still way better than a VisionFive 2, and more than enough to get your hands in the thing (especially with the hourly pricing). You have to acknowledge that the RISC-V ecosystem isn't as mature as that of ARM64 and AMD64. You don't get the best performance/price ratio with RISC-V (yet). Many extensions were ratified so recently that hardware doesn't even exist (yet). As far as I'm concerned, the LicheePi 4A from Sipeed which is also equipped with a TH1520 offers a decent value for a RISC-V SBC. If you want more performance than that, it's going to cost you a lot more.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    Right now, you can't get more performance than the TH1520 (C910 cores) and JH7110 (U74 cores) at ANY price. The only thing you can do is get more of the same cores i.e. SG2042 with 64x C910 cores. The same goes for emulation. QEMU on my i9-13900HX laptop is about the same speed on each core, but there I have 24 cores (32 threads). I just compiled gcc 14 natively on both LicheePi 4A (the same as this hosting) and docker/QEMU: i9-13900HX (8 P + 16 E cores) docker running riscv64/ubuntu image real 101m44.472s user 1695m26.395s sys 24m36.671s LicheePi 4A (TH1520 SoC, 4x C910 cores) real 422m41.367s user 1430m56.638s sys 70m17.994s The LicheePi actually used less CPU time, but the i9 won with more cores.
    - b9b10eb736 3y ago
      Thanks for the clarification, you're completely right. I didn't realize the SG2042 used the same core. So, Scaleway's offer really does seem to make sense!
      - nevi-me 3y ago
        Thank you all, yes it makes sense to use this as the cost is great for say 3 months worth of tinkering.
    - camel-cdr 3y ago
      Arguably OpenXiangShan should be more powerful, but verilog simulation isn't really that usable in practice, and it has no working vector support yet. (the dev branch currently hangs after a few minutes of simulating)
drmpeg 3y ago
On the RISC-V IRC channel, it was shown that there was some bug with the Milk-V Pioneer processor, which is a C920 core. I'm not sure if the C910 has the same issue. The super slow benchmark was: stress-ng --verbose --metrics --aggressive --atomic 64 --timeout 600 If you try this, adjust the number (64) to match the number of cores on your system.
- my123 3y ago
  It's not just about a given microbenchmark - that platform just sucks tbh. Hopefully something better appears.
  - drmpeg 3y ago
    Real world performance reported: glibc build on Unmatched ~7:30, on Pioneer ~16:20 hours.
    - brucehoult 3y ago
      I don't have a Pioneer (I wish!) but I just yesterday compiled GCC head (14.0.1) on my 16GB LicheePi 4A (same cores as the Pioneer, but only 4 instead of 64) and it took just under 7:03 in your notation: real 422m41.367s user 1430m56.638s sys 70m17.994s It's hard to believe the Pioneer with 16x as many cores and a slightly higher clock speed and 128GB RAM and NVMe SSD vs eMMC would be slower. My expectation is that it would beat my i9-13900HX laptop (24 cores) running riscv64/ubuntu in docker (QEMU) which took 1:42. real 101m44.472s user 1695m26.395s sys 24m36.671s Note: newlib build, not glibc. But still!
      - drmpeg 3y ago
        The glibc times were reported on the RISC-V IRC channel by davidlt. Here's the backlog for that day. https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-02 https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-02 The stress-ng benchmark was suggested the previous day. https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-01 https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-01
brucehoult 3y ago
> Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level. If you avoid it then you won't be using RISC-V at all, right now. Along with the JH7110, it is the fastest RISC-V CPU you can buy off the shelf today. That will probably change late in this year, but for now you can't do significantly better. Overall the two (and the SG2042, same cores as the TH1520 but 64 of them, plus L3 cache) are very similar in speed. The C910 can be 30% to 50% faster on some microbenchmarks. The JH7110 is usually about 10% faster on system level real world tasks e.g. building software. Not enough to notice unless you sit both side by side. > And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too Which matters much less than it used to, as gcc 14 can compile C code with RVV intrinsics to either. Just today I took someone's RVV 1.0 test code, which they'd only been able to run on simulators, and compiled it and ran it on my TH1520 LicheePi 4A, with only Makefile changes (`-march=rv64gc_xtheadvector` instead of `-march=rv64gcv`). https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1b57gib/comment/kt4t428/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1b57gib/comment/kt4t...
- b9b10eb736 3y ago
  Fully agreed. > The JH7110 is usually about 10% faster on system level real world tasks e.g. building software. Pretty sure the U74 CPU from the JH7110 is way worse than the C910 from the TH1520 on pretty much all aspects. So my guess is that your metric is mostly explained by the fact that the JH7110 has a PCIe bus which allows plugging in an SSD rather than an eMMC or SD Card. But such SSD also has a cost. I think this gives some perspectives.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    It's not a "metric" it's real-world use. Whatever the causes, the CPU core is not the only component in an overall system. I use both of these boards every day. Constantly, as it's my work. Building my RVV 0.7.1 gcc 9.2 snapshot takes 111 min on the U74 VisionFive 2, 122 minutes on the C910 LicheePi 4A. Running DotNET "LINQ" test suite takes 4m30s on VisionFive 2, 5m30s on LicheePi 4A. Doing `emacs --eval '(kill-emacs)' hello.c` takes 0.72s on VisionFive 2, 0.75s on LicheePi 4A. Close, but the C910 does not win. Yes, the C910 significantly beats the U74 on every micro-benchmark. Dhrystone, coremark, my "primes" test https://hoult.org/primes.txt https://hoult.org/primes.txt, memcpy... https://hoult.org/TH1520_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/TH1520_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/JH7110_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/JH7110_memcpy.txt It doesn't translate to the real world, at least in the TH1520 SoC, on the LicheePi 4A sbc.

TH1520 with the XuanTie C910 core. Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level. And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too.

by my123 3y ago

TH1520 with the XuanTie C910 core. Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level. And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too.

nevi-me 3y ago

I was going to try the server out until I saw this comment. Which alternative board/computer would you recommend one buy? I'm learning RISC-V assembly with a friend, it'd be great for us to have a machine to tinker with (we'll use ESP-32-Cx for 32-bit).

b9b10eb736 3y ago
Still way better than a VisionFive 2, and more than enough to get your hands in the thing (especially with the hourly pricing). You have to acknowledge that the RISC-V ecosystem isn't as mature as that of ARM64 and AMD64. You don't get the best performance/price ratio with RISC-V (yet). Many extensions were ratified so recently that hardware doesn't even exist (yet). As far as I'm concerned, the LicheePi 4A from Sipeed which is also equipped with a TH1520 offers a decent value for a RISC-V SBC. If you want more performance than that, it's going to cost you a lot more.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  Right now, you can't get more performance than the TH1520 (C910 cores) and JH7110 (U74 cores) at ANY price. The only thing you can do is get more of the same cores i.e. SG2042 with 64x C910 cores. The same goes for emulation. QEMU on my i9-13900HX laptop is about the same speed on each core, but there I have 24 cores (32 threads). I just compiled gcc 14 natively on both LicheePi 4A (the same as this hosting) and docker/QEMU: i9-13900HX (8 P + 16 E cores) docker running riscv64/ubuntu image real 101m44.472s user 1695m26.395s sys 24m36.671s LicheePi 4A (TH1520 SoC, 4x C910 cores) real 422m41.367s user 1430m56.638s sys 70m17.994s The LicheePi actually used less CPU time, but the i9 won with more cores.
  - b9b10eb736 3y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, you're completely right. I didn't realize the SG2042 used the same core. So, Scaleway's offer really does seem to make sense!
    - nevi-me 3y ago
      Thank you all, yes it makes sense to use this as the cost is great for say 3 months worth of tinkering.
  - camel-cdr 3y ago
    Arguably OpenXiangShan should be more powerful, but verilog simulation isn't really that usable in practice, and it has no working vector support yet. (the dev branch currently hangs after a few minutes of simulating)

drmpeg 3y ago

On the RISC-V IRC channel, it was shown that there was some bug with the Milk-V Pioneer processor, which is a C920 core. I'm not sure if the C910 has the same issue. The super slow benchmark was: stress-ng --verbose --metrics --aggressive --atomic 64 --timeout 600 If you try this, adjust the number (64) to match the number of cores on your system.

my123 3y ago
It's not just about a given microbenchmark - that platform just sucks tbh. Hopefully something better appears.
- drmpeg 3y ago
  Real world performance reported: glibc build on Unmatched ~7:30, on Pioneer ~16:20 hours.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    I don't have a Pioneer (I wish!) but I just yesterday compiled GCC head (14.0.1) on my 16GB LicheePi 4A (same cores as the Pioneer, but only 4 instead of 64) and it took just under 7:03 in your notation: real 422m41.367s user 1430m56.638s sys 70m17.994s It's hard to believe the Pioneer with 16x as many cores and a slightly higher clock speed and 128GB RAM and NVMe SSD vs eMMC would be slower. My expectation is that it would beat my i9-13900HX laptop (24 cores) running riscv64/ubuntu in docker (QEMU) which took 1:42. real 101m44.472s user 1695m26.395s sys 24m36.671s Note: newlib build, not glibc. But still!
    - drmpeg 3y ago
      The glibc times were reported on the RISC-V IRC channel by davidlt. Here's the backlog for that day. https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-02 https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-02 The stress-ng benchmark was suggested the previous day. https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-01 https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/riscv/2024-02-01

brucehoult 3y ago

> Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level. If you avoid it then you won't be using RISC-V at all, right now. Along with the JH7110, it is the fastest RISC-V CPU you can buy off the shelf today. That will probably change late in this year, but for now you can't do significantly better. Overall the two (and the SG2042, same cores as the TH1520 but 64 of them, plus L3 cache) are very similar in speed. The C910 can be 30% to 50% faster on some microbenchmarks. The JH7110 is usually about 10% faster on system level real world tasks e.g. building software. Not enough to notice unless you sit both side by side. > And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too Which matters much less than it used to, as gcc 14 can compile C code with RVV intrinsics to either. Just today I took someone's RVV 1.0 test code, which they'd only been able to run on simulators, and compiled it and ran it on my TH1520 LicheePi 4A, with only Makefile changes (`-march=rv64gc_xtheadvector` instead of `-march=rv64gcv`). https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1b57gib/comment/kt4t428/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1b57gib/comment/kt4t...

b9b10eb736 3y ago
Fully agreed. > The JH7110 is usually about 10% faster on system level real world tasks e.g. building software. Pretty sure the U74 CPU from the JH7110 is way worse than the C910 from the TH1520 on pretty much all aspects. So my guess is that your metric is mostly explained by the fact that the JH7110 has a PCIe bus which allows plugging in an SSD rather than an eMMC or SD Card. But such SSD also has a cost. I think this gives some perspectives.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  It's not a "metric" it's real-world use. Whatever the causes, the CPU core is not the only component in an overall system. I use both of these boards every day. Constantly, as it's my work. Building my RVV 0.7.1 gcc 9.2 snapshot takes 111 min on the U74 VisionFive 2, 122 minutes on the C910 LicheePi 4A. Running DotNET "LINQ" test suite takes 4m30s on VisionFive 2, 5m30s on LicheePi 4A. Doing `emacs --eval '(kill-emacs)' hello.c` takes 0.72s on VisionFive 2, 0.75s on LicheePi 4A. Close, but the C910 does not win. Yes, the C910 significantly beats the U74 on every micro-benchmark. Dhrystone, coremark, my "primes" test https://hoult.org/primes.txt https://hoult.org/primes.txt, memcpy... https://hoult.org/TH1520_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/TH1520_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/JH7110_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/JH7110_memcpy.txt It doesn't translate to the real world, at least in the TH1520 SoC, on the LicheePi 4A sbc.