4 ms·

I'll reiterate what I wrote before: 042€/hour per hour of compute is a great deal for developers. If you tests with cross compilation and qemu anyways and some

I'll reiterate what I wrote before: 042€/hour per hour of compute is a great deal for developers. If you tests with cross compilation and qemu anyways and sometimes needs test/benchmark on the native hardware, then this means you can spend about 5€ and you are probably set for months if not a year. Also, with the latest gcc you can finally target rvv 0.7.1, which is supported by these CPUs. You just write your standardized rvv 1.0 intrinsics and if you add `-march=64gcxtheadvector` gcc 14 will just generate the equivalent rvv 0.7.1: https://godbolt.org/z/va9sfEnMW https://godbolt.org/z/va9sfEnMW

justahuman74 3y ago
We probably want to encourage people to forget pre 1.0 vectors exists, to ease ecosystem fragmentation
- brucehoult 3y ago
  That's what the SiFive mafia have been trying to get people to do, for the three years since Nezha arrived with RVV 0.7.1, while they (still!) have zero RVV hardware available for the end user to buy. It's pure FUD. The x86 world somehow survives with MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX512. The Arm word has a few incompatible variants too, with VFP, a couple of variations of NEON, SVE, SVE2, MVE. In comparison, RVV draft 0.7.1 and ratified 1.0 are practically the same thing. With GCC 14 transparently compiling unmodified code using RVV C intrinsics to either 0.7.1 or 1.0 there is very little cost or reason not to support both. RVV 0.7.1 is available in the vast majority of RISC-V SBCs in the world today, from the $5 Milk-V Duo (1.0 GHz C906, 64 MB RAM, 256M & 512M available for a few bucks more), to the ~$30 Lichee RV [dock] and MangoPi MQ Pro, to the $120-$180 Lichee Pi 4A, to the $2500 64 core Milk-V Pioneer. With the sole exception of the CanMV-K230 (single core, 0.5 GB RAM), if a RISC-V board on sale today doesn't have RVV 0.7.1 then it doesn't have vectors at all.
  - kragen 3y ago
    i think the vast majority of risc-v sbcs in the world today don't support any v extension at all, yeah it's wonderful news that gcc is able to paper over the compatibility problems now
  - oconnor663 3y ago
    Deciding what to do about the version split seems tricky, but on the plus side, it's impressive that they implemented a lot of real hardware before they even froze the extension.
    - kragen 3y ago
      not really. standards consortia are notoriously sluggish and chinese hardware companies are famously agile
kragen 3y ago
that's fantastic news about gcc btw possibly you should add a decimal point to your price
zer00eyz 3y ago
For me, the price is 15.99 euros. For 18 bucks USD I can get the same 100mb, 16mb and 4c/8t of core i5 hosted by OVH cloud (where I have so many upgrade paths it's laughable. I can, if I wish emulate my builds on x86 right here, at home, on my prox mox box or anywhere else I wish and not pay per hour of dev time. As a small dev, the cost savings isnt there yet. I don't have good RISC-V options at home/office to do testing on. That having been said, I want the few dev boards that are out there to come down from the 70dollar price point. I love what ESP32 ecosystem has coming out (P4? I think, it has zigbee). So if you have the spare 16 bucks a month, and the TIME to play this might be a good time to stick your toe in!
- brucehoult 3y ago
  > For 18 bucks USD I can get the same 100mb, 16mb and 4c/8t of core i5 It's not about the highest performance or cheapest hosting if you don't care what you're using. It's for those who specifically want RISC-V hosting. > ESP32-P4 Dual 400 MHz CPUs, less than 1 MB RAM. If you are happy with things in that class, you don't need to pay any $70. For $5 you can get Milk-V Duo dual 1000 MHz + 700 MHz with 64 MB RAM and run Linux on it. You can compile C/asm code for the 700 MHz "microcontroller" core right there on the 1 GHz Linux core, if you want. Just put the bare metal binary in the right directory and reboot the 700 MHz core. Use the Arduino library to write your code, if you want, if twiddle the registers yourself. https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo https://github.com/milkv-duo/duo-arduino/releases https://github.com/milkv-duo/duo-arduino/releases
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    Thanks for the link to the milk-V that looks amazing. I would still love a mini pc/ raspberry pi style form factor for testing things that are more "application" and less embedded. The "real network" and 4-8 cores where I can vet out high thread low volume tasks would be ideal. I can run this at home and "play" avoiding the rent seeking techno feudalism for an experiment!

justahuman74 3y ago

We probably want to encourage people to forget pre 1.0 vectors exists, to ease ecosystem fragmentation

brucehoult 3y ago
That's what the SiFive mafia have been trying to get people to do, for the three years since Nezha arrived with RVV 0.7.1, while they (still!) have zero RVV hardware available for the end user to buy. It's pure FUD. The x86 world somehow survives with MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX512. The Arm word has a few incompatible variants too, with VFP, a couple of variations of NEON, SVE, SVE2, MVE. In comparison, RVV draft 0.7.1 and ratified 1.0 are practically the same thing. With GCC 14 transparently compiling unmodified code using RVV C intrinsics to either 0.7.1 or 1.0 there is very little cost or reason not to support both. RVV 0.7.1 is available in the vast majority of RISC-V SBCs in the world today, from the $5 Milk-V Duo (1.0 GHz C906, 64 MB RAM, 256M & 512M available for a few bucks more), to the ~$30 Lichee RV [dock] and MangoPi MQ Pro, to the $120-$180 Lichee Pi 4A, to the $2500 64 core Milk-V Pioneer. With the sole exception of the CanMV-K230 (single core, 0.5 GB RAM), if a RISC-V board on sale today doesn't have RVV 0.7.1 then it doesn't have vectors at all.
- kragen 3y ago
  i think the vast majority of risc-v sbcs in the world today don't support any v extension at all, yeah it's wonderful news that gcc is able to paper over the compatibility problems now
- oconnor663 3y ago
  Deciding what to do about the version split seems tricky, but on the plus side, it's impressive that they implemented a lot of real hardware before they even froze the extension.
  - kragen 3y ago
    not really. standards consortia are notoriously sluggish and chinese hardware companies are famously agile

kragen 3y ago

that's fantastic news about gcc btw possibly you should add a decimal point to your price

zer00eyz 3y ago

For me, the price is 15.99 euros. For 18 bucks USD I can get the same 100mb, 16mb and 4c/8t of core i5 hosted by OVH cloud (where I have so many upgrade paths it's laughable. I can, if I wish emulate my builds on x86 right here, at home, on my prox mox box or anywhere else I wish and not pay per hour of dev time. As a small dev, the cost savings isnt there yet. I don't have good RISC-V options at home/office to do testing on. That having been said, I want the few dev boards that are out there to come down from the 70dollar price point. I love what ESP32 ecosystem has coming out (P4? I think, it has zigbee). So if you have the spare 16 bucks a month, and the TIME to play this might be a good time to stick your toe in!

brucehoult 3y ago
> For 18 bucks USD I can get the same 100mb, 16mb and 4c/8t of core i5 It's not about the highest performance or cheapest hosting if you don't care what you're using. It's for those who specifically want RISC-V hosting. > ESP32-P4 Dual 400 MHz CPUs, less than 1 MB RAM. If you are happy with things in that class, you don't need to pay any $70. For $5 you can get Milk-V Duo dual 1000 MHz + 700 MHz with 64 MB RAM and run Linux on it. You can compile C/asm code for the 700 MHz "microcontroller" core right there on the 1 GHz Linux core, if you want. Just put the bare metal binary in the right directory and reboot the 700 MHz core. Use the Arduino library to write your code, if you want, if twiddle the registers yourself. https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo https://github.com/milkv-duo/duo-arduino/releases https://github.com/milkv-duo/duo-arduino/releases
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  Thanks for the link to the milk-V that looks amazing. I would still love a mini pc/ raspberry pi style form factor for testing things that are more "application" and less embedded. The "real network" and 4-8 cores where I can vet out high thread low volume tasks would be ideal. I can run this at home and "play" avoiding the rent seeking techno feudalism for an experiment!