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Going from a regular Framework mainboard with x86 to this RISC-V will be quite the drop in performance. It's really huge. You don't need to guess.
by gtirloni 2y ago
Going from a regular Framework mainboard with x86 to this RISC-V will be quite the drop in performance. It's really huge. You don't need to guess.
- Zambyte 2y agoThey didn't say anything about performance though?
- packetlost 2y agoIt's a chip that you could buy over 2 years ago. It's a JH7110 SoC which you can buy for like $40 in one of several SBC: https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/ https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/ https://milkv.io/mars https://milkv.io/mars I happen to have 2 of them and they're dog slow, pre-vector extension RISC-V. You cannot do much useful with them, they're slower than a Raspberry Pi 3.
- Zambyte 2y agoI meant kibwen, not the OP.
- brucehoult 2y agoNo, the first JH7110 boards (VisionFive 2) started arriving in pre-order customer hands in early February 2023, 16 months ago. In general use they are much faster than a Pi 3, especially given the 8 GB RAM vs 1 GB which is often far more important than the CPU speed. The GPU is also much better. And the M.2 SSD. Better to compare to the Pi 4. Like all the Arm A55 boards, it's a little slower than Pi 4's A72s, but also uses less power.
- dmitrygr 2y agoWhich says everything that needs to be said
- Zambyte 2y agoI meant kibwen didn't say anything about performance, not the OP.
- gtirloni 2y agoThey also didn't say anything about the mainboard having RGB LEDs or a quantum computing chip, but I'm assuming someone swapping a x86 mainboard for a RISC-V one on a personal laptop will want some kind of performance for daily tasks, which that chip won't provide even barely.
- Zambyte 2y agoWhy not assume that someone interested in a RISC-V laptop understands the limitations associated with RISC-V? Just seems like hating for no reason :\
- retrocryptid 2y agoOr... Maybe people who buy these things know why they're buying them and raw horsepower isn't their primary concern.
- retrocryptid 2y agoMy testing put the performance a bit shy of an A72 @ 2.4GHz. The U54 was on par with an A53. I thought I saw someone else publish specmarks to corroborate this assertion, but i can't find it right now.
- infamouscow 2y agoModern Arm chips will maintain a wide gap in performance for quite awhile.* Arm has poured a lot of money into optimizing their chip IP and it speaks for itself in the benchmarks. Excluding if performance wasn't a concern to begin with - I don't see the argument why an open ISA is really worth the performance / heat / power cost. *: https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks
- snvzz 2y agoI hope you realize that you're talking about a cheap SoC that was released in late 2022, and does not reflect currently announced RISC-V microarchitectures. e.g. SiFive P870 is competitive with ARM's best, whereas Ventana Veyron V2 and Tenstorrent Ascalon/Alastor compete with the state of the art from AMD/Intel/Apple/Qualcomm. RISC-V enables the best processors.
- infamouscow 2y agoI must have missed the real world performance benchmarks that demonstrate the claims of a marketing department.
- brucehoult 2y agoThat requires actual hardware, which naturally tends to be in mass production (i.e. cheap) SBCs around four years after the announcement of the core. That's a constant over Arm and RISC-V e.g. we've just in the last two years seen Rock 5, Pi 5 (nine months ago), Orange Pi 5 with Arm A76 cores announced in 2018. P870 was announced in October. It'll be a while! P670 was announced November 2022, and will be in e.g. the SG2380 around the end of this year -- actually remarkably fast. It should leapfrog those A76 boards in performance.
- oopsallmagic 2y agoIt's intended for hobbyists and tinkerers. If you want a computer that screams, you get a desktop. Nobody's trying to play the newest GTA on this chip.
- retrocryptid 2y agoStarFive catalog parts use slightly tweaked SiFive cores. So if you were going to license a SiFive core for an embedded design, you may want to have something that uses the catalog part to verify your code will work. I mean, emulating your core for development is a good approach in general, but at some point you may want to run your code on actual silicon. So sure, an Intel i9 or ARM Mac is probably going to be faster than a 4 core U74 SoC, but if you're using a RISC-V core for some embedded application, having a RISC-V system to test with is probably a good idea. And it's cool you can get a RISC-V SBC for a couple hundred bux. It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals. And if you can stuff it in a laptop form factor, it's portable.
- brucehoult 2y agoYou can get a quad core U74 1.5 GHz RISC-V SBC for $40 -- the Milk-V Mars. Or $34 for the Compute Module version. Or $5 for the Milk-V Duo with 1.0 GHz single core and 64 MB RAM, which is more appropriate for many embedded uses and still runs Linux (with a 2nd 700 MHz 64 bit RISC-V microcontroller core for real-time tasks) > It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals The HiFive Unleashed was never $2k. The standard price was $999, and the first batch of preorders (which I got one of) was $1199. It indeed was lacking in peripherals, with only 8 GB RAM, an SD card, and gigE interfaces natively, but an FPGA Mezzanine connector that allowed turning it into a full PC using a standard Xilinx FPGA dev board, or the much cheaper custom MicroSemi expansion board. But if you didn't mind booting from SD, SSHing/X in, and mounting storage from your PC using NFS (etc) then you could do a lot of software development with the bare $999 board.
- mkesper 2y agoThey are planning to do it the other way round so no worries, I guess.