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That's why I wonder, who is this device being sold to? I do understand why RISC-V appeals to enthusiasts - I've been eyeing a couple RISC-V SBCs to potentially

That's why I wonder, who is this device being sold to? I do understand why RISC-V appeals to enthusiasts - I've been eyeing a couple RISC-V SBCs to potentially add to my homelab - I just don't understand the form factor. I sure as hell wouldn't carry two tablet/laptop-sized devices with me. Doing systems work in-system is a recipe for bricking the device until you can carry it back home. Doing integration work is much more productive if you can play with a dozen different CSI or DSI peripherals, rather than being stuck with one of each. I linked Chimera specifically to point out they've been building/porting apps thru an emulator, since it was more performant and readily available. We've already ruled out using it for consuming media, and all but the most basic work. So what kind of hacker/enthusiast stuff can I actually do with this device specifically? It just looks like the worst of all worlds to me?

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
I'd consider a tablet to be a convenient form factor for people working with front-end tools (e.g. porting a browser to RISC-V etc) as they don't then need to find another spare power cable and a spare monitor to connect to an SBC. My view is that this is a step along the way to building RISC-V hardware for end-users. I'd guess that they chose this form-factor because they could build it relatively easily and at low cost. Their January blog post indicates that the PineNote is mainly usable: https://pine64.org/2025/01/11/january_2025/ https://pine64.org/2025/01/11/january_2025/
- rollcat 2y ago
  > porting a browser to RISC-V Modern web browsers take several hours to compile on reasonably powerful hardware. (I don't know much about rebuilding for incremental changes. TBH I'm terrified of the scope to even try.) Also that sounds like an incredibly niche application? > [...] as they don't then need to find another spare power cable and a spare monitor to connect to an SBC. My own solution is to use an HDMI capture stick to display a window on my main workstation. Works great for kiosk-type applications, and I keep my regular setup for actual coding. I previously used the hardware PIP feature of my monitor, but it will often obscure another window. If I need KVM, and for devices that support that, I have a screen that does USB-C with DP, plus an internal USB hub to connect the keyboard and mouse. One cable to rule them all. I could probably get half a dozen USB-C/DP into HDMI+USB-A adapters but honestly swapping two cables instead of one is not that big of a deal. My screen has 4 HDMI inputs, regular DP, and USB-C/DP. I ended up using all of them ;) Plus you get to pick more powerful HW to actually support development - even a 20% improvement is big, and IIRC that was the difference between Jetson T210 and RasPi4; enough to do non-Jetson-specific builds on a different board.
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    > Also that sounds like an incredibly niche application? This is a niche device, so yes it's designed for niche applications and also for people who want to play around with RISC-V hardware.
brucehoult 2y ago
The Chimera folks seem to be confused and/or out of date. The optimum way [1] to build thousands of RISC-V packages has been on real hardware, not in emulation, ever since the VisionFive 2 came out just over two years ago, at approximately 1/7th the price of the HiFive Unmatched they mention (which came out almost 4 years ago in May 2021). Emulation is convenient if you already have a honking x86, and it's not already busy doing other things. e.g. typically your own desktop computer. But that doesn't scale. It takes three to four $100 VisionFive 2s to get the same overall build performance as a $1500 i9-13900 or 14900 or Ryzen 9 7950x running RISC-V code in docker/qemu. You can use resources more efficiently with a single machine with a lot of cores and a lot of RAM, and it's convenient. The Milk-V Pioneer with 64 2.0 GHz OoO RISC-V cores and 128 GB RAM, available since January 2024, fits that bill, but they also dismiss it because it costs $2500 as a preassembled machine (or $1500 just for motherboard with CPU, BYO RAM and storage and case/ps). But you'd spend $5000 or $6000 on x86 to get the same total throughput in emulation of RISC-V. The same update says they just bought an Ampere Altra to support arm64. They don't say what that cost, but I believe it's going to be minimum $4000. [1] if you don't mind a little more setup (which the Chimera people do) then the optimum optimum way is to run the build scripts and random tools themselves in RISC-V code on either real hardware or in emulation, but distcc the actual C/C++ compiles out to a cross-compiler running native on x86 or Apple (or Ampere). That gives a very significant speedup (up to 10x) over emulation or current RISC-V hardware, while retaining the ability to build even the most complex packages without problems.
- rollcat 2y ago
  I stand corrected about the high-end state of the art; TBH I haven't been following the developments in a long while. But the device in question clearly looks low-end to me. I would love to see it benchmarked against a contemporary mid-range Thinkpad or Macbook running RISC-V in emulation.
  - brucehoult 2y ago
    Sure, it's low end. But emulation carries a high burden. Here are some figures from my own tests (except the Pioneer), compiling a RISC-V Linux kernel version from December 7 using defconfig. All "native" builds on either RISC-V hardware or else RISC-V Ubuntu 20.04 running in emulation (qemu) in docker. 4m35s $2500 Milk-V Pioneer 64x THead C910 @2.0 GHz 19m13s $1600 Lenovo Legion Pro 5i i9-13900HX 2023 (24 core) 67m35s $100 VisionFive 2 4x SiFive U74 @1.5 GHz 69m16s $900 Mac Mini M1 (4P + 4E cores) 70m57s $90 Lichee Pi 3A 8x Spacemit X60 @1.6 GHz 143m20s $800 Lenovo Ryzen 5 4500U laptop (6 cores Zen 2)

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

I'd consider a tablet to be a convenient form factor for people working with front-end tools (e.g. porting a browser to RISC-V etc) as they don't then need to find another spare power cable and a spare monitor to connect to an SBC. My view is that this is a step along the way to building RISC-V hardware for end-users. I'd guess that they chose this form-factor because they could build it relatively easily and at low cost. Their January blog post indicates that the PineNote is mainly usable: https://pine64.org/2025/01/11/january_2025/ https://pine64.org/2025/01/11/january_2025/

rollcat 2y ago
> porting a browser to RISC-V Modern web browsers take several hours to compile on reasonably powerful hardware. (I don't know much about rebuilding for incremental changes. TBH I'm terrified of the scope to even try.) Also that sounds like an incredibly niche application? > [...] as they don't then need to find another spare power cable and a spare monitor to connect to an SBC. My own solution is to use an HDMI capture stick to display a window on my main workstation. Works great for kiosk-type applications, and I keep my regular setup for actual coding. I previously used the hardware PIP feature of my monitor, but it will often obscure another window. If I need KVM, and for devices that support that, I have a screen that does USB-C with DP, plus an internal USB hub to connect the keyboard and mouse. One cable to rule them all. I could probably get half a dozen USB-C/DP into HDMI+USB-A adapters but honestly swapping two cables instead of one is not that big of a deal. My screen has 4 HDMI inputs, regular DP, and USB-C/DP. I ended up using all of them ;) Plus you get to pick more powerful HW to actually support development - even a 20% improvement is big, and IIRC that was the difference between Jetson T210 and RasPi4; enough to do non-Jetson-specific builds on a different board.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  > Also that sounds like an incredibly niche application? This is a niche device, so yes it's designed for niche applications and also for people who want to play around with RISC-V hardware.

brucehoult 2y ago

The Chimera folks seem to be confused and/or out of date. The optimum way [1] to build thousands of RISC-V packages has been on real hardware, not in emulation, ever since the VisionFive 2 came out just over two years ago, at approximately 1/7th the price of the HiFive Unmatched they mention (which came out almost 4 years ago in May 2021). Emulation is convenient if you already have a honking x86, and it's not already busy doing other things. e.g. typically your own desktop computer. But that doesn't scale. It takes three to four $100 VisionFive 2s to get the same overall build performance as a $1500 i9-13900 or 14900 or Ryzen 9 7950x running RISC-V code in docker/qemu. You can use resources more efficiently with a single machine with a lot of cores and a lot of RAM, and it's convenient. The Milk-V Pioneer with 64 2.0 GHz OoO RISC-V cores and 128 GB RAM, available since January 2024, fits that bill, but they also dismiss it because it costs $2500 as a preassembled machine (or $1500 just for motherboard with CPU, BYO RAM and storage and case/ps). But you'd spend $5000 or $6000 on x86 to get the same total throughput in emulation of RISC-V. The same update says they just bought an Ampere Altra to support arm64. They don't say what that cost, but I believe it's going to be minimum $4000. [1] if you don't mind a little more setup (which the Chimera people do) then the optimum optimum way is to run the build scripts and random tools themselves in RISC-V code on either real hardware or in emulation, but distcc the actual C/C++ compiles out to a cross-compiler running native on x86 or Apple (or Ampere). That gives a very significant speedup (up to 10x) over emulation or current RISC-V hardware, while retaining the ability to build even the most complex packages without problems.

rollcat 2y ago
I stand corrected about the high-end state of the art; TBH I haven't been following the developments in a long while. But the device in question clearly looks low-end to me. I would love to see it benchmarked against a contemporary mid-range Thinkpad or Macbook running RISC-V in emulation.
- brucehoult 2y ago
  Sure, it's low end. But emulation carries a high burden. Here are some figures from my own tests (except the Pioneer), compiling a RISC-V Linux kernel version from December 7 using defconfig. All "native" builds on either RISC-V hardware or else RISC-V Ubuntu 20.04 running in emulation (qemu) in docker. 4m35s $2500 Milk-V Pioneer 64x THead C910 @2.0 GHz 19m13s $1600 Lenovo Legion Pro 5i i9-13900HX 2023 (24 core) 67m35s $100 VisionFive 2 4x SiFive U74 @1.5 GHz 69m16s $900 Mac Mini M1 (4P + 4E cores) 70m57s $90 Lichee Pi 3A 8x Spacemit X60 @1.6 GHz 143m20s $800 Lenovo Ryzen 5 4500U laptop (6 cores Zen 2)