I noticed a few mistakes/omissions. From the top of my mind:
- There's mention of bad cryptography performance. But there is a cryptography acceleration engine. This is not enabled in the current test kernels, but yet patch is being reviewed by Linux upstream. In contrast, the Broadcom SoCs in the other boards VF2 was compared against have no such hardware.
- There's mention of unusably slow youtube, but again, there's a hardware video decode block that's still not usable, yet it is considerably more capable than the one in the Broadcom SoCs.
- Related, Firefox is very slow because JS is interpreted. A RISC-V JIT implementation landed recently and will be present in the 111 release due in a few weeks.
- The SoC GPU is glossed over, but it did deserve more attention. Claimed to be 4x the performance of RPi4's SoC, Imagination Technologies is working on an open driver. This is a public effort as of early 2022, with some code already in Mesa3d upstream.
I am happy that the author did stress that this is early days, and that if the review/benchmarks were to be repeated in the future, the results would be very different.
Get this board (I love mine) if you're curious about and want to play with RISC-V. There's currently nothing faster than the VF2 available at any price, and yet VF2 is available at ~$100.