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Comment by whitehexagon | Hacker News Reader

Did I miss the pricing? I quite fancy the "StarFive's VisionFive 2" that was mentioned here a while back (assuming software improves a bit), but once again not clear what this new board offers in terms of RISC-V extensions/level of support. btw I noticed today that Pine64 are also planning a cheap RISC-V board maybe next month.

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It adds a much slower CPU /s

The VisionFive 2 is currently the best RISC-V SBC option, at least until TH1520 becomes available (next month?), depending on the price.

I can vouch for the VF2 hardware - works well. Alas PCIe is oddly slow, but I'm hopeful that firmware will improve that.

EDIT: The Pine Star64 is (should be) the exact same SOC, so it should be basically the same as VF2 (small differences like PCIe edge connector instead of an M.2 slot, etc).

Thanks. I saw there is a pine64 EU store now, so fingers crossed they will stock it, although a working PCIe would also be very nice! I hadn't heard of TH1520 until now, 2.5GHz is going to give the Pi4 a better run for it's money.

It looks like they're going to be running the bare chip at 1.85 GHz stock. Will probably need to add a heatsink and maybe fan to get to the rated 2.5 GHz.

And, yes, with its OoO CPU cores it should match a Pi 4 at the same MHz, but do more MHz.

People are getting around 250 MB/s from an SSD on the PCIe (M.2) on VisionFive 2. Ok, so you'd ideally like 400 MB/s from 1 lane, but it's still 10x better than SD card.

It's probably being limited because the RAM to RAM copy speed isn't much more than that! I get 475 MB/s memcpy() speed for 64 MB copies on my VisionFive 2. The much slower CPU on the AllWinner D1 manages 1100 MB/s n the same code. Somehow the SiFive-based SoCs have never been good on RAM speed -- the HiFive Unleashed and Unmatched were even worse than this.

Hopefully the Horse Creek SoC has some good Intel DDR IP in it.

I'm getting ~ 180 MB/s on a Samsung SM8?? which hits around 3 GB/s on a desktop. I'm using a 5.1V 3.5A supply so that ought not be the issue (but I'll try another PSU now).

Horse Creek would be nice - should it ever become available for purchase.

EDIT: Well, I'm shocked. With a far more beefy supply (12.3V/0.7A) I now hit 295+ MB/s, not great but so much better than before. Thanks for the hint.

Interesting data, thanks!

Nobody called me on my nonsense so I will: The 5.1V 3.5A = 17.8W was the PSU _rating_ whereas the 12.1V 0.7A = 8.5 W was actually _meassured_. I’m not a EE and I don’t understand the power section of that board, but something to look out for.

Yes, it didn't seem to make sense butI figured it was a typo and the more important thing was the increased SSD speed.

What is the rating of your bigger supply?

And presumably what you were measuring is the average Amps/Watts, not the peak.

Exactly. The bigger supply is the (excellent) https://pine64.com/product/pinepower-120w-desktop-power-supp... and the output I used is rated as: 65W Output/5V3A, 9V3A, 12V3A, 15V3A, 20V3.25A

> Did I miss the pricing?

If you follow the "Where to Buy" links for the United States, it's available from Amazon for $280.

Thanks, I only scanned Europe. But anyway that is quite a premium over the SV2 at around $70? And I got the impression Star64 will also be in that lower price bracket, but lets wait and see.

No, that link goes to the Tinker Edge, a board with a different CPU and a TPU. As far as I can tell, Amazon does not carry the Tinker V at all.

Nope...the Amazon page that ASUS redirects to[1] is a different SBC[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Tinker-1-5GHz-Graphics-Motherboa...

[2] https://tinker-board.asus.com/product/tinker-edge-t.html

You're right, thanks! Here's the "Where to Buy" page that sent me there: https://tinker-board.asus.com/where-to-buy.html

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