Milk-V Pioneer A 64-core, RISC-V workstation for native development | Hacker News Reader

Milk-V Pioneer A 64-core, RISC-V workstation for native development

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27 pointslvturner8 comments

Dunno. The idea is neat. But at this point we don't even have a working, and reasonably supported RISC-V SBC. Sure, there are many small boards, and I also have some goodness from Pine64, but they are still mostly toys.

And this comes from the heart of China, from a company I have never heard of until it started to get spammed over HN like 2 weeks ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the hardware is really nice. But they are not very famous about supporting things long term neither software- nor hardwarewise.

One thing I appreciate here is the UEFI support, which in theory decouples the OS from the machine and opens up the space for standard RISC-V distributions that can run on boards from multiple manufacturers, creating a circle of virtue. This is also what's missing from the embedded RISC-V space - a standard boot process. Without that you're mostly stuck with the vendor supplied distro(s) forever.

>But at this point we don't even have a working, and reasonably supported RISC-V SBC.

VisionFive2 (based on JH7110) is as close as it gets, and much better than your average ARM SBC, as the SoC and SBC vendor itself works on upstream support[0].

As of recently, there's even UEFI. A work in progress, but already capable of booting Linux.

0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan

The chip provider is a subsiduary of Bitmain and it seems that MilkV have quite close ties with them, time will tell if this provides for long term support or not.

I'm not sure the statement about "Support things long term neither software nor hardware wise" (maybe I'm taking this statement out of context, but it seemed directly linked to the firm being based in China...) is entirely fair - some examples being, Tencent, Huawei, Ali(cloud), ZTE, TP-Link, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Tuya, etc and then more on the maker side of things companies like Creality and of course Espressif.

I find it hard to trust anyone whose avatar is pixel art or a still from an anime.

This is cool but you know, 64 super wimpy cores isn't enough. For this workstation to be worth it I need the vector instructions to actually work and be supported by libav/ffmpeg because the amount of workloads that can be spread to 64 cores is so niche that either you deck out the maximum possible configuration of an x86 system because you can't afford to lose even a tiny bit of performance or it is very common but requires dedicated software/hardware support.

Not that wimpy. I've been using the manufacturer's EVB for this chip since March and it goes really well. Streets ahead of anything else in the RISC-v world at the moment. And dual- and quad-socket boards are coming soon.

Even on things that don't parallelise well it's still pretty good.

For example on building riscv-gnu-toolchain (binutils, gcc, libc) for which the stupid GNU recursive makefile buildsystem means it only averages using about 9-10 of those 64 cores, it takes 34 minutes. This compares to 11 minutes on a 32 core Threadripper, 20 minutes on a 6 core Zen 2 laptop, 32 minutes on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with i7-8650u, and 102 minutes on a Pi4.

On things that use all the cores, it's comparable to a 12-16 core current generation x86 -- which costs the same or more.

It's a lot powerful than the Graviton 1 that became available on AWS in November 2018.

The vector unit work great, that's been my main reason for testing one.

There will be much much faster RISC-V SoCs with lots of cores in the next couple of years, but this lets you get software ported on a realistic machine right now.

I think the target demographic of this isn't somebody who whats a workstation, but people who what to do riscv development, and start porting things like ffmpeg, make sure video drivers are working, and so on.

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