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Comment by blacklion | Hacker News Reader

I'm in market to replace platform for my home-built NAS. I'm looking at EPYCs 7001 or 7002 with SuperMicro platform (second hand) as primary target.

When I seen this Milk-V Pioneer platform I was very enthusiastic: looks like what I need (minus IPMI, but I can omit this requirement) - one slot for 10G network, one slot for HBA, M.2 slots for caches, I can select RAM (in opposite to most of these platforms, where RAM is soledrid-on), plus ability to experiment with new platform. Looks perfect.

But... $1499?! Plus VAT to import to Europe?!

Sorry. I pass :-(

Why does it cost SO MUCH!?

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Because it won't sell in anywhere near the volumes comparable x86 motherboards will.

It's the same for the Talos II using IBM's POWER. It costs a lot because a) it is designed as a workstation and b) the volume just isn't there.

Economies of scale basically.

As someone who dabbles in electronics, it was eye-opening to go to DigiKey and PCBWay and price up a modern x86 motherboard.

Obviously DigiKey doesn't have the chipset ICs, but at quantities of 100 just the connectors, VRMs, passives and the big 8-layer PCB to house it was so much higher.

Like I knew it would be higher, but this exercise really put industrialized manufacturing and economy of scale into perspective.

>Why does it cost SO MUCH!?

Because it is their first generation chip, thus small production run.

You can either wait for the next one (SOPHON SG2044, with V 1.0 extension, TBA 2024) or get something that's mass-produced now, such as SBCs or tablets based on the JH7110 or TH1520 SoCs.

Point of fact: it costs no more (maybe less) than a similarly configured prebuilt x86 computer with 12-16 performance cores, which it will be performance-competitive with on many tasks where you can keep most of the 64 cores busy.

Because it's a development platform, produced in small quantities. It also has 64 cores which I guess an EPYC doesn't have at that kind of price.

On one hand I agree with you. It is apples-to-oranges to compare new development platform and old, second-hand, production one.

On other hand... There is NO comparable production RISC-V platforms. You say "It has 64 cores" - well, it is good argument when there is choice. But there is no choice on RISC-V side, there is no such platform with 32 or 8 or any other number of cores. So, I compare what I can buy with "RISC-V" badge and what I can buy with "amd64" badge. When I choose EPYC I could choose from 8 cores up to 64 cores, according to my wallet and needs. For 1000 euro I could have good, proven MoBo which offers more than this "development platform" (i.e. IPMI and VGA exit, which means I don't need any videocard to occupy so precious PCIe slot - and I think, it is good idea for DEVELOPMENT platform to have full remote control & access, IPMI or some other) and 8 core/16 threads first generation EPYC (which will be faster core-to-core, I'm sure), NEW. If I agree to buy second-hand hardware it will be about 550 euros (same mobo, same CPU). For 1400 euros I will get NEW 16 cores / 32 thread EPYC + mobo combo, or about 700 euros second-hand.

Yes, I know, development vs. production, but this situation stays the same for years now.

BTW, situation is the same with ARM platforms too - there is no way to buy "big desktop/small-server class" ARMv8 board with good set of expansion slot.

Have you checked the cost of a prebuilt 64 core EPYC machine (not just the chip) recently?

Sure, it's 4 times the performance, but it's also going to be several times the price.

Even a prebuilt 7950X (16 core) machine costs more than the Pioneer, at leas the ones I've found on the net.

Why should I compare prebuilt machine (which will not exactly what I want, I'm sure) and MoBo with soldered-in CPU?

I'm already own good chassis, HBA, 10G network adapter and lot of HDDs :-)

We get it, you've found an area where a new open architecture (only 12 years old, only been making chips for 5 years) doesn't compete with a 50 year old proprietary architecture that is used by 95%+ of the machines around. It's like it is 1997 and Windows looks unstoppable, what could this silly Linux toy ever be useful for?

Agreed.

Except I really don't think it's fair to call RISC-V 12 (or 13) years old. Sure, that's when some university guys in a pub said "fuck it, we should just make our own ISA" and started throwing ideas around, but it was a long long time before it was frozen and there was something companies could start building on.

That happened in July 2019. just over 4 years ago, which I think should be counted as the zero date.

When did Arm start working on Aarch64? I don't think we have any idea — as far as I know they've never said. My guess is it was around the 2003 release of AMD64. But the world learned about it when they published the finished ARMv8-A spec in October 2011.

If 2011 is the date for ARMv8 then the fair comparable date for RISC-V is 2019.

> only been making chips for 5 years

Five years ago, the only RISC-V chips were one-off ones made in Berkeley university, and the FE310-G000 and FU540-C000, which were also made by those same guys as were in that pub, manufactured in total volumes of a few hundred, and with no guarantee they would be compatible with the eventual ratified standard.

HiFive Unleashed (FU540) was 2018: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/hifive-unleashed-cpuin... Of course that's basically 5 Rocket Chips in silicon, and Yunsup is one of those "university guys", so point taken.

I have a HiFive Unleashed, one of those used to demo them at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland in March 2018. It was over a year after that before the ISA was ratified (and of course designed well before that) so, as I said, there was no guarantee that it would actually qualify as "RISC-V" long term.

With the HiFive Unleashed SiFive "shipped a draft spec", which is exactly the same thing they shit on Canaan (K210, priv arch 1.9.1, literally a snapshot of the Rocket repo) and THead (C906/C910 RVV 0.7.1) for. They just got lucky that no breaking changes were made, unlike the other guys.

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