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Comment by 404mm | Hacker News Reader

Pi 5 is the first Pi I did not buy. I was always the early adopter of all Pi’s but that ended with 4.

For me, the killer was a combo of 3 things: 1. Too expensive relative to performance. 2. Availability of quite decent N100 (and similar) boxes with expandable memory and storage. 3. Not interested in Pi that should be actively cooled.

I always wished the Pi had eMMC storage but it never happened for the non-compute module versions.

I still have a few Pi’s around the house and they are plenty powerful for their purpose.

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I suspect the Pi Foundation was getting really annoyed at other Pi compatible boards capturing the high end ARM SBC niche. Their flagship Pi 4's Cortex-A72 is now almost a decade old and not even fast enough to run more than a very basic lightweight desktop and completely out of the question for the market section.

Each Pi so far was about a 30% jump in power consumption, this time it's over 130%. They couldn't get the performance they needed, so they cranked the Pi 5 TDP beyond what was sensible to compensate. I mean 5A over 5V USB-C is borderline non-standard and basically maxing out the current port without needing a regulator. It's really funny seeing the N100, a CISC for fucks sake, get 2-3x the performance while pulling 2 watts less under load. This is their AMD Bulldozer moment.

Checked out RISC-V yet? That's becoming more interesting than ARM for me.

What's the "I have less than a hundred dollars and I want a reasonably performing Linux desktop" RISC-V SBC option?

I think this is a good question. I don't think you're going to find a RISC-V board with comparable performance to an rPI 4 or 5 in that price range currently.

Interesting. Using the RPi 5 as a benchmark, what if I was willing to spend $200? I guess what I'm wondering is how much you have to spend to get to that point.

I’m in a similar boat with the Pi 5 being the first I haven’t bought. I do have one of the VisionFive 2 boards, but I’m more interested in the Milk-V Oasis board that’s supposedly coming near the end of the year.

Software support for RISC-V isn’t as good yet either. I don’t know of any hardware that supports the hypervisor extension, there is no IOMMU spec today, many distributions don’t give it the same support as ARM64, etc. It is definitely improving rapidly, but I don’t think there have been any really compelling RISC-V SoCs just yet.

> I do have one of the VisionFive 2 boards, but I’m more interested in the Milk-V Oasis board that’s supposedly coming near the end of the year.

The Milk-V Oasis is out, but are you saying there's going to be another revision of that board?

I'm torn between the Lichee (7-node, 28 cores), the Milk (1 node, 64 cores), or the VisionFive 2.

If I was going to build out a lab for shared use across a number of engineers building packages and ci/cd for Linux, what would be the best option now, while we all wait for the hardware to improve in H2/2024?

64 cores sounds like the Pioneer [0].

Their Oasis [1] board is going to use SiFive's IP, the main cluster is 12 P P670 cores, and 4 E cores. There are also 8 X280 cores as an "NPU", also RISC-V but with a slightly different ISA.

[0] - https://milkv.io/pioneer

[1] - https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-wi...

Been following the progress. Exciting to see it catch up on the software side!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1apoFXZ9ad8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhPKZ5JpbHw

I feel like these boards now have only one way to improve, and that is by adding AI capabilities. Like being able to load Whisper onto a board and use it for transcribing mic input.

Because the bigger-faster-hungrier race is putting them in direct competition with x64 boards, where you then ask yourself that for a couple of watts more you'll be able to get a real PCI slot or two to plug in whatever you want, and use the RAM you want.

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