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Comment by b9b10eb736 | Hacker News Reader

Still way better than a VisionFive 2, and more than enough to get your hands in the thing (especially with the hourly pricing). You have to acknowledge that the RISC-V ecosystem isn't as mature as that of ARM64 and AMD64. You don't get the best performance/price ratio with RISC-V (yet). Many extensions were ratified so recently that hardware doesn't even exist (yet).

As far as I'm concerned, the LicheePi 4A from Sipeed which is also equipped with a TH1520 offers a decent value for a RISC-V SBC. If you want more performance than that, it's going to cost you a lot more.

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Right now, you can't get more performance than the TH1520 (C910 cores) and JH7110 (U74 cores) at ANY price. The only thing you can do is get more of the same cores i.e. SG2042 with 64x C910 cores.

The same goes for emulation. QEMU on my i9-13900HX laptop is about the same speed on each core, but there I have 24 cores (32 threads).

I just compiled gcc 14 natively on both LicheePi 4A (the same as this hosting) and docker/QEMU:

i9-13900HX (8 P + 16 E cores) docker running riscv64/ubuntu image

    real    101m44.472s
    user    1695m26.395s
    sys     24m36.671s

LicheePi 4A (TH1520 SoC, 4x C910 cores)

    real    422m41.367s
    user    1430m56.638s
    sys     70m17.994s

The LicheePi actually used less CPU time, but the i9 won with more cores.

Thanks for the clarification, you're completely right. I didn't realize the SG2042 used the same core. So, Scaleway's offer really does seem to make sense!

Thank you all, yes it makes sense to use this as the cost is great for say 3 months worth of tinkering.

Arguably OpenXiangShan should be more powerful, but verilog simulation isn't really that usable in practice, and it has no working vector support yet. (the dev branch currently hangs after a few minutes of simulating)

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