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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> it's basically just a RISC-V SBC but in a Framework mainboard form-factor.

As someone who's been looking for an excuse to get a Framework, I'm thrilled at the idea that if this doesn't pan out, I can just swap in a different mainboard and convert it to a full-featured x86 laptop, and then donate the RISC-V mainboard to the tinkerers at my local hackerspace (who are more than capable of 3D-printing a nice enclosure for it).

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You don't even need to 3D print anything, just get the official mainboard enclosure https://frame.work/ca/en/products/cooler-master-mainboard-ca...

Going from a regular Framework mainboard with x86 to this RISC-V will be quite the drop in performance. It's really huge. You don't need to guess.

They didn't say anything about performance though?

It's a chip that you could buy over 2 years ago. It's a JH7110 SoC which you can buy for like $40 in one of several SBC:

https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards

https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/

https://milkv.io/mars

I happen to have 2 of them and they're dog slow, pre-vector extension RISC-V. You cannot do much useful with them, they're slower than a Raspberry Pi 3.

I meant kibwen, not the OP.

No, the first JH7110 boards (VisionFive 2) started arriving in pre-order customer hands in early February 2023, 16 months ago.

In general use they are much faster than a Pi 3, especially given the 8 GB RAM vs 1 GB which is often far more important than the CPU speed. The GPU is also much better. And the M.2 SSD.

Better to compare to the Pi 4. Like all the Arm A55 boards, it's a little slower than Pi 4's A72s, but also uses less power.

Which says everything that needs to be said

I meant kibwen didn't say anything about performance, not the OP.

They also didn't say anything about the mainboard having RGB LEDs or a quantum computing chip, but I'm assuming someone swapping a x86 mainboard for a RISC-V one on a personal laptop will want some kind of performance for daily tasks, which that chip won't provide even barely.

Why not assume that someone interested in a RISC-V laptop understands the limitations associated with RISC-V? Just seems like hating for no reason :\

And also understands JH7110 was already available in VisionFive 2 in early 2022, and is neither new nor representative of current RISC-V compliant microarchitectures.

Who's hating? Please stop projecting your own insecurities.

Or... Maybe people who buy these things know why they're buying them and raw horsepower isn't their primary concern.

My testing put the performance a bit shy of an A72 @ 2.4GHz. The U54 was on par with an A53.

I thought I saw someone else publish specmarks to corroborate this assertion, but i can't find it right now.

Modern Arm chips will maintain a wide gap in performance for quite awhile.* Arm has poured a lot of money into optimizing their chip IP and it speaks for itself in the benchmarks. Excluding if performance wasn't a concern to begin with - I don't see the argument why an open ISA is really worth the performance / heat / power cost.

*: https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks

I hope you realize that you're talking about a cheap SoC that was released in late 2022, and does not reflect currently announced RISC-V microarchitectures.

e.g. SiFive P870 is competitive with ARM's best, whereas Ventana Veyron V2 and Tenstorrent Ascalon/Alastor compete with the state of the art from AMD/Intel/Apple/Qualcomm.

RISC-V enables the best processors.

I must have missed the real world performance benchmarks that demonstrate the claims of a marketing department.

That requires actual hardware, which naturally tends to be in mass production (i.e. cheap) SBCs around four years after the announcement of the core. That's a constant over Arm and RISC-V e.g. we've just in the last two years seen Rock 5, Pi 5 (nine months ago), Orange Pi 5 with Arm A76 cores announced in 2018.

P870 was announced in October. It'll be a while!

P670 was announced November 2022, and will be in e.g. the SG2380 around the end of this year -- actually remarkably fast. It should leapfrog those A76 boards in performance.

> That requires actual hardware . . .

That's the point I was making.

If you don't have the actual hardware, discussion about performance is a waste of time. If you disagree, I urge you to invest in my chip startup. Our chips get 10000x better performance than the any other RISC-V chip on the market. The hardware itself won't be out for 100 years, but that doesn't matter to you :)

>chip startup

Nevermind them not being startups, neither SiFive nor ARM make chips.

As you do not actually make chips, you are also not their client.

According to SiFive, the P870 is roughly equivalent to an ARM X2 or AMD Xen 4, so it's about two or three generations back from the Cortex X925.

I've yet to see a catalog part w/ that core, but the guys I know at SiFive say they're pretty sure it should hit 3GHz, which is cortex X2 territory. Not exactly ARM's current best, but they're definitely closing the gap.

One difficulty in evaluating SiFive's cores is their business model is to license their designs to companies who are fabbing their own custom or semi-custom SoCs, so they don't appear in generally available parts until much later.

Where can you find an Arm SBC with a Cortex X925?

Or even anything better than an A76, announced May 2018? (Pi 5, Rock 5, etc) Which implements ARMv8.2-A from 2016.

Yes, I know ARMv9 cores are available in high end phones running Android. But not, that I know of, in SBCs or laptops running Linux.

We've got several different RVA22+Vector (latest spec, ratified March 2023) RISC-V cores, SoCs, SBCs and laptops on sale right now, with much faster ones (P670, A78-class) coming around the end of the year.

It's intended for hobbyists and tinkerers. If you want a computer that screams, you get a desktop. Nobody's trying to play the newest GTA on this chip.

StarFive catalog parts use slightly tweaked SiFive cores. So if you were going to license a SiFive core for an embedded design, you may want to have something that uses the catalog part to verify your code will work.

I mean, emulating your core for development is a good approach in general, but at some point you may want to run your code on actual silicon.

So sure, an Intel i9 or ARM Mac is probably going to be faster than a 4 core U74 SoC, but if you're using a RISC-V core for some embedded application, having a RISC-V system to test with is probably a good idea.

And it's cool you can get a RISC-V SBC for a couple hundred bux. It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals. And if you can stuff it in a laptop form factor, it's portable.

You can get a quad core U74 1.5 GHz RISC-V SBC for $40 -- the Milk-V Mars. Or $34 for the Compute Module version. Or $5 for the Milk-V Duo with 1.0 GHz single core and 64 MB RAM, which is more appropriate for many embedded uses and still runs Linux (with a 2nd 700 MHz 64 bit RISC-V microcontroller core for real-time tasks)

> It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals

The HiFive Unleashed was never $2k. The standard price was $999, and the first batch of preorders (which I got one of) was $1199.

It indeed was lacking in peripherals, with only 8 GB RAM, an SD card, and gigE interfaces natively, but an FPGA Mezzanine connector that allowed turning it into a full PC using a standard Xilinx FPGA dev board, or the much cheaper custom MicroSemi expansion board.

But if you didn't mind booting from SD, SSHing/X in, and mounting storage from your PC using NFS (etc) then you could do a lot of software development with the bare $999 board.

They are planning to do it the other way round so no worries, I guess.

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