High-performance RISC-V processors: UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, SpacemIT K3 | Hacker News Reader

High-performance RISC-V processors: UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, SpacemIT K3

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104 pointsfork-bomber35 comments

The performance here is less interesting than the apparently quasi imminent availability of real RVA23 devices. If/when that occurs it will set a baseline and things should not warrant from scratch rebuilds constantly for at least a while.

Anyone that believes semiconductor performance claims before device availability is in for a rough time.

You are right, but I think this is different than say performance claims for the next generation by mainstream GPU or CPU manufacturers.

This is a chicken and the egg problem. You need interest in the architecture and belief in performance for device availability to start to pop, after all who would invest a lot of money in something they don't think will have a market, but you also need device availability to support performance claims.

So I think for newer products, performance claims will have to do.

Manufacturers don't lie about how many clock cycles Dhrystone or Coremark or SPEC takes on their design.

The first two can be checked at the verilator (or commercial equivalent) stage, and SPEC in FPGA, both long before physical chips.

The only things in doubt are:

- whether they hit the hoped-for MHz

- whether the code you want to run has the same characteristics as their benchmark

For example SG2044 GeekBench results have been appearing on the site from time to time for more than half a year now. GB as a whole is pretty much worthless for what I care about, but the Clang test within it aligns closely with what I do, including the rqtio between multi-thread and single-thread.

High performance for RISC-V; still a ton of catchup especially in efficiency (perf/W) to Intel/AMD and Arm.

At least we're getting close to Raspberry Pi level performance now.

It has already caught up with regards to intellectual property openness. That is of course the great win here.

Tenstorrent won't be many months behind them, with true 2020s Apple / Intel / AMD performance levels.

An original November 2020 M1 Mini (4P+4E 3.4 GHz) is still my main computer to sit in front of, and I have zero plans to change that right now.

You'll be able to buy RISC-V at that level sometime next year.

M1-class performance/power efficiency/cost would be impressive. I guess we'll see when/if it actually happens.

> You'll be able to buy RISC-V at that level sometime next year.

Will you? What exactly are Tenstorrent's plans for Ascalon? They are chasing the AI market, and I haven't seen any clear indication that they intend to sell their RISC-V CPUs as unbundled SKUs, or on "main computer" PCBs (ATX/mATX/ITX/etc.) I'm not sure they even care about that market.

I hope they'll do this, but that's all I have right now. If you know something in particular, please share. If I could buy a M1 or better class Ascalon desktop system I'd be happy to pay an Apple-esq premium, and I believe many others would as well.

AIUI we know of one Ascalon licensee, LG.

The known intent of LG is as main processor on its smart TVs.

Tenstorrent have clearly said, I think in a presentation at a recent RISC-V Summit, that they want to see wide distribution of Ascalon to as many users and developers as possible, including laptops, to help kick-start the mainstream RISC-V ecosystem.

Not just expensive servers, unlike some of the other high performance CPUs coming soon.

This might be what you have in mind, or similar[1]: RISC-V Taipei Day May 21, 2025. There are some hard numbers on Ascalon performance in there, anyhow.

One figure from that: "36 SPECINT2K17 Rate" for the "8 core Athena Chiplet." That is on par[2] with a Intel Core i5-9600K (circa 2018 CPU.) That's enough for useful workloads. I'm actually still using one for Linux work on a daily basis.

That's about what I would expect: it's in the ballpark of plausibility, given the givens. It's not reasonable to expect parity with Zen 5 or whatever. They'll need some years yet to ramp up their designs.

I excited about Tenstorrent. Keller as the boss: one can hope for great things.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h61k4wOOzZU [2] https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2019q1/cpu2017-20190...

Milk brags about their "proprietary extension". I understand that the vendors can do whatever they want, but that turns me off.

Proving the point that RISC-V isn't necessarly as open as it gets advocated for, versus the competition.

Versus the competition? Modern x86 and ARM chipsets are not only proprietary from the ISA-up, they have the same proprietary extensions.

"RISC chipset adds in proprietary CISC features" has been in my headlines so often that I assumed nobody cared. Helluva time to go up-in-arms, in Q3 2025.

In the end a small distinction that hardly matters when buying OEM boards.

Obviously. But that has nothing to do with what your comment said.

Usually those boards come with RISC-V CPUs using proprietary extensions, for dismay of RISC-V FOSS advocates, it has everything to do with it.

Well then you probably should have said "RISC-V isn't entirely open" rather than "as open" because now your responses make nearly no sense.

Can't wait for a faster risc-v SBC, waiting for rust builds on my VisionFive 2 drives me crazy.

https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-revi...

no need to wait

Best to wait for the RVA23 chips.

Other than having RVV, that board is slower than a VisionFive 2, at least for what I primarily do (building software). Yes, even with 8 cores vs 4.

Also the K1 chip offers support for 16 GB RAM, but the RV2 only offers 8 GB. I have 16 GB on the same chip on my LicheePi 3A.

Are you sure about the "slower" part? Because I have both a VisionFive 2 and the OrangePi RV2, and the OrangePi RV2 is way faster in my different tests. Even in single core scenarios.

Yup. For example, Build Linux kernel commit 7503345ac5f5 with defconfig.

VisionFive 2

... with -j4, 3.37x faster than -j1

    real    67m35.189s
    user    249m55.469s
    sys     13m35.877s

... with -j1

    real    227m52.130s
    user    215m19.648s
    sys     12m7.831s

LicheePi 3A

... with -j8 5x faster than -j1

    real    70m57.001s
    user    514m33.367s
    sys     39m43.167s

... with -j4 3.28x faster than -j1

    real    108m0.979s
    user    399m0.734s
    sys     30m47.136s

... with -j1

    real    354m44.285s
    user    330m24.508s
    sys     24m12.196s

When using all the cores the SpacemiT is not much slower, but single core it takes over 1.5x longer.

On other tasks that don't stress the caches so much the SpacemiT can do well.

Reminder: Haswell and Zen1 were around 8.1 specint2006/GHz.

These CPUs are above that.

So is P550 ... 8.65 is the claim I think. It doesn't have the MHz though. My i7-4790K (which is still in the back room somewhere) had a base of 4.0 GHz and could turbo to 4.2 or 4.4. My Megrez is doing just 1.8 GHz.

Main issue with P550 is no V. Huge handicap, can't easily make up for that.

RVA23 requires V. These incoming CPUs are the real deal, a perfectly usable performance level in the present day.

(unless they cache-starve them or some other such fuck up)

My 4790k was still my main PC until I recently (weeks) built a new PC with 9800x3d, 96GB ECC, rx7900gre.

4790k had 4 cores. If these new chips clock reasonably, say, 3+ GHz, and have 8 or 16 cores, they'll easily generally outdo this old -but very usable still- Intel chip.

Everyone needs to be focusing on memory controllers. No one has enough main memory bandwidth.

I'm okay with ddr4 as long as you can still buy it.

Reminder: The Cortex-A76 cores in the Pi5 are 9.9 SPECint2006/GHz, only the UR-CP1000 is above that, but that doesn't support RVV.

The SpacemiT X100 is slightly below that, but has 256-bit RVV and RVA23 support.

No V instruction set is going to be a big handicap though, as that's pretty much RISC-V's equivalent of AVX and missing those instructions is going to suck big time.

RVA23 compliant implies V.

Two of the three processors seem to be RVA23.

Pretty much my issue is that the one that is the closest to shipping is also the one missing V instructions. I am far more skeptical over potential processors especially after Horse Creek just vanished into thin air.

Two just say RVA23, one is "Compliant with RVA23 excluding V extension".

It's a long way to say "Not complaint with RVA23."

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