Re:RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
by jareds on Friday March 03, 2023 @04:27PM
(#35015255)
I wouldn't consider these mistakes or omissions. He's reviewing the board as is and not assuming future progress that may or may not take place in some undetermined time. If I'm looking for a relatively cheep single board computer to play with and am not focused on specific RISC-V development I want to buy a board for what it can do now not what it will be able to do with kernel updates that are not guaranteed.
Re:RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
by snvzz on Friday March 03, 2023 @04:41PM
(#35015423)
>He's reviewing the board as is and not assuming future progress that may or may not take place in some undetermined time.
Absolutely, but he does (for the cryptography example) mention that future chips will do better in this regard. Why would he do this, and not mention the cryptography engine present in this very SoC?
Re:RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
by brucehoult on Sunday March 05, 2023 @09:58PM
(#35037032)
> I want to buy a board for what it can do now not what it will be able to do
Then buy something else.
My VF2 boards (one 8 GB and one 4 GB) were very clearly sold as "Early Bird" and "Super Early Bird", respectively, and Jeff's will have been too.
They are for early adopters and for developers to use to fill in the missing software support. It is not practically possible to do this without a board in your hands.
It is NOT for the average user right now. In 3 or 6 months it will be.
I noticed a few mistakes/omissions. From the top of my mind:
- There's mention of bad cryptography performance. But there is a cryptography acceleration engine. This is not enabled in the current test kernels, but yet patch is being reviewed by Linux upstream. In contrast, the Broadcom SoCs in the other boards VF2 was compared against have no such hardware.
- There's mention of unusably slow youtube, but again, there's a hardware video decode block that's still not usable, yet it is considerably more capable than the one in the Broadcom SoCs.
- Related, Firefox is very slow because JS is interpreted. A RISC-V JIT implementation landed recently and will be present in the 111 release due in a few weeks.
- The SoC GPU is glossed over, but it did deserve more attention. Claimed to be 4x the performance of RPi4's SoC, Imagination Technologies is working on an open driver. This is a public effort as of early 2022, with some code already in Mesa3d upstream.
I am happy that the author did stress that this is early days, and that if the review/benchmarks were to be repeated in the future, the results would be very different.
Get this board (I love mine) if you're curious about and want to play with RISC-V. There's currently nothing faster than the VF2 available at any price, and yet VF2 is available at ~$100.