As for actual use the potential lies in the modularity. You could work primarily from an x86 laptop but swap the RISK-V board in for testing. And whichever board isn't currently in the laptop can be even be loaded into the small desktop shell Framework makes. If the price is right an existing Framework user could possibly get a RISC-V machine for less money than one of the dedicated laptops from DeepCompute without needing to buy another screen, keyboard, battery, etc and end up with a better build quality to boot.
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).
https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards
https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/
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.
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.
I thought I saw someone else publish specmarks to corroborate this assertion, but i can't find it right now.
*: https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks
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.
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'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 :)
Nevermind them not being startups, neither SiFive nor ARM make chips.
As you do not actually make chips, you are also not their client.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It would make far more sense to go the traditional Raspberry Pi cluster way, either as discrete nodes[1], daughterboards[2], or as blades[3].
[0]: https://deepcomputing.io/a-risc-v-world-first-independently-...
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/tutorials/cluster-raspberry-pi-t...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecdm3oA-QdQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6zt8KeXFdA
[0] https://deskpi.com/products/deskpi-super6c-raspberry-pi-cm4-...
Or was, apparently? Seems to be out of stock and there's no restock or backorder date shown.
OT, but does something like that exist for the Pi 5? I actually loved the Pi 400 Desktop Kit (I hope they make one for the Pi 5!), and I saw quite a few laptop shells for the Pi 4, but I've not seen anything announced for the Pi 5 except for various ridiculous "desktop" cases (like the Pironman 5 that I've actually ordered).
Can you please elaborate? I'm a programmer with a linux framework laptop (NixOS specifically).
Benchmarks of the CPU in question: https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks...
Comparing an 8 GB JH7110 board to a 1 GB Pi 3 is beyond ridiculous. The Pi might win a few micro-benchmarks that use NEON, but not general purpose C code, and in real use 1 GB is incredibly limiting.
All Arm SBCs at present as far as I know -- certainly including the Pi 5 and RK3588 boards (Rock 5 etc) -- are far behind the current Arm ISA, as they implement ARMv8.2-A from 2016. And none of them even have the optional SVE vector ISA that was defined as part of ARMv8.2-A.
In contrast, the JH7110 implements mid 2019 RISC-V specs, plus some things from late 2021 (e.g. Zba and Zbb).
The SpaceMIT 8 core SoC in the BPI-F3, Muse Book and others being released now implements RVA22+Vector ratified in March 2023. The Canaan K230 (on e.g. the CanMV-K230 board) also implements the same RVA22+Vector spec.
Late this year the 16 core ~2.5 GHz P670 (A78-class) SoC will leapfrog anything available on currently known Arm SBCs. Milk-V say the base model of their Oasis SBC will be $119. Sipeed says a fully-kitted board will be $300.
The chip there (spacemiT K1) is available in Banana Pi BPi-F3, which is already shipping. It is RVA22 with the ratified V extension.
A laptop with JH7110 makes little sense today.
0. https://linuxgizmos.com/musebook-riscv-v-laptop-with-spacemi...
Yeah. spacemiT K1 is a new chip, 8core, RVA22 with Vector extension.
JH7110 is old in contrast. Was first seen in VisionFive 2 in January 2023. Only 4 cores, slower, and RVA20 without Vector.
The idea of a RISC-V laptop sounds cool, but this feels like just grabbing a raspberry pi and sticking it in a laptop chasis. It doesn't seem like this is going to really offer anything new in this space other than maybe some increased visibility for RISC-V (esp. if Linus Tech Tips covers it), and a neat project/option for people with existing Framework parts.
As far as development purposes, I don't see what this offers over an existing SBC or even just a VM. From what I've seen of people running Linux on these things, it is definitely not something you'd want to develop on... plus, it seems like DeepCompute sells their own RISC-V laptops which are (probably) more powerful than this thing: https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-riscv-laptop...