I keep checking in on Tenstorrent every few months thinking Keller is going to rock our world... losing hope.

At this point the most likely place for truly competitive RISC-V to appear is China.

Tenstorrent is supposedly taping out 8-wide Ascalon processors as we speak, with devboards projected to be available in Q2/Q3 this year.

BTW. Keller is also on the board for AheadComputing — founded by former Intel engineers that had been behind the fabled "Royal Core".

>Ascalon tape out

Supposedly happened earlier this year. Tenstorrent says devboards in Q3.

Now we just wait.

I can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K.

That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.

I don't know what bubble you are living in, but the i5-9600K is many steps up beyond "SBC class".

The Raspberry Pi 5 results on Geekbench 6 are all over the place. A score between 500 to 900 in single core and a 2000 multi core score.

Radxa 4 is an SBC based around the N100 and it basically gets the same or slightly higher performance as the Raspberry Pi 5.

Meanwhile the i5-9600K gets a score of 1677 in single core, which is 83% of the performance of the entire Raspberry Pi 5 and gets a score of 6199 when using multiple cores, that's 3x the performance.

I'd call this at least "Laptop class" and you even admitted yourself back in 2025 that you're using a processor on that level.

"I don't know what bubble you are living in"

My bubble includes a number of SBCs and embedded boards from Advantech, most with Ryzen embedded (V1000 class) CPUs.

SBC is too vague I suppose. Past the hobbyist level of SBC, there are many* vendors with Core i5-1340P and similar CPUs today. These are superior to a 2018 i5-9600k. That's a 2023 device, which aligns with what I concluded at the time.

In 2025+, such a CPU is not a desktop class device, and is sufficient in a modest laptop in lower power form. I use one for light Linux development work.

* LattePanda Sigma, ASROCK NUC, DFROBOT, Premio and many NAS and industrial devices.

> At this point the most likely place for fast RISC-V to appear is China.

Or we just adopt Loongson.

TBH I still don't really get how it's different from MIPS. As far as I can tell... Loongson seems to be really just MIPS, while LoongArch is MIPS with some extra instructions.

LoongArch is, on a first approximation, an almost RISC-V user space instruction set together with MIPS-like privileged instructions and registers.

Wait, this is a modern-ish ISA with a software-managed TLB, I didn’t realize that! The manual seems a bit unhappy about that part though:

> In the current version of this architecture specification, TLB refill and consistent maintenance between TLB and page tables are still [sic] all led by software.

https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...

I think they have already added hardware page table walks.

https://lwn.net/Articles/932048/

They did get rid of the delay slots and some other MIPS oddities

But legally distinct! I guess calling it Ｍ○ＰＳ was not enough for plausible deniability.

ISAs shouldn't be patentable in the first place.

(purely on vibes) loongson feels to me like an intermediate step/backup strategy rather than a longterm target (though they'll probably power govt equipment for decades of legacy either way :p)

I did read it. A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform. The title is misleading.

BTW, it's quite impressive how the s390x is so fast per core compared to the others. I mean, of course it's fast - we all knew that.

And don't let IBM legal see this can be considered a published benchmark, because they are very shy about s390x performance numbers.

> A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform.

What is the current fastest platform that isn’t exorbitantly expensive? Not upcoming releases, but something I can actually buy.

I check in every 3-6 months but the situation hasn’t changed significantly yet.

A P550 based board is the best you can get for now (~2-3x faster than the Banana Pi). In 2-3 months there should be a number of SpaceMIT k3 chips that are ~4-6x faster than the banana pi and somewhat reasonably priced (~200-300). By the end of the year, however, you should be able to get an ascalon chip which should be way way faster than that (roughly apple m1/zen3 speed)

What is the current fastest ppc64le implementation that isn’t exorbitantly expensive? How about the s390x?

I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.

What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.

The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.

I thought I read somewhere that Z CPUs run at 5GHz ??

Probably because that's just the infrastructure they have.

i686 builds even faster

Which risc-v implementation is considered fast?

Nothing shipping today is really competitive with modern ARM or x86. The SiFive P870 and Tenstorrent Ascalon (Jim Keller's team) are the most anticipated high-performance designs, but neither is widely available. What you can actually buy today tops out around Cortex-A76 class single-thread performance at best, which is roughly where ARM was five or six years ago.

I remember taking down some notes wrt SiFive P870 specs, comparing them to x86_64, and reaching the same conclusion. Narrower core width (4-wide vs 8-wide), lower clock frequency (peaks at 3GHz) and no turbo (?), limited support for vector execution (128-bit vs 512-bit), limited L1 bandwidth (1x 128-bit load/cycle?), limited FP compute (2x 128-bit vs 2x 512-bit), load queue is also inconveniently small with 48 entries (affecting already limited load bandwidth), unclear system memory bandwidth and how it scales wrt the number of cores (L3 contention) although for the latter they seem to use what AMD is doing (exclusive L3 cache per chiplet).

SpacemiT K3 is about the same performance as a Rockchip RK3588. So, 4 years ago?

Except the K3 kills it on AI (60 TOPS).

> Which risc-v implementation is considered fast?

SpacemiT K3 is 2010 Macbook performance single-core, 2019 Macbook Air multi-core, and better than M4 Apple Silicon for AI.

So I guess it depends on what you are going to do with it.

M4 is 38 TOPS at INT8 precision whereas SpacemiT K3 is 60 TOPS at INT4 precision so at best they would be equal in "AI" performance but they are not because the rest of the K3 chip is much less capable than M4 (as I would expect).

E.g. M4 total system memory bandwidth is 120GB/s whereas K4 is 51GB/s, single core memory bandwidth is 100-120GB/s vs ~30GB/s. M4 has 10 CPU cores and neural engine with 16 cores whereas K3 has 8 CPU cores and 8 "AI" cores, K3 clock frequency is almost half the clock frequency in M4 etc. etc.

But anyway thanks for sharing, always good to learn about new hardware.

DC-ROMA 2 is on the Rasperry 4 level of performance last I heard

>I did read it. A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform. The title is misleading.

Ironically, its SoC (spacemiT K1) is slower than the JH7110 used in the first mass-produced RISC-V SBC, VisionFive 2.

But unlike JH7110, it has vector 1.0, making it a very popular target.

Of course, none of these pre-RVA23 boards will be relevant anymore, once the first development boards with RVA23-compatible K3 ship next month.

These are also much faster than anything RISC-V currently purchasable. Developers have been playing with them for months through ssh access.

But they didn't reflect that in a title like "current RISC-V silicon Is Sloooow" ...

Then how do you justify the title?