For normal program code it is closer to a Pi 4 than to a Pi 3, similar to the all the very popular A55s board that have come out more recently than the Pi 4.
The only way it is slower than a Pi 3 is if the Pi 3 program is using SIMD (Neon), which the VisionFive 2 lacks.
The worst part of this Pi 3 comparison is that the Pi 3 has only 512MB or 1GB of RAM, which is extremely limiting in the modern world. This RISC-V board comes with a *minimum* of 2GB and is available with 8GB for $37.
The RAM difference alone makes many things possible that are impossible on a Pi 3, and many other things much faster, regardless of the raw CPU speed.
And then you have the M.2 NVMe SSD, something that neither the Pi 3 nor Pi 4 support, which again makes a whole raft of things much faster, even if the single lane means it can "only" do something near 400 MB/s (vs SD cards at 40 or 80 MB/s)
Maybe the memory of my Pi2 is better than reality.
I have a VisionFive2 as part of my lab (next to some arm and x86 sbc), with an nvme disk, and it's unbearably slow. It's still useful for testing platform compatibility, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
The VF2 (original) is a stolid workhorse, as long as you only use it for simple CLI-based stuff. The hardware is very well supported by Linux. The performance isn't great, but I used it to fix hundreds of Fedora packages to add RISC-V support, so you can't really beat its effectiveness. You do want to get the version with the max amount of RAM, and you'll also need to add an M.2 for storage (one PCIe lane!)
For CLI-based programming work an SSD is unnecessary, an SD card is perfectly fine as long as it's large enough to hold all your stuff and you have enough RAM to cache the frequently-used bits. The difference will be measured in a couple of dozen seconds on an hour-long build.
SD cards have the very great advantage that you can have multiple ones with different OSes or versions and swap them in seconds.
I'm a happy owner of an original VF2. However, people buying this board should be aware that the StarFive JH7110 is not compatible with the RVA23 spec, which Ubuntu said it was the bare minimum for now on and might create some software incompatibilities in the future.
What's with that cookie dialog on some german sites? I thought I don't understand it because it's in german, but this one seems to be translated and I still can't figure it out.
Had to close the site without reading the article, anyone has alternate links?
Unrelated to the contents of the article itself, but this page is a great example of the UI ramifications of GDPR. On mobile, I get a full screen popup, and there appears to be an "accept all" button, but no "reject all" button. I'm grateful to have tools like uBlock Origin's element zapper for pages like this.
For those who don't, here's a version of the page with no full-screen banner: https://archive.is/bTEse
I wonder if the future positioning for RISC-V will be better support from manufacturers of SBCs than their ARM counterparts. Right now they are barely useable outside of Raspberry Pi, which unfortunately has had supply issues.
I know ARM chip makers can just rely on the smartphone, tablets and Roku market but since there is no such market for RISC-V they sort of have to be good as SBCs.
Isn’t it crazy that we already have riscv rpi like boards what a time to be alive :D
Now we only need a graphene phone with riscv. :)
No matter if low spec or something if it just works :D
Like the Nokia where sailfish was born or something :D
The very limited software support would probably stop me from buying one.
Even if there are builds or container images for riscv64, they are probably often not tested at all. Sometimes different architectures have weird quirks (unexpected performance issues for some code, unexpected crashes). I guess only very few maintainers will investigate and fix those.
It took quite some time until all software worked perfectly on arm/arm64. When the first Raspberry Pi was released, this was quite a different experience.
You probably want to consider the OrangePi RV2 board instead (I wrote about it here: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-revi...). I own the original VF2 as well, and the RV2 from OrangePi is much faster, and software support is miles better too.
Does it have any onboard flash? Embedded SBCs that have no wireless and no onboard state (like the RPi3 without wifi) are quite useful for security applications like offline cold signing/CAs.
The RPi4/5 have a flashable bootrom now so they don’t qualify any longer. The 1/2/3 load their second stage bootloader from the micro-SD, their first stage is burned at the factory and cannot be modified. If you remove the SD and physically destroy it, they can not persist state or exfiltrate data.
I agree with you in a temporal & non-proprietary sense.
Temporally, because (knock on wood) RISC-V is going to take over the RadHard space market between Microchip/NASA’s High Performance Space Computer [1] and the Gaisler chips [2]
In a non-proprietary sense because much NVDA is alleged to be RISC-V
Yes. Basic PCI requires at least 64 different data signals (plus Vcc and Gnd) across 124 connector pins. This is expensive in terms of board surface, routing placement and I/O pins.
PCI Express x1 requires only 11 data signals plus Vcc and Gnd across 18 pins, but even the v1 spec from 2003 requires a data rate of 2.5GT/s (as opposed to PCI's data rate of only 33 MT/s). This is a much higher rate than most other data signals usually found on these boards, and rates this high have their own challenges in terms of signal routing.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadFor normal program code it is closer to a Pi 4 than to a Pi 3, similar to the all the very popular A55s board that have come out more recently than the Pi 4.
The only way it is slower than a Pi 3 is if the Pi 3 program is using SIMD (Neon), which the VisionFive 2 lacks.
The worst part of this Pi 3 comparison is that the Pi 3 has only 512MB or 1GB of RAM, which is extremely limiting in the modern world. This RISC-V board comes with a *minimum* of 2GB and is available with 8GB for $37.
The RAM difference alone makes many things possible that are impossible on a Pi 3, and many other things much faster, regardless of the raw CPU speed.
And then you have the M.2 NVMe SSD, something that neither the Pi 3 nor Pi 4 support, which again makes a whole raft of things much faster, even if the single lane means it can "only" do something near 400 MB/s (vs SD cards at 40 or 80 MB/s)
I have a VisionFive2 as part of my lab (next to some arm and x86 sbc), with an nvme disk, and it's unbearably slow. It's still useful for testing platform compatibility, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
SD cards have the very great advantage that you can have multiple ones with different OSes or versions and swap them in seconds.
Had to close the site without reading the article, anyone has alternate links?
For those who don't, here's a version of the page with no full-screen banner: https://archive.is/bTEse
I know ARM chip makers can just rely on the smartphone, tablets and Roku market but since there is no such market for RISC-V they sort of have to be good as SBCs.
Even if there are builds or container images for riscv64, they are probably often not tested at all. Sometimes different architectures have weird quirks (unexpected performance issues for some code, unexpected crashes). I guess only very few maintainers will investigate and fix those.
It took quite some time until all software worked perfectly on arm/arm64. When the first Raspberry Pi was released, this was quite a different experience.
The RPi4/5 have a flashable bootrom now so they don’t qualify any longer. The 1/2/3 load their second stage bootloader from the micro-SD, their first stage is burned at the factory and cannot be modified. If you remove the SD and physically destroy it, they can not persist state or exfiltrate data.
Temporally, because (knock on wood) RISC-V is going to take over the RadHard space market between Microchip/NASA’s High Performance Space Computer [1] and the Gaisler chips [2]
In a non-proprietary sense because much NVDA is alleged to be RISC-V
[1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
[2] https://www.gaisler.com/secondary-product-category/rad-hard-... see GR765 & GR801
PCI Express x1 requires only 11 data signals plus Vcc and Gnd across 18 pins, but even the v1 spec from 2003 requires a data rate of 2.5GT/s (as opposed to PCI's data rate of only 33 MT/s). This is a much higher rate than most other data signals usually found on these boards, and rates this high have their own challenges in terms of signal routing.
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WTF.