Most people would be better off waiting for the multiple RVA23 boards that are supposed to come out this year, at least if they don't want to be stuck running custom vendor distros. "RVA23 except V" at this price point and at this point in time is a pretty bad value proposition.
It's honestly a bit hard to understand why they bothered with this one. No hate for the Milk-V folks; I have 4 Jupiters sitting next to me running in Zig's CI. But hopefully they'll have something RVA23-compliant out soon (SpacemiT K3?).
A TL;DR doesn't explain everything. The Milk-V Titan doesn't have Vector instructions or crypto, while the Pi 5 does. It's very clearly a broken benchmark.
This is why a bunch of RISC-V people won't buy boards without RV Vector instructions.
I've noticed that the sentence “Compliant with RVA23 excluding V extension” has apparently been a bit confusing to some reporters in the tech press lately.
It means that the UR-DP1000 chip would have been RVA23-compliant if only it had supported the V (Vector) extension. The Vector extension is mandatory in the RVA23 profile.
There are other chips out there even closer to being RVA23-compliant, that have V but not a couple of scalar extensions. The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty.
V is such a big extension, with many instructions and requiring more resources, that I don't think that it would be worth the effort.
I'm surprised we have not seen more investment into RISC-V from Chinese firms. I would think they want to decouple from ARM and the west in general as a dependency. Maybe they view the coup of ARM China as having secured ARM for the time being and not as much pressure?
Either way, it's currently hard to be excited about RISC-V ITX boards with performance below that of a RPi5. I can go on AliExpress right now and buy a mini itx board with a Ryzen 9 7845HX for the same price.
As a point of comparison, the Radxa Orion O6 shipped a year ago as a 12 core ARMv9 board on same form factor and TDP, for $100 less, with 5x the single core performance (and including a competent iGPU, NPU and VPU). These are very much developer/tinkerer only boards as is.
The good: eight cores. The bad: it’s slow and still no V extension. On the bright side, it uses DDR4, so you might be able to find RAM for it. “Titan” feels like some wishful over marketing.
These are still very early days for RISC-V, but I’m always happy to see things progress in this space. No, this isn’t a viable desktop for the average consumer, but if it makes the architecture more accessible for the types of weirdos who tend to pave the way for the rest of us, it’s good.
I just got a Milkv Mars and it is bit rough around the edges. Discord group helped me to get a Debian running on it but I would not say it was simple or easy to get it working.
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[ 8.5 ms ] story [ 54.6 ms ] threadIt's honestly a bit hard to understand why they bothered with this one. No hate for the Milk-V folks; I have 4 Jupiters sitting next to me running in Zig's CI. But hopefully they'll have something RVA23-compliant out soon (SpacemiT K3?).
tldr; 236 vs 666 single core score
This is why a bunch of RISC-V people won't buy boards without RV Vector instructions.
It means that the UR-DP1000 chip would have been RVA23-compliant if only it had supported the V (Vector) extension. The Vector extension is mandatory in the RVA23 profile.
There are other chips out there even closer to being RVA23-compliant, that have V but not a couple of scalar extensions. The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty. V is such a big extension, with many instructions and requiring more resources, that I don't think that it would be worth the effort.
Either way, it's currently hard to be excited about RISC-V ITX boards with performance below that of a RPi5. I can go on AliExpress right now and buy a mini itx board with a Ryzen 9 7845HX for the same price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
2.0ghz isn’t a whole lot of performance for RISC-V system.
What is the target audience for these development boards anyway?