[HN Gopher] RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
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RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
Author : mikece
Score : 71 points
Date : 2023-03-03 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| whitehexagon wrote:
| I purchased a DE10-nano last year with the plan to try some FPGA
| RISC-V based development... but got lost in the number of
| extensions and versions of RISC-V kicking around. Has anyone
| tried this? I'd also be interested how it compares performance
| wise to the above, and Pi4, see if it worth the effort. Anyway at
| least it got some good use with MiSTer :) I kinda hope Raspberry
| adopts RISC-V on their next SBC, but hopefully with more open
| hardware.
| jburgess777 wrote:
| The repo below has support for building a 32bit RISC-V CPU for
| de10nano. It also includes information about booting Linux.
|
| https://github.com/litex-hub/linux-on-litex-vexriscv
|
| The CPU will likely have a clock speed around 100Mhz, far
| slower than the 1.5Ghz 64bit cores on the VisionFive 2 or Pi4.
| The FPGA might still be useful if you want to customize the CPU
| or integrate other custom hardware.
| snvzz wrote:
| This is a decent review of VisionFive 2 as it is right now (early
| days).
|
| 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.
| jareds wrote:
| 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.
| snvzz wrote:
| >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?
|
| What's most likely is he managed to overlook this SoC has
| this hardware.
|
| >I want to buy a board for what it can do now
|
| This board clearly isn't for you.
|
| >kernel updates that are not guaranteed.
|
| Having kernel patches already sent upstream for review[0] is
| a much better situation than potentially having nothing.
|
| 0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan
| sylware wrote:
| RISC-V has to start somewhere, I would say, and since the
| "markets" are already busy, I don't expect them to improve as
| fast as the others.
|
| But no toxic IP on the ISA is the way to go (and it seems the ISA
| has CPU internal design simplicity in mind, of course there will
| be trade off).
|
| Hope RISC-V is a success.
| snvzz wrote:
| >(and it seems the ISA has CPU internal design simplicity in
| mind, of course there will be trade off)
|
| There's no such trade-off. The ISA is designed to scale from
| the smallest embedded microcontrollers to the top
| supercomputers.
|
| It has the advantage of being designed from a clean slate,
| decades after the incumbent ISAs, with careful consideration
| put into every decision made and the hindsight of every other
| ISA to draw from.
|
| The (relatively cheap) book "RISC-V Reader" presents a good
| introduction to the ISA and its design, with chapters covering
| each extension and comparing with incumbent ISAs.
|
| The incumbent ISAs end up looking very bad. Note that the book
| is written by the main architects of the ISA, so it is of
| course very biased. They do however manage to keep it
| reasonably objective and to make really good points.
| bigape911 wrote:
| This is not the first riscv board and they have had plenty of
| time to learn from all the sbcs out there. This experience sounds
| horrible.
| snvzz wrote:
| >This is not the first riscv board
|
| It isn't, but it is the first one that's made at scale.
|
| >This experience sounds horrible.
|
| Barely launched, it's a much better experience than the average
| ARM SBC, and the review makes a point to stress this fact.
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| I really wish someone would make a framework-laptop compatible
| board layout for a RISC-V chip. Even if it's not high performance
| it'd let us treat it like a daily-driver and really contribute to
| getting the desktop linux experience in better shape for RISC-V
| mikece wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that Amazon hasn't made (or commissioned)
| a small SBC computer to compete directly with the Raspberry Pi
| but one that is certified for and pre-loaded with software for
| AWS IoT applications (including Greengrass) and selling for about
| $99. At that price point you could sell both to AWS customers
| looking for inexpensive IoT systems for experimentation (or
| deployment!) as well as the general enthusiast market who could
| replace the AWS IoT bits (probably based on Fedora?) and put
| whatever distro they want on it. This would be a win-win for
| Amazon since the general enthusiast market could enable volume
| sales to keep the price of entry for AWS IoT experimenters low
| enough to try out (creating yet another sales funnel for AWS
| services).
|
| I wonder if Amazon would consider using a RISC-V CPU for such a
| device?
| tracker1 wrote:
| For that matter a scaled down version of the chipsets their arm
| cloud servers use. Where you can build/test in-house and deploy
| to AWS. I know there's the "why not just build/test in AWS?" as
| a question, and the answer is sometimes you want to self-host
| or at least start that way. Or you want to do more than just
| the web side, but still want to be compatible.
| packetlost wrote:
| They sorta already do, it's called Echo. I'm not convinced
| there's a market for what you're describing, or at least not
| one that's necessarily worth the cost. A lot of the cheap
| Chinese IoT devices generally available already go through AWS.
| People with the skills and desire to do that type of thing
| themselves are both a small market, and less likely to use AWS
| for the types of projects they'd be building with said device.
| jburgess777 wrote:
| They do have something like this, an ESP32 based system for IoT
| using FreeRTOS.
|
| https://devices.amazonaws.com/detail/a3G0h000007djMLEAY/M5St...
|
| I am not sure of the exact relationship AWS has with FeeRTOS,
| but the FAQ says they have 'taken stewardship' of the open
| source project.
|
| https://www.freertos.org/FAQ_Amazon.html
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| The maintainer works for Amazon, I think
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