Thanks for this, I was looking to upgrade my VF2 but I'm not sure it's worth it at this stage, the VF2 is painfully slow, and this board doesn't reach 2x perf
I get similar results here. The Banana Pi BPI-F3 was a big disappointment. I was expecting some improvement over the VisionFive 2, but no dice. A big Linux build at -j8 on the BPI-F3 takes essentially the same time as a -j4 build on the VF2.
Apparently the small level 2 caches on the X60 are crippling.
I'm surprised how much faster the Jupiter is than the BPI-F3: 28%.
That's a lot for the same SoC.
And, yes, ridiculously small caches on the BPI-F3 at 0.5 MB for each 4 core cluster, vs 2 MB on the VisionFive 2 and 4 MB on the P550.
The Pioneer still wins for cache and I think real-world speed though, with 4 MB L3 cache per 4 core cluster, but also access to the other 60 MB of L3 cache from the other clusters on the (near) single-threaded parts of your builds (autoconf, linking, that last stubborn .cpp, ...)
The goal is to actually run RISC-V binaries on RISC-V hardware, to see what works and what doesn't. You wouldn't spot code generations bugs like this one if you merely cross-compile and never run the binaries: https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=c65046ff2e...
For quite some time to come, the main user of the Fedora riscv64 port will be the Fedora riscv64 builders. With cross-compilation, we wouldn't even have that limited use of the binaries produced.
There's a lot of cases where you want to build something and run it afterwards, such as tests or intermediate tooling used in later steps in the build.
In any case, I actually want to use RISC-V machines for my development environment.
$400 (16GB DDR5) and $500 (32GB DDR5) because that's not in the blog post.
But I have some questions:
Why the weird form factor? Mini-DTX is supported by a lot of cases but as a motherboard form factor it's incredibly niche compared to Mini-ITX and especially Micro-ATX.
Unless something is particularly unique with this HiFive revision you can use PCIe SSDs it just looks like this one is relatively lane starved and you'll need to eat the PCIe slot to do so (it's a x16 slot physically but only x4 in terms of actual wired lanes). The E-keyed slot is listed as SDIO, but even if it had PCIe wired up it'd be a max of x2 lanes.
Just checked: looks like it does provide a full size pcie slot. My guess is that the intended use case is for developers testing compatibility. You could almost certainly plug in an nvme drive through an adapter to that full size slot (although booting from it would likely require a custom uboot build) but if you use up the one slot for storage, you can’t plug in any other peripherals to test.
You can connect M.2 NVMe, it just doesn't have a dedicated slot. If you're looking for a cheap device to plug a bunch of different PCIe devices into a RISC-V development board is probably not your ideal pick, look at a normal computer.
Honestly, this type of board is something that you aren't really going to just install in a case and forget about it. You are most likely going to have this on a test bench so you can swap out all kinds of different hardware for validation.
Buttons on the bottom for power/reset, 2 different JTAG ports, DIP switches for settings, and remote board management aren't things that are normally found on consumer boards. Mini DTX probably allows them to have a marginally smaller width compared to Micro-ATX while still allowing space for all of that debug functionality with a 2 slot graphics card installed. eMMC is also kind of important for a SOM as well.
mini-dtx is mini-itx with space for an extra slot - in practice a lot of cases support that as a mini-itx board plus dual slot gpu has the same footprint.
> "As a result of increased production and economies of scale, we’re excited to announce we are able to lower the price to just $399 for the 16GB version and $499 for the 32GB version"
SiFive's boards are always more expensive than 3rd party boards using the same CPU cores. They are aimed primarily at SiFive IP customers who are designing their own chips, to develop software on before their chips are ready.
> Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel processors at the same price level?
rwjm's package build benchmark shows it as 25% faster than a comparable µarch Raspberry Pi 4.
It's been some time since Intel or AMD had similar products: I guess something around Pentium III, Pentium M, or early Core 2.
Prices are a function of production volume (and features / quality, but mostly volume).
The Pi 4 is if course a mass-market product and is cheaper. Arm's own "Juno" A72 dev board is $10,000, which is 20x more than this SiFive board.
It can't run an upstream kernel yet, although it's very likely that we'll get there. SiFive have in the past been very good about getting changes upstream.
You can get vectorized instructions from Microchip at a much higher price point in a few months on RISCV with the forthcoming $1500ish Devboard - it has some nice specs, 10GigE
This is similar to the High Performance Space Computer which will be coming out in Rad Hardened & Rad Tolerant versions, I think these devboards will be 40k-60k
That's an insane price for something which will perform similarly to the BPI-F3.
It has double the DLEN, but it also only runs at 1GHz, while the BPI-F3 is available at 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz for way cheaper.
> There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for the devkit is $150, currently shipping.
This is an entirely different processor, the now very old SiFive U54 at 0.6GHz.
Firefox has been able to run on RISC-V for as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure I remember SiFive doing a demo back in 2018 at FOSDEM which included the browser. However generally GUI environments are still quite slow, so it won't be very usable.
1. Ubuntu invested very heavily into making Linux friendly to a whole generation of makers when nobody else was. Ubuntu is most familiar to them. Canonical will benefit from that investment for the foreseeable future.
2. Ubuntu benefits from Debian's debootstrap which makes porting to a new architecture substantially easier.
Can someone who is more familiar with this SoC confirm for me that this P550 doesn't have the RISC-V "V" vector extensions? I'm seeing a GBC suffix which I guess means bit manipulation, compressed instructions, and whatever the G extension is which I don't fully understand (IMAFD plz explain?)
P550 cores don't have vector extensions. It's actually quite an old design, from 2021. What you'd want is SiFive P670 cores, which are RVA22 compliant with the vector 1.0 spec.
Three years from announcement of a core to SoCs on boards being available is actually on the quick side.
Arm A53 (Pi 3, October 2012 - February 2016), A72 (Pi 4, Feb 2015 - June 2019), and A76 (Pi 5, May 2018 - September 2023, or January 2022 for Radxa Rock 5B) all took longer.
P670 was only announced in November 2022. If a board ships by the end of 2025 it will be doing very well.
Note that it's only on one 1.6GHz core, and still pretty anemic otherwise (pi form factor, it's to be expected.) So something "deskop grade" with all the nice extensions and other goodies is probably still a ways off. Maybe next year; we'll have to see -- but lots of useful extensions continue to be ratified today, so it may still be a while before things "cool off."
G includes MAFD extensions for non-embedded (I) applications. That's multiplication and division, atomics, single and double-precision floating point. It also includes the control/status register and a instruction-fence instruction. I think it's there to mean "the base plus the standard bits that people generally want in a processor if they're writing C for it".
it takes time (~2 years) for silicon designers to go from idea to taping out silicon. The P550's cores are advertised as having good area efficiency, so it could be both getting rid of the vector extensions to optimize area and they just couldn't incorporate them into the design.
I is the base integer instructions
M is integer multiplication
A is atomic
F is single precision float
D is double precision
G is shorthand for all of the above + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
> + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
The original RV32I and RV64I required some control registers for high frequency counters and instruction counters. You also needed the instructions to access these registers. This proved to be too complex for the simplest implementations, so recently (five years ago?) this functionality has been moved to their own extensions.
Including these extensions in G makes the current G have the same functionality as the original G.
> 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
CSR (i.e. status) register and instruction fence extensions. Instruction fences are most useful in cases where you modify text section during runtime (e.g. JIT or code hot reload) such that you need to ensure the consistency of code across different harts
"Now Available" must mean something different to SiFive than it does to me. When I click the links in the press release that purport to let me acquire one, they all say "No Stock Available," which means the opposite of "Now Available" to me.
They weren't loading at all earlier, though, so saying that I can't get one but showing me the price I can't get it at is some kind of improvement, I guess.
Note that the link in the announcement takes you to the 32 GB, which is (instantly?) out of stock.
16 GB (which is enough for a quad core, IMO) is $399 with "375 in stock, ships tomorrow"
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc
I ordered a Milk-V Megrez (same SoC but 1.8 GHz vs 1.4 GHz here) for $100 less a week ago. The price difference was much bigger then!
I benchmarked these against a few other RISC-V boards. They're pretty fast, relative to RISC-V (although not relative to x86): https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-sp...
Note the benchmark is not very rigorous, but it reflects what we want to do with these boards which is to build Fedora packages.
Thanks for this, I was looking to upgrade my VF2 but I'm not sure it's worth it at this stage, the VF2 is painfully slow, and this board doesn't reach 2x perf
I get similar results here. The Banana Pi BPI-F3 was a big disappointment. I was expecting some improvement over the VisionFive 2, but no dice. A big Linux build at -j8 on the BPI-F3 takes essentially the same time as a -j4 build on the VF2.
Apparently the small level 2 caches on the X60 are crippling.
The P550 actually feels "snappy".
I'm surprised how much faster the Jupiter is than the BPI-F3: 28%.
That's a lot for the same SoC.
And, yes, ridiculously small caches on the BPI-F3 at 0.5 MB for each 4 core cluster, vs 2 MB on the VisionFive 2 and 4 MB on the P550.
The Pioneer still wins for cache and I think real-world speed though, with 4 MB L3 cache per 4 core cluster, but also access to the other 60 MB of L3 cache from the other clusters on the (near) single-threaded parts of your builds (autoconf, linking, that last stubborn .cpp, ...)
Why can't the packages be cross-compiled on a platform with reasonable performance?
The goal is to actually run RISC-V binaries on RISC-V hardware, to see what works and what doesn't. You wouldn't spot code generations bugs like this one if you merely cross-compile and never run the binaries: https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=c65046ff2e...
For quite some time to come, the main user of the Fedora riscv64 port will be the Fedora riscv64 builders. With cross-compilation, we wouldn't even have that limited use of the binaries produced.
There's a lot of cases where you want to build something and run it afterwards, such as tests or intermediate tooling used in later steps in the build.
In any case, I actually want to use RISC-V machines for my development environment.
Not everything can be easily cross compiled, unfortunately.
Its also just plain annoying to configure in many cases
$400 (16GB DDR5) and $500 (32GB DDR5) because that's not in the blog post.
But I have some questions:
Why the weird form factor? Mini-DTX is supported by a lot of cases but as a motherboard form factor it's incredibly niche compared to Mini-ITX and especially Micro-ATX.
Edit: DTX supposed to be an open standard but it's already a "dead" platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTX_(form_factor)
Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs can't be used?
Unless something is particularly unique with this HiFive revision you can use PCIe SSDs it just looks like this one is relatively lane starved and you'll need to eat the PCIe slot to do so (it's a x16 slot physically but only x4 in terms of actual wired lanes). The E-keyed slot is listed as SDIO, but even if it had PCIe wired up it'd be a max of x2 lanes.
> Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs can't be used?
Presumably very limited pcie bandwidth. You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc motherboard.
E key slots typically provide 1 lane of pcie 2.0 (even on systems with 3.0 available), while m.2 is 4 lanes and frequently faster pcie 3.0
Just checked: looks like it does provide a full size pcie slot. My guess is that the intended use case is for developers testing compatibility. You could almost certainly plug in an nvme drive through an adapter to that full size slot (although booting from it would likely require a custom uboot build) but if you use up the one slot for storage, you can’t plug in any other peripherals to test.
Sometimes not even that. On my motherboard the E key slot is USB3!
I believe the slot usually passes 4 wire usb2 as well as 1 lane if pcie. I had no idea usb3 was an option. How does that affect compatibility?
> You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc motherboard
Thanks that makes perfectly sense! I kind of want to buy one now (too bad single 32GB boards can't be bought, minimum order is 256)
> You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc motherboard.
For the price tag I think it should be more like a motherboard. Especially when Raspberry Pi 5 has official m.2 hats.
This is effectively an industrial dev board not a product for normal users. They are usually expensive because of low volume
You can connect M.2 NVMe, it just doesn't have a dedicated slot. If you're looking for a cheap device to plug a bunch of different PCIe devices into a RISC-V development board is probably not your ideal pick, look at a normal computer.
if you look on the product brief, the M.2 E key is only hooked up via SDIO, not PCIe
Honestly, this type of board is something that you aren't really going to just install in a case and forget about it. You are most likely going to have this on a test bench so you can swap out all kinds of different hardware for validation.
Buttons on the bottom for power/reset, 2 different JTAG ports, DIP switches for settings, and remote board management aren't things that are normally found on consumer boards. Mini DTX probably allows them to have a marginally smaller width compared to Micro-ATX while still allowing space for all of that debug functionality with a 2 slot graphics card installed. eMMC is also kind of important for a SOM as well.
mini-dtx is mini-itx with space for an extra slot - in practice a lot of cases support that as a mini-itx board plus dual slot gpu has the same footprint.
> "As a result of increased production and economies of scale, we’re excited to announce we are able to lower the price to just $399 for the 16GB version and $499 for the 32GB version"
? Also, both now listed as No Stock Available
I get that RISC-V is exciting as an open-source phenomena, but that is a pretty expensive piece of kit.
Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel processors at the same price level?
Or more performance per watt?
Or an instructino set that makes a lot of operation super fast?
What is the upside?
SiFive's boards are always more expensive than 3rd party boards using the same CPU cores. They are aimed primarily at SiFive IP customers who are designing their own chips, to develop software on before their chips are ready.
> Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel processors at the same price level?
rwjm's package build benchmark shows it as 25% faster than a comparable µarch Raspberry Pi 4.
It's been some time since Intel or AMD had similar products: I guess something around Pentium III, Pentium M, or early Core 2.
Prices are a function of production volume (and features / quality, but mostly volume).
The Pi 4 is if course a mass-market product and is cheaper. Arm's own "Juno" A72 dev board is $10,000, which is 20x more than this SiFive board.
https://www.elementsearch.com/arm-v2m-juno-0317d-evaluation-...
> What is the upside?
It (and Sipeed, Pine64, Milk-V boards with the same SoC) is the fastest RISC-V hardware, per core, currently available.
The $2500 Milk-V Pioneer is overall faster due to having 64 cores (and 128 GB RAM, 32 PCIe lanes), but is slightly slower per core.
You buy these early dev boards because you want or need RISC-V for some reason, not because you want the cheapest fastest hardware of any kind.
Not an unreasonable price for a dev board.
The key part is 'dev' - it's for people doing development on the platform.
Open source, open ISA, embedded systems. That’s it.
We are still years away from boards where they are interesting to people who are only interested in laptop or higher performance classes.
The last SiFive board I had died after about a year of use and is no longer supported so buyer beware
Huh. Its only 17:45 EST and Arrow is already sold out.
I hope they can put out an RVA23 level board soon
Can it run a vanilla kernel or is it nailed forever to Sifive's Dev team?
It can't run an upstream kernel yet, although it's very likely that we'll get there. SiFive have in the past been very good about getting changes upstream.
RV64GBC, so still no vector instructions?
Does anyone know if there's a den board / soc that does the V set yet?
You can get vectorized instructions from Microchip at a much higher price point in a few months on RISCV with the forthcoming $1500ish Devboard - it has some nice specs, 10GigE
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
This is similar to the High Performance Space Computer which will be coming out in Rad Hardened & Rad Tolerant versions, I think these devboards will be 40k-60k
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for the devkit is $150, currently shipping.
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
Where did you get the $1500?
That's an insane price for something which will perform similarly to the BPI-F3. It has double the DLEN, but it also only runs at 1GHz, while the BPI-F3 is available at 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz for way cheaper.
> There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for the devkit is $150, currently shipping.
This is an entirely different processor, the now very old SiFive U54 at 0.6GHz.
Does anyone know if any browsers have Ubuntu RISC-V ports? Chromium or Firefox perhaps? Might be interesting to give it a spin.
Firefox has been able to run on RISC-V for as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure I remember SiFive doing a demo back in 2018 at FOSDEM which included the browser. However generally GUI environments are still quite slow, so it won't be very usable.
Edit: This one I think: https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/ but I can only see them running Quake, not Firefox.
Don’t capitalize every word in a title. I thought “Ubuntu Now” was a technology that I didn’t know about.
> Don’t capitalize every word in a title
It is what they taught me to do at school. So I do it still
I'm with parent commenter: please don't.
Why is Ubuntu always the choice, why not fedora or opensuse?
In some sense, this question answers itself: the most important distro to support is the most popular distro in the space.
Because Canonical invested in it and they didn't.
Ubuntu has historically had a business model that is more open to supporting out-of-tree kernel patches
I can think of two reasons:
1. Ubuntu invested very heavily into making Linux friendly to a whole generation of makers when nobody else was. Ubuntu is most familiar to them. Canonical will benefit from that investment for the foreseeable future.
2. Ubuntu benefits from Debian's debootstrap which makes porting to a new architecture substantially easier.
Can someone who is more familiar with this SoC confirm for me that this P550 doesn't have the RISC-V "V" vector extensions? I'm seeing a GBC suffix which I guess means bit manipulation, compressed instructions, and whatever the G extension is which I don't fully understand (IMAFD plz explain?)
P550 cores don't have vector extensions. It's actually quite an old design, from 2021. What you'd want is SiFive P670 cores, which are RVA22 compliant with the vector 1.0 spec.
Three years from announcement of a core to SoCs on boards being available is actually on the quick side.
Arm A53 (Pi 3, October 2012 - February 2016), A72 (Pi 4, Feb 2015 - June 2019), and A76 (Pi 5, May 2018 - September 2023, or January 2022 for Radxa Rock 5B) all took longer.
P670 was only announced in November 2022. If a board ships by the end of 2025 it will be doing very well.
The only board that is cheap and available with the ratified 1.0 vector extension I know of is the Kendryte K230, which you can find on some boards for about $40 USD: https://developer.canaan-creative.com/k230/dev/zh/00_hardwar...
Note that it's only on one 1.6GHz core, and still pretty anemic otherwise (pi form factor, it's to be expected.) So something "deskop grade" with all the nice extensions and other goodies is probably still a ways off. Maybe next year; we'll have to see -- but lots of useful extensions continue to be ratified today, so it may still be a while before things "cool off."
SpacemiT K1 on BananaPi is another commonly seen RVV 1.0 capable chip. IIRC both Kendryte K230 and SpacemiT K1 are in-order cores.
G includes MAFD extensions for non-embedded (I) applications. That's multiplication and division, atomics, single and double-precision floating point. It also includes the control/status register and a instruction-fence instruction. I think it's there to mean "the base plus the standard bits that people generally want in a processor if they're writing C for it".
Ah, ok, thanks for the clarification. When I last played with RISC-V it was in (hobby) FPGA stuff and the cores I was messing with did not specify G.
it takes time (~2 years) for silicon designers to go from idea to taping out silicon. The P550's cores are advertised as having good area efficiency, so it could be both getting rid of the vector extensions to optimize area and they just couldn't incorporate them into the design.
I is the base integer instructions
M is integer multiplication
A is atomic
F is single precision float
D is double precision
G is shorthand for all of the above + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
> + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
The original RV32I and RV64I required some control registers for high frequency counters and instruction counters. You also needed the instructions to access these registers. This proved to be too complex for the simplest implementations, so recently (five years ago?) this functionality has been moved to their own extensions.
Including these extensions in G makes the current G have the same functionality as the original G.
> 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
CSR (i.e. status) register and instruction fence extensions. Instruction fences are most useful in cases where you modify text section during runtime (e.g. JIT or code hot reload) such that you need to ensure the consistency of code across different harts
"Now Available" must mean something different to SiFive than it does to me. When I click the links in the press release that purport to let me acquire one, they all say "No Stock Available," which means the opposite of "Now Available" to me.
They weren't loading at all earlier, though, so saying that I can't get one but showing me the price I can't get it at is some kind of improvement, I guess.
32 GB is out of stock.
16 GB (which is enough for a quad core, IMO) is $399 with "375 in stock, ships tomorrow"
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc
I ordered a Milk-V Megrez (same ship but 1.8 GHz vs 1.4 GHz here) for $100 less a week ago. The price difference was much bigger then!
presumably that means that they had stock and then sold through all of it basically instantly.