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I'm contemplating getting a #RISCV board for use at home. I ruled out the enterprise systems that are several thousand USD/EUR, as I plan to only use it for hobby capacity. Is there anything that is there to avoid? I recently learned that the SiFive boards have somewhat terrible memory performance, making them painfully slow for real world use. Any advice?
@zygoon There are enterprise systems? Which ones???
@zygoon Nice, although I wouldn't exactly call it high-performance:
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2309.00381
It's on the level of a 4-core Sandy Bridge cpu. But at least we're getting there.
@dcz well, the price is getting closer to "I would only buy this for work". I surely don't love riscv enough to spend 3K on a very fancy toy.
@zygoon
Lichee RV with its dock is one of the cheapest SoM around. Don't expect to compile on it 
@zygoon I have a Sifive Unmatched and a MilkV Pioneer. Do not get an Unmatched if you expect to use it as a desktop. It is a potato and is very noisy. The Pioneer seems fine so far. But I use it mostly for development. And that is OK. Did not take the time to get a browser to run on it yet (latest WebKit is broken on risc v). So it is hard to say. But the price... Also consider that there is no CPU yet available that does full kvm. So if you plan to run VMs, you have to wait a bit.
@zygoon Questions is: What is your idea behind buying RISC-V machine? A cheap potato for tests? Then VisionFive 2 is ok (or even cheaper slower boards). If you want something with some power (i.e. at least Rpi4B), maybe for a light desktop/home light srv backend)? LicheePi 4A is best choice right now (got one last week).
What to have in mind:
- Right now (emphasis on >now<) the spport for new kernels/drivers/hw accels etc. is taking off.
- (No) Support of RISC Vector instructions (0.7 vs 1.0)
@zygoon LicheePi 4A uses TH1520 CPU (4 cores @1,9Ghz, 4/8/16GB RAM + integrated eMMC storage, Vector 0.7.1 spec support, NPU, is currently mainly on kernel 5.10).
It is (now) "Not great, not terrible". With new kernels coming (6.5-6.8) and thus drivers (OpenGL/hw accel/AES accel etc..) and other things coming later this year, it will become quite ok as light desktop/light home server backend.
@zygoon Basically similar to RPi: Several images to be burned to device using fastboot. Alhough so far it seems quite simple, not a craziness like on Android devices.
Possible to boot from internal eMMC, uSD cards, (external) USBs.
@theron29 eMMC is good. uSD is, well, acceptable.
Do you have to use uboot? Is the support upstream or is everyone on some fork of their own?
@zygoon
A "problem" with >current< CPUs support of RV Vector spec is that majority of today's CPU have no Vector support or spec 0.7 support (not official).
Vecctor spec v1.0 was not finalized several years ago, when RV CPUs manufacturers decided not to wait any longer and designed and produced current CPU generation -> with either no or v0.7.* spec support. There is minimal to no compiler support for these optimizations, so this has potentially big impact on performance.
@zygoon Here are some interesting benchmarks...
I believe it should be achievable to have a compiler patched with/for vector 0.7.* optimizations and build the whole system just for Lichee with these optimizations....
(But it is a) a theory and b) my wishful thinking 
)
@zygoon So, I stepped over my lazyness and found this (very good note) within the documentation for their official Linux build (based on Debian 12):
@zygoon Hmmmm, curious: GNOME Shell runs faster&smoother on LicheePi 4A than Xfce... 
@theron29 as much as I like the fact that tiny boards _can_ run linux desktop, I'm much more interested in headless systems at present.
Coincidentally, I ran a Windows XP virtual machine with 256MB of ram and one CPU. The crazy speed at which everything ran on that system is a nice baseline to how slow our modern systems are. There's something lost, I think, in how we make software.
@zygoon I believe a discussion is still ongoing about Vector 0.7.* vs 1.0 compiler support (I did not have time to dig deeper into this yet so I'm unsure about the current state, but general notion is NOT to support v0.7.* -> start digging here https://github.com/brucehoult/riscv-gnu-toolchain).
If you are ok with trying RV kernel builds etc, LicheePi is very good start now.
On the other hand probably a new gen of devices with rvv1.0 CPUs will get released later this year, so it might be ok to wait for a little while
