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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 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
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.