... and asked him, telling him that I was the Linux reporter from The Register. He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
That was November 2023.
It didn't happen.
At the following Ubuntu Summit, I spoke to Nirav Patel right after he did this demo:
«
It runs, it works, and even high-definition video playback is smooth, but this is not a powerhouse CPU. The machine we tried was sluggish and not very responsive. Even playing a single YouTube video, CPU utilization in the System Monitor was pretty high, and it was working hard when we tried moving the video window around. Minimizing it did reduce the CPU burden, though. Aside from video decoding, the machine felt less responsive than our old Raspberry Pi 3, to pick a more familiar example. In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance.
»
We are another year on, and I just recently returned from the following Ubuntu Summit. I am still waiting.
A RVA20 compliant chip, released in 2023. I have one of these (VisionFive 2, received February 2023) with a couple hard disks and ZFS, serving as home NAS. Between RPi 3 and RPi 4 in CPU speed, similar I/O as RPi 4.
Obviously not a speed demon, but it was the very first mass-produced RISC-V SoC.
>He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
Probably the Intel thing that never actually happened, despite there been test chips which is what your acquaintance likely was able to play with.
SiFive released something else instead, earlier this year, as stopgap. Based on their P550 microarchitecture, it is dramatically faster than JH7110, but of no particular interest to anybody not directly involved in RISC-V, as it lacks vector and thus isn't RVA23 compliant.
In 2026, it'll be 2023+3, and many usefully fast RVA23 core IPs (Above Zen1 performance) are expected to finally show up in development boards, although only the one from Tenstorrent has had a concrete announcement so far.
I approached John Ronco from SiFive who had just come off stage after a talk at the Ubuntu Summit in Rīga:
https://events.canonical.com/event/31/contributions/199/
... and asked him, telling him that I was the Linux reporter from The Register. He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
That was November 2023.
It didn't happen.
At the following Ubuntu Summit, I spoke to Nirav Patel right after he did this demo:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/18/riscv_framework_main_...
I tried that machine.
I tried to be charitable:
« It runs, it works, and even high-definition video playback is smooth, but this is not a powerhouse CPU. The machine we tried was sluggish and not very responsive. Even playing a single YouTube video, CPU utilization in the System Monitor was pretty high, and it was working hard when we tried moving the video window around. Minimizing it did reduce the CPU burden, though. Aside from video decoding, the machine felt less responsive than our old Raspberry Pi 3, to pick a more familiar example. In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance. »
We are another year on, and I just recently returned from the following Ubuntu Summit. I am still waiting.