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DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

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Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#21

Post by MindSpunk »

MostlyStable wrote: post #17

A lot of comments are focusing on the value as a RISC-V development platform, which is obviously important, but I'm also hopeful that this presages more Framework mainboard options besides just what Framework itself offers. There is already a pretty big community offering I/O modules beyond Framework's options, but the true benefit of a Framework system is in the ability to not be locked in to only what one company t…

There's not really a lot of room for anyone to make a board that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though. Framework already have both x86 vendors covered for people who want Intel or AMD. The only other chip worth making a board for is Snapdragon X Elite. There's nothing else in the same performance class.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#22

Post by boredatoms »

MindSpunk wrote: post #21
MostlyStable wrote: post #17

A lot of comments are focusing on the value as a RISC-V development platform, which is obviously important, but I'm also hopeful that this presages more Framework mainboard options besides just what Framework itself offers. There is already a pretty big community offering I/O modules beyond Framework's options, but the true benefit of a Framework system is in the ability to not be locked in to only what one company t…

There's not really a lot of room for anyone to make a board that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though. Framework already have both x86 vendors covered for people who want Intel or AMD. The only other chip worth making a board for is Snapdragon X Elite. There's nothing else in the same performance class.

I hope it becomes a standard format for developer boards

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#23

Post by bane »

MindSpunk wrote: post #21
MostlyStable wrote: post #17

A lot of comments are focusing on the value as a RISC-V development platform, which is obviously important, but I'm also hopeful that this presages more Framework mainboard options besides just what Framework itself offers. There is already a pretty big community offering I/O modules beyond Framework's options, but the true benefit of a Framework system is in the ability to not be locked in to only what one company t…

There's not really a lot of room for anyone to make a board that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though. Framework already have both x86 vendors covered for people who want Intel or AMD. The only other chip worth making a board for is Snapdragon X Elite. There's nothing else in the same performance class.

There's the possibility of making mainboards with other features though, built-in FPGAs, SDRs, or maybe lower-powered x86 chips for more battery life.

I guess that all falls under "curiosity", but I really do hope that the ecosystem for framework compatible parts blow up.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#24

Post by therealcamino »

brucehoult wrote: post #10
v1ne wrote: post #3

This JH7110 is from 2021. Some specs: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/08/29/starfive-jh7110-risc... 1.5 GHz CPU core frequency, some old RISC-V cores while we're still waiting for cores with decent single-core performance to compete with modern desktop processors. Sorry, but for me this board is dead in the water, unless you can't use ARM/x86 for political reasons.

> This JH7110 is from 2021. First retail customer deliveries of mass-production JH7110 chip and board were February 2023. First laptops with it were at the end of 2023. The CPU cores used (U74) were announced in October 2018. The first high-priced dev boards using essentially test chips (HiFive Unmatched $650, BeagleV Starlight unknown price, 300 were made and given away to developers) were mid 2021. It is important…

That's true, you don't hear about these dates in vertically-integrated businesses, but it's a bit of a misdirection. Vertically-integrated manufacturers definitely don't take 6 years from RTL completion to mass production of the end product.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#25

Post by beeflet »

MindSpunk wrote: post #21
MostlyStable wrote: post #17

A lot of comments are focusing on the value as a RISC-V development platform, which is obviously important, but I'm also hopeful that this presages more Framework mainboard options besides just what Framework itself offers. There is already a pretty big community offering I/O modules beyond Framework's options, but the true benefit of a Framework system is in the ability to not be locked in to only what one company t…

There's not really a lot of room for anyone to make a board that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though. Framework already have both x86 vendors covered for people who want Intel or AMD. The only other chip worth making a board for is Snapdragon X Elite. There's nothing else in the same performance class.

> that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though

So what? It would be great to use this as a developer platform because you have the whole chassis and peripherals of a laptop and all you have to make is the mainboard

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#26

Post by CoastalCoder »

snvzz wrote: post #14
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's a dev board that will likely be slower than QEMU, and is missing half of the Risc-V extensions that you want to test with. (and it supports a maximum of 8gb of ram, so good luck compiling LLVM on it)

>good luck compiling LLVM on it 4 cores, thus 2GB/core. Plenty.

I can't remember if LLVM has this problem specifically, but the linker step with debug info can really explode the memory use.

And unfortunately, that's even without build parallelism.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#27

Post by brucehoult »

therealcamino wrote: post #24
brucehoult wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This JH7110 is from 2021. First retail customer deliveries of mass-production JH7110 chip and board were February 2023. First laptops with it were at the end of 2023. The CPU cores used (U74) were announced in October 2018. The first high-priced dev boards using essentially test chips (HiFive Unmatched $650, BeagleV Starlight unknown price, 300 were made and given away to developers) were mid 2021. It is important…

That's true, you don't hear about these dates in vertically-integrated businesses, but it's a bit of a misdirection. Vertically-integrated manufacturers definitely don't take 6 years from RTL completion to mass production of the end product.

That's because they are vertically-integrated and can overlap the different stages and have the board people give feedback to the SoC people, who can give feedback to the CPU core people.

With multiple vendor-customer relationships in the chain there is not only likely to be no overlap in stages, but even there may be 6, 12, 24 months of gap between the RTL for the core being available and someone even making a decision to make an SoC using those cores, and a similar gap from a chip being available to someone else deciding to buy it to design a motherboard around it.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#28

Post by jksmith »

ralmidani wrote: post #6

How mature is the RISC-V ecosystem for dev machines? VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs are probably not supported, but what about a setup with Fedora, Erlang, Elixir, Node, and maybe NeoVIM?

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Platform_list#Supported_targets_...

So with FPC/Lazarus you have a full dev system if works as wiki suggests.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#29

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

snvzz wrote: post #14
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's a dev board that will likely be slower than QEMU, and is missing half of the Risc-V extensions that you want to test with. (and it supports a maximum of 8gb of ram, so good luck compiling LLVM on it)

>good luck compiling LLVM on it 4 cores, thus 2GB/core. Plenty.

make -j4 for LLVM requires about 36GB (I know because I tried with 32GB). 16 gb is almost enough to maybe build a debug build of LLVM without threading, but it will take a few hours on a chip that slow. With only 8gb, you are going to be absolutely trashing your swap (which at pcie gen 1x2 speeds will be pretty darn torturous). I'm guessing this system will take ~8 hours to build LLVM.

Re: DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

#30

Post by omeid2 »

bane wrote: post #23
MindSpunk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not really a lot of room for anyone to make a board that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though. Framework already have both x86 vendors covered for people who want Intel or AMD. The only other chip worth making a board for is Snapdragon X Elite. There's nothing else in the same performance class.

There's the possibility of making mainboards with other features though, built-in FPGAs, SDRs, or maybe lower-powered x86 chips for more battery life. I guess that all falls under "curiosity", but I really do hope that the ecosystem for framework compatible parts blow up.

lower-powered x86 has little chance anymore. In 10 years from now, just about every portable system will be ARM-like.
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