Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

deepcomputing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 69 posts

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

#41

Post by brucehoult »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #36
brucehoult wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decis…

Those delays are very understandable but they don't make the chips less old, or counteract the problems caused by being old when RISC-V is racing to catch up.

The people who put out RTL for a core go right on to making a better core. The time they take to design a new core is not affected by how long people making SoCs or boards or consumer products do or don't take to make their own products.

Are you aware that major chip company Microchip just announced a new family of chips, the PIC64GX -- a big deal for them -- with a dev board that has just become available in the last month or so, which uses RISC-V cores first used in the HiFive Unleashed in early 2018 (and announced in Oct 2017, when they already had working test chips)?

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/curiosity-p...

Are you aware that people still announce new chips based on the Arm A53, a core announced in 2012?

Or that 70% of Arm's revenue comes from CPU cores announced in 1994 (ARM7TDMI) - 2009 (Cortex-M0)?

"Old" is not relevant to anything. Only design features are relevant.

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

#42

Post by timschmidt »

WithinReason wrote: post #40
timschmidt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance per watt is nearly identical for the Apple M4 and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, despite the Ryzen being manufactured on 4nm while the M4 is on 3nm: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/3 Sorry to burst your bubble.

You charts show the M4 having a more than 2x advantage in both MIPS per watt and MB per Joule over the Ryzen

Read through the article. Ryzen wins a few, and from a worse node, and with off-package dram, and a much more capable GPU.

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

#43

Post by brucehoult »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #29
snvzz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Fortunately the LLVM build framework allows you to specify how many link steps can be done in parallel separately from the number of other things done in parallel.

Also, linkers other than GNU `ld` (or `gold` which is faster but used more RAM) use a lot less RAM e.g. `mold`, or even better LLVM's own `lld`.

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

#44

Post by timschmidt »

chaxor wrote: post #39
timschmidt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance per watt is nearly identical for the Apple M4 and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, despite the Ryzen being manufactured on 4nm while the M4 is on 3nm: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/3 Sorry to burst your bubble.

The biggest thing I want to see from framework is ARM (or better, Risc-V that achieves great low power performance) with an enormous battery and linux or BSD with all the optimizations to improve battery life. I bought a macbook a while ago specifically because I can get it to last about 45-50 hours non-stop usage on one charge, so getting a system tailored for even better performance and a longer battery life (macbo…

I agree that would be a delight. I'd even take a color eink or transmissive / reflective LCD to lower the display power draw. But I would still like to be able to equip it with large amounts of storage and ram.

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

#45

Post by capitol_ »

usr1106 wrote: post #35

They promise Linux support. What is the situation with Rust on RISC-V? Obviously for a couple of years you haven't been able to build a somewhat complete and modern distro without a Rust compiler. However, that wasn't available everywhere outside of x86 and arm64 at the same time ( https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/ ). Has that been fully solved in the meantime?

My experience with our riscv build deamons in Debian is everything works, but there is some spurious segfaults from time to time.

Check the green build matrix on this page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=alexander.kjall%40...

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

#46

Post by Dylan16807 »

brucehoult wrote: post #41
Dylan16807 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those delays are very understandable but they don't make the chips less old, or counteract the problems caused by being old when RISC-V is racing to catch up.

The people who put out RTL for a core go right on to making a better core. The time they take to design a new core is not affected by how long people making SoCs or boards or consumer products do or don't take to make their own products. Are you aware that major chip company Microchip just announced a new family of chips, the PIC64GX -- a big deal for them -- with a dev board that has just become available in the las…

> The time they take to design a new core is not affected by how long people making SoCs or boards or consumer products do or don't take to make their own products.

I don't think anyone implied otherwise. But the product in my hand is still lacking.

> Are you aware that major chip company Microchip

I don't see how this affects my argument in any way?

> Are you aware that people still announce new chips based on the Arm A53, a core announced in 2012?

Not for the main cores of laptops they don't.

> "Old" is not relevant to anything. Only design features are relevant.

There is sufficient context here to tie the two together. These cores are slow because of relative lack of development time. These cores lack vector units specifically because of their age, because they were designed before there was a spec (which you brought up).

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

#47

Post by KingOfCoders »

timschmidt wrote: post #42
WithinReason wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You charts show the M4 having a more than 2x advantage in both MIPS per watt and MB per Joule over the Ryzen

Read through the article. Ryzen wins a few, and from a worse node, and with off-package dram, and a much more capable GPU.

"off-package dram"

Yes, the real ARM vs. x86 discussion will come around Ryzen Max 2025Q1 with 128mb on-package dram (hope we get desktop board manufacturers to sell this).

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

#48

Post by whazor »

nrp wrote: post #32
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…

We have gotten inbound interest from other Mainboard makers too, at least one of which is pretty far along on a design.

Would you be okay if they compete with your mainboards? For example, they produce a lower price AMD board.

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

#49

Post by ywvcbk »

brucehoult wrote: post #15
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)

An N100 running QEMU will be slower. A machine that is faster running QEMU will cost a lot more. For example my 6 core Zen2 laptop runs my primes benchmark (small code, long-running, the best possible case for qemu-user) 10% slower than my VisionFive 2. If you want to run a whole emulated OS then qemu-system is a lot slower than qemu-user. My i9-13900 laptop runs the same benchmark in qemu-user 2.6x faster than the V…

> will cost a lot more.

Presumably everyone buying this thing would already have (or need) a proper PC/Mac to use alongside it.

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

#50

Post by tecleandor »

chaxor wrote: post #39
timschmidt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance per watt is nearly identical for the Apple M4 and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, despite the Ryzen being manufactured on 4nm while the M4 is on 3nm: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/3 Sorry to burst your bubble.

The biggest thing I want to see from framework is ARM (or better, Risc-V that achieves great low power performance) with an enormous battery and linux or BSD with all the optimizations to improve battery life. I bought a macbook a while ago specifically because I can get it to last about 45-50 hours non-stop usage on one charge, so getting a system tailored for even better performance and a longer battery life (macbo…

Between Zoom (not the whole time, but just by having it in the background), Slack and Crowdstrike's Falcon agent, I usually can't make more than 5 or 6 hours away of a wall outlet with my MacBook Pro M2 Max...

I hate corporate software.

Post reply on HN