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Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

3.14.by

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Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#101

Post by spintin »

snvzz wrote: post #36
spintin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPU doesn't have a closed driver that works either. It's been a year for the JH7110 too, so I wouldn't hold my breath. On Vision Five 2 everything is still softpipe in the official Debian from Star Five! On the PineTab-V NOTHING involving the 3D part of the GPU works! YouTube works for consumption, but that's not interesting for production. To write/film a review of a SoC with GPU without running glgears is backw…

>I think the only hope now is for the upstream to gain a working driver in a year or two. PowerVR driver is already part of mesa3d mainline[0]. Some definitions for the variant used in JH7110 have been added recently, but it's not yet operational. 0. https://mesamatrix.net/

Seems pvr is only vulkan?

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#102

Post by Findecanor »

snvzz wrote: post #16

This is TH1520, same SoC as the Lichee Pi 4A. A chip that's oddly faster than JH7110 (VisionFive2, Milk-V Mars) in microbenchmarks, but slower in practice (e.g. gcc). Presumably due to smaller cache. It is also less power efficient, and lacks the upstream support JH7110 enjoys[0]. I would look at Pinetab-V, a tablet-laptop based on that SoC, today. Better yet, wait for Milk-V Oasis[1] tba this June, as well as other…

The SG2380 is a bit weird though. Four of the P670 cores are clocked lower than the others.

The X280 cores are not RVA22 compliant. They are only RV64GCV, so they can't run the same code as the P670 cores. SophGo's datasheet lists these cores under "AI accelerator", paired with a "TPU", so they were never intended to run general purpose code.

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#103

Post by cjdell »

windowsrookie wrote: post #80

The author mentions if you want a small laptop today, you need to go to eBay and buy an old UMPC. This is not correct, there are some modern mini laptops. I purchased a new 8" mini laptop with folding touchscreen and an intel N100 CPU from AliExpress. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805658668421.html Specs: Intel N100 12GB RAM NVME SSD Slot 1280x800 Touchscreen (with pen support) USB-C port (supports charging and…

Seriously want. Few questions if I may:

- Have tried a Linux distro on it?

- What is battery life like (especially under Linux)?

- How is the keyboard generally? (Not expecting miracles but is it usable)

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#104

Post by ramesh31 »

windowsrookie wrote: post #80

The author mentions if you want a small laptop today, you need to go to eBay and buy an old UMPC. This is not correct, there are some modern mini laptops. I purchased a new 8" mini laptop with folding touchscreen and an intel N100 CPU from AliExpress. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805658668421.html Specs: Intel N100 12GB RAM NVME SSD Slot 1280x800 Touchscreen (with pen support) USB-C port (supports charging and…

>A downside of not buying from a real company: The drivers for the device are emailed to you in a .zip file from the seller. So that is pretty sketchy, but it's the same for any of these Aliexpress devices.

Have fun hosting a CCP exit node

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#105

Post by kube-system »

the_third_wave wrote: post #99
saxonww wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've ever seen anyone write 'silicium' and sure enough, it's an alternative name for silicon. I wonder if this is a more common name for silicon in some other part of the world (I'm in the US). I don't think I've ever seen this spelling before today, and I'm not a young person.

It is the spelling used in e.g. the Netherlands, a country where the light metal used in aircraft goes by the name Aluminium which also happens to be the correct version [1] of the bastardised Aluminum . The word Silicon 'feels' wrong to a Dutch speaker because it makes it sound like integrated circuits are made out of the same stuff used to assemble aquariums, fake boobs and heat-resistant flexible cookware. That st…

Silicone has silicon in it.

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#106

Post by camel-cdr »

remexre wrote: post #93
rwmj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a comparison of a few RISC-V single board computers and the Lichee Pi 4A is definitely very slow on real world tasks, even though in theory it ought to be the fastest. I never got to the bottom of exactly why - it might be software issues or non-upstream drivers. At the moment I'd recommend the VF2 for general use. https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/07/25/heads-up-lichee-pi-4a-...

Something's definitely "up with" the RISC-V GCC port; in principle maybe there are just some passes or backend options that need to be flipped on in some way? https://godbolt.org/z/cvc6j1sM6

Looks like clang does the optimization for -mno-strict-align, but gcc doesn't seem to support that fully yet: https://godbolt.org/z/xn8erKMTe

Edit: Apparently gcc assumes by default, that unaligned loads aren't supported, but with -mtune=size it somehow enables it: https://godbolt.org/z/d9P19aMnn

some discussion around that: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id...

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#107

Post by camel-cdr »

Findecanor wrote: post #102
snvzz wrote: post #16

This is TH1520, same SoC as the Lichee Pi 4A. A chip that's oddly faster than JH7110 (VisionFive2, Milk-V Mars) in microbenchmarks, but slower in practice (e.g. gcc). Presumably due to smaller cache. It is also less power efficient, and lacks the upstream support JH7110 enjoys[0]. I would look at Pinetab-V, a tablet-laptop based on that SoC, today. Better yet, wait for Milk-V Oasis[1] tba this June, as well as other…

The SG2380 is a bit weird though. Four of the P670 cores are clocked lower than the others. The X280 cores are not RVA22 compliant. They are only RV64GCV, so they can't run the same code as the P670 cores. SophGo's datasheet lists these cores under "AI accelerator", paired with a "TPU", so they were never intended to run general purpose code.

X280s where design for AI applications, and have an interface for custom vendor extension. If I understood it correctly SophGo plans to add a matmul extension to it.

You wouldn't be able to run P670s and X280s on and schedule applications between them anyways, because they have different vector lengths.

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#109

Post by calgarymicro »

windowsrookie wrote: post #80

The author mentions if you want a small laptop today, you need to go to eBay and buy an old UMPC. This is not correct, there are some modern mini laptops. I purchased a new 8" mini laptop with folding touchscreen and an intel N100 CPU from AliExpress. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805658668421.html Specs: Intel N100 12GB RAM NVME SSD Slot 1280x800 Touchscreen (with pen support) USB-C port (supports charging and…

There are also all of the various GPD devices[0] as well if you're looking for something a bit more expensive that theoretically has more of a reputation.

[0]https://www.gpd.hk/

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#110

Post by happycube »

bpye wrote: post #25

I could get over the perf but the power consumption is rough. It seems strange that the USB hub is using so much power. From a (leaked?) data sheet I don’t see any way to disable it - but it does have firmware which can be updated? There is also a 5V-3.3V LDO built in so I wonder if that may be what is dissipating so much power. The AMS1153 looks like a similar story…

IIRC pi4 also had VIA USB hub power issues early on.
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