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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

#121

Post by windowsrookie »

calgarymicro wrote: post #109
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/

The GPD Pocket 3 is the closes equivalent device and I considered it as well. But, you can buy two of these AliExpress N100/12GB RAM laptops for the price of one Pentium N6000/8GB RAM GPD Pocket. The i7 GPD Pocket pushes $1,000.

Also, based on reddit posts, GPD's build quality and customer service doesn't seem to be any better than the AliExpress laptop.

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

#122

Post by alias_neo »

camel-cdr wrote: post #77
alias_neo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, and what form factor is this in? Are we talking mATX/ITX style board as opposed to an SBC?

It says mini ITX: https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-wi...

That makes sense, and sounds like an excellent deal.

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

#123

Post by windowsrookie »

kube-system wrote: post #96
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…

Here's another example, similar in form factor to old Sony VAIO UMPCs https://www.ayaneo.com/product/AYANEO-SLIDE.html

A 6" display with Windows 11 sounds like an exercise in futility to me. That form factor probably works well for gaming, but In my experience it doesn't work well for anything else. I'm not a gamer so I prefer a more traditional laptop style device.

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

#124

Post by snvzz »

davidlt wrote: post #48
snvzz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. This seems to be the SoC and board I have been waiting a long time for. Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement. It should be fun to play with it this summer, and further down the line it will become my home server, replacing an old atom board that's considerably weaker. That's mostly enabled by the builtin I/O (pcie slots, sata ports...).

+1 on your initial comment. Exactly how I feel about the current situation. MilkV Oasis with SG2380 would be the end-game for majority of developers, but they are definitely loosing money if they keep starting price at 120 USD. They don't have it frozen (they changed the SoC specification some weeks ago) thus I wouldn't be surprised to see this slip into 2025. I wouldn't be surprised if this outperforms MilkV Pioneer…

They're counting on most purchasers not preordering, and thus not getting the preorder discount.

Which is a reasonable assumption to make. SG2380 will surprise many as it launches and gets reviewed and talked about.

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

#125

Post by hajile »

sylware wrote: post #63
cjs_ac wrote: post #52

Is anyone making RISC-V SoCs outside of China? Trade restrictions have given China serious incentives to make RISC-V CPUs domesticly, unlike every other country that can just buy AMD64 and ARM chips. Given the geopolitics of the situation, while RISC-V is gaining marketshare in the microcontroller space, it looks like RISC-V will be the Chinese-bloc CPU ISA while the west sticks with what we already have.

RISC-V is becoming a worldwide interop standard, and a real one, namely royalty free and which will be stable in time once we get all the "now we know" features, and all that at the ISA level (x86_64 and ARM are _NOT_ worldwide royalty free). And don't be mistaken, there is no perfect ISA (it is said "average"), it does not exist, only a set of trade-offs and compromises which will not fit all use-cases perfectly. RI…

RISC-V is already putting the squeeze on ARM in the embedded market. RISC-V is fewer gates at almost every performance level the embedded market is interested in due to having a tighter, non-legacy ISA (there's even the open SERV core which fits RISC-V into an insanely small 2.1KGe).

RISC-V likely has a future in mobile devices as it crawls up the performance tree like ARM did. This leaves ARM in a tight squeeze between x86 on the top and RISC-V on the bottom.

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

#126

Post by snvzz »

camel-cdr wrote: post #107
Findecanor wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Not trivial, but also not impossible.

e.g. I understand there's some bits to check whether vector has been used. It would also be abnormal for a process to be in wait (as opposite to ready) within a vector loop.

Having a chip like this one deployed will definitely enable experimentation and research on how to best deal with this situation.

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

#127

Post by snvzz »

alias_neo wrote: post #70
brucehoult wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200 Not sure what you're looking at as you didn't give a link, but perhaps you're confusing Pioneer and Oasis? The 64 core Pioneer prebuilt with case, power supply, SSD, video card, 128 GB RAM for $2500 is quite reasonably priced against commercially built 16 core x86 machines, if your workload can keep 64 cores busy. Each core is around 1/4 the speed of current x86…

I clicked through the GP's second link and the pre-order link which took me here: https://arace.tech/products/pre-order-milk-v-oasis-16-core-r... This appears to be the (voucher for the) "chip" but I don't see any board to mount it on other than the Pioneer. Again, I admit I know nothing about the RISC-V ecosystem so apologies, I'm just curious.

To clarify, Milk-V Oasis is the board, not the chip.

The chip is SG2380, and it comes soldered onto the board.

Thus the preorder is for the board, which includes the chip.

This is a Mini-ITX board, and you're meant to provide RAM, storage, power supply, case and whatever else needed.

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

#128

Post by snvzz »

spintin wrote: post #101
snvzz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

mesa3d also has Zink, which implements opengl, opencl and gles on top of vulkan.

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

#129

Post by cjdell »

windowsrookie wrote: post #118
cjdell wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I have not personally tried linux on it. This laptop has device specific drivers that may be difficult to get working correctly under linux. The screen is likely sourced from a tablet, so it's default orientation is portrait. This means that the UEFI displays in that orientation, rather than the correct landscape orientation. The included windows drivers correct that. There is also a sensor that rotates the screen au…

Thanks for taking the time to answer these. The thing you say about the display is interesting. I guess that means subpixel rendering (ClearType) will be suboptimal when in "laptop" mode but not a big deal.

Missed having a true pocket computer since the Psion/Windows CE days. I'll probably end up buying one... :-)

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

#130

Post by matthews2 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #13

Does it use U-Boot or EFI?

It uses U-Boot, but you can use U-Boot to launch an EFI executable.

https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/thead/lpi4a.html https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/usage/cmd/bootefi.html

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