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

3.14.by

51–60 of 158 posts

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

#51

Is there a reason for a dearth of PCIe connectivity on these small SoCs? Is it difficult to implement? Perhaps a pincount issue? The big problem with these small and cheap systems is that you can't connect NVMe drives to them and you pay a huge performance penalty.

Generally high speed serdes IO blocks, which are needed for PCIe, in ASIC design are rather high power consumers. Even on Intel and AMD laptop spec CPUs there's generally many fewer PCIe lanes than on their desktop counterparts. The silicon space needed is also not small and sometimes the silicon process for making good low power but high performance serdes transceivers is not the best process for making the other things needed on the SOC, which can be solved with chiplet style designs but then you have another problem.

Most inexpensive and small SOC just can't justify adding such costs and complexities given that it's very likely their target volume buyer doesn't need such features.

I suspect this RISC-V SOC is priced in the $10-20 range, but I have no true understanding of the cost of this part. In that price range for SOCs almost no one has 4 PCIe lanes on offer, but some do have 1 or 2.

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

#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.

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

#53
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…

USB 3.0 can eat alot of power due to high speed, if it's always active...

USB 3.0 host controllers and hubs do not need to consume large amounts of power nor do they need to always be active, if designed well. USB 3.0 has LPM (link power management) and Microsoft wrote up a nice overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/u...

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

#54

Does it use U-Boot or EFI?

In kernel config I see: CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y CONFIG_EFI=y If that's what identifies it

That just defines what the Linux kernel will be able to do, it doesn't necessarily imply that the hardware is using UEFI for firmware to launch another bootloader or OS.

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

#55
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, best products are always in the future :-) Oasis looks very capable and juicy, looking forward to get my hands on it.

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...).

I placed an order for 4 coupons :D

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

#56
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tested its rv64v vector performance

Kinda hard to compare it against anything, but here are some benchmarks: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/milkv_pioneer/...

this is fantastic! they're the first sophon benchmark results i've seen, and they're far more comprehensive than most benchmark results of any kind

have you run into any toolchain difficulties due to the 0.7.1 nature of the rvv?

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

#57
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.

Would not be the first time the cheaper technology becomes the market leader instead of the "better" one. Time will tell.

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

#58
post #30
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…

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-...

Interesting, I had the opposite experience: the GUI was very slow and nearly unusable on most RISC-V boards that I have, except the LicheePi4a. But that is probably just due to the GPU (which unfortunately doesn't have open source drivers yet?), and not the CPU, and they're all running different kernels and distros. When I have some time I'll need to compare again with the latest distro available for each, and also a fully open source one.

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

#59
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.

I've seen a few companies adopting RISC-V for embedded applications outside of China, like the management processor on Nvidia GPUs or Western Digitals SSD controllers, but those are places you'd probably use a small Cortex-M core rather than a big Cortex-A SoC if you were using ARM. Nvidia is still all-in on ARM for big processors.

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

#60
post #4

I have one of these as well - the distro I installed has a broken Chrome that crashes shortly after startup, hopefully that's fixed now. The case is prototype-quality but fine (the fact that it's metal helps a lot), the screen is nice, the keyboard is even more awkward than it needs to be for the size. I've been a bit disappointed by the performance in my tests (compiling various projects of mine with GCC), it seems…

Is JIT for JavaScript supported on RISC-V? This was an issue in PPC for a long time.

Per the V8 site, the JIT is only fully supported on x86 and ARM. There is a RISC-V port available on a YMMV basis but I don't know what state it's currently in.

https://v8.dev/docs/ports

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