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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

#61

Post by alias_neo »

snvzz wrote: post #21
BarsMonster wrote: post #18

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...).

> Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement.

I don't know much about the RISC-V ecosystem at the moment, but what do you consider an "unbelievably low price"?

They SoC appears to be £5 to pre-order (EDIT: £5 is for a 20% off coupon), but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200. Is this considered a good deal for RISC-V right now?

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

#63

Post by sylware »

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.

RISC-V is a US Berkley initiative. Have a look at wikipedia where you'll find most of the answers to your questions.

That said, to be a success, RISC-V will need _extremely_ performant implementations all across the board ("embedded", desktop, server), micro-archs and silicium process. It will have to survive its mistakes: for instance critical bugs in its major micro-archs or design flaws (you have to presume it will happen).

And without access to the best silicium process, it _WON'T_ have performant implementations. Because there is no "enough" in the silicium industry, it wants always more transistors and less power consumption, and each new silicium process brings significant improvements on those metrics.

This is where chinese chip designers are in trouble: Taiwan has the foundries with the best silicium process, and now you get US restrictions on EU EUV tools.

Even though I wish intel and amd to switch to risc-v in the not to far away future, I would give attention at the people over there who would try to torpedo RISC-V. The other one, ARM, well, they will try everything to sabotage it, RISC-V is a death sentence for them... unless they clearly move to RISC-V ultra performant micro-arch design.

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

#64

Post by bigfishrunning »

rwmj wrote: post #47
sapiogram wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. Their point was that ARM is also progressing exponentially.

But only a few companies (two? Arm and Apple?) develop new Arm designs, whereas anyone is free to develop new RISC-V designs.

Most of those new Risc-V designs Are on the extreme low end; not a bad thing, but there's not a ton of high performance Risc-V stuff happening.

It's more likely to fill in the ESP32 niche then the ARM one

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

#65

Post by sylware »

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…

Well, I don't like the SGxxxx SOC as they contain an ARM core (= royalties), I would prefer a CVxxxx SOC without an ARM core, and if they could get in the future displayport instead of hdmi and AV1 instead of h26[45] (hdmi and mpeg are not worldwide royalty free).

I am trying to buy some milk-v duo boards with the CV1800 SOC in EU (without a credit card to use online, and which I can contact with a self-hosted email), anyone can help?

EDIT: the next SGxxxx SOC is actually a full desktop SOC, not an "embedded" one (I was talking about the those). No ARM cores, but still a mpeg and hdmi block, and it seems the GPU hardware programing manual is not public.

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

#66

Post by brucehoult »

alias_neo wrote: post #61
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...).

> Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement. I don't know much about the RISC-V ecosystem at the moment, but what do you consider an "unbelievably low price"? They SoC appears to be £5 to pre-order (EDIT: £5 is for a 20% off coupon), but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200. Is this considered a good deal for RISC-V right now?

> 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, but there are four times as many.

Don't forget 64 core x86 is $5000 just for the chip.

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

#67

Post by sylware »

edwintorok wrote: post #58
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-...

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…

You have to keep in mind that since RISC-V is an ISA standard, C[gcc] coded kernels are here for legacy support purpose. The C[gcc] language is not appropriate anymore, assembly coded is the right(tm) way.

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

#68

Post by camel-cdr »

alias_neo wrote: post #61
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...).

> Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement. I don't know much about the RISC-V ecosystem at the moment, but what do you consider an "unbelievably low price"? They SoC appears to be £5 to pre-order (EDIT: £5 is for a 20% off coupon), but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200. Is this considered a good deal for RISC-V right now?

The unbelievably low price price milk-v listed was $120. Sipeed mentioned something abour $300.

I presume that the milk-v one might be just the cpu+motherboard, and sipeed included ram and gpu in the price, but thats all speculation.

If it's anywhere in the $300 range I'd be very happy.

Just for scale the specint numbers from the P670 are on Cortex A76 level, so you get what the rp5 has, but you get way more cores.

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

#69

Post by camel-cdr »

kragen wrote: post #56
camel-cdr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes.

I'm using the old gnu toolchain branch from brucehoult and write the benchmarks such that they work in rvv 1.0 and rvv 0.7.1. To help with that I've got a gnu assembler macro file that does 1 to 1 instruction translation when possible and for the other cases I need to #if/#else/#endif.

I'm working on rvv unicode conversions, and plan to release a blog post/article with benchmarks and explanation soon. The problem is that I've uses c intrinsics to write it, so I need to manually translate the assembly code to rvv 0.7.1 compatible code.

That entails

    vsetivli -> vsetvli
    vle64 -> vle32
    vmvNr -> vmv.v.v & 2 vsetvli
    vzext.vN -> N/2 vwaddu & N/2+1 vsetvli
in my case.

Also, the board I've got access to (it might be an eval board, idk) has a bug in vredmax, so I also needed to adjust the code to not use that. (I've yet to investigate that further)

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

#70

Post by alias_neo »

brucehoult wrote: post #66
alias_neo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement. I don't know much about the RISC-V ecosystem at the moment, but what do you consider an "unbelievably low price"? They SoC appears to be £5 to pre-order (EDIT: £5 is for a 20% off coupon), but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200. Is this considered a good deal for RISC-V right now?

> 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.

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