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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

#71

Post by brucehoult »

pat64 wrote: post #26

Couple of observations here; - RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. - The assertion you can’t buy UMPCs in 2024 is patently false. GPD and a whole host of manufacturers make em. - A non mobile optimised blog in this day and age? That was a chore to read on the go.

> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up

That's a weird assertion. This machine is basically competitive with a Pi 4 (certainly miles ahead of Pi 3, both in CPU power and in having 8 or 16 GB RAM vs 0.5 or 1 GB).

The initial version of the RISC-V spec was ratified in July 2019, and the C910 core in this chip was announced in the same month. The TH1520 SoC hit the market in June 2023 (my board was delivered that month), four years after the CPU core was announced, and also four years after the Pi 4.

Note that the Arm A72 cores in the Pi 4 were announced in February 2015, so it was 4 1/2 years from core to Pi 4 using it, slightly longer than the THead C910 core announcement to Lichee Pi 4A shipping.

The Arm A53 also took about four years from announcement to the Pi 3 and Odroid C2. And the Arm A76 took four years from announcement to the RK3588 and Rock 5 shipping.

This is just the industry.

If the SG2380 machine(s) really come out this year then they will be faster than the A76 RK3588 boards and Pi 5 and around 2 to 2.5 years behind. But their P670 cores are equivalent to Arm A78, which is not available on an SBC -- and there are 16 of them, which is also not available in any cheap Arm-based SBC.

That's halving the gap.

SiFive's fastest core, the P870, is around Arm Cortex-X3 performance, and announced just 16 months later (October 2023 vs June 2022).

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

#72

Post by G3rn0ti »

sapiogram wrote: post #43
G3rn0ti wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. Only assuming development progress happens linearly. In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. It took years to even get to the point to have RISC-V SoCs and now we are seeing the first laptop products. The pace will accelerate, especially with the promise of RISC-V being a cheaper platform to build hardware on than ARM a…

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

This line of arguing would imply that an established company selling established products would not need to fear any competition as long as it can keep the pace of its innovation cycles. While this line of reasoning is not wrong it completely ignores the possibility of "disruptive innovation" to use a buzz word here. I honestly think RISC-V could be a shooting star that will come to many as a surprise. And as long as RISC-V lags in performance behind ARM it could still compete successfully in price due to free licensing of RISC-V versus expensive licensing of ARM64. This has been AMD's strategy for many years (before they had better integrated GPUs compared to Intel). And think of how IBM completely lost its PC business to cheap competition.

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

#73

Post by alias_neo »

camel-cdr wrote: post #68
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?

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.

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

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

#74

Post by brucehoult »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #64
rwmj wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> but there's not a ton of high performance Risc-V stuff happening.

Uhhh ... yes, there is.

Several companies designing very high performance RISC-V were founded in 2021 or so. Most of them have top designers fresh from designing the latest Apple, Intel, AMD chips and they are aiming to match current x86 and Apple performance.

You'll see their products in the market around 2026.

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

#75

Post by brucehoult »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #41

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.

The rival JH7110 SoC (it's like A55 to this chip's A72 -- slightly slower but cheaper and much lower power consumption) has PCIe. The VisionFive 2 brings one lane out to M.2 NVMe. The Star64 brings it out to a standard PCIe connector.

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

#76

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

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.

Western digital and Nvidia are both shipping riscv (just not as standalone processors)

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

#77

Post by camel-cdr »

alias_neo wrote: post #73
camel-cdr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

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

#78

Post by kragen »

camel-cdr wrote: post #69
kragen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

thanks, this information is fantastic

i really hope to have a chance to read your blog post! i haven't tried rvv programming at all

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

#80

Post by windowsrookie »

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 DisplayPort) HDMI Ethernet (1 gigabit) WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2

It's actually a pretty decent computer for being a no-name Chinese device. It has a backlit keyboard and my Microsoft Surface pen works perfectly on it. The 1280x800 LCD is low-res by todays standards, but at 8" is just fine. The 800 vertical resolution does mean that some modern apps get pushed behind the taskbar (on Windows 10). The cursor touchpad is difficult to be precise with, but you have the touchscreen with pen support if you need to select smaller items.

Around Black Friday it was $245 + tax (Without an SSD, I preferred to install my own name-brand SSD) so keep an eye out for sales.

The UEFI appears to be fully unlocked and has pages and pages of options. There are options to adjust CPU boost and voltage settings but I haven't been able to get the CPU to pull more than 6.5w.

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.

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