SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V Developer Boards Begin Shipping

[schmidtbag]

i am temped to make a nas/small home server out of this... but i would like to see more ram, 16 lanes pcie3 (not 8), and two m2 x4. i'll keep an eye on this.

Why do you need more than 16GB for a NAS?

if someone has it: will emby work?

In theory it should work (if it works on ARMv7, it ought to work on RISC-V), but there doesn't appear to be anything officially supported.

[brucehoult]

I'd like to know how the open source drivers hold up when using an AMD graphics card in that slot.

AMD graphics cards have been working just fine on the predecessor board for three years. This board was recently demonstrated running Extreme Tux Racer at 43 FPS. Not a killer gaming machine, but it works.

[brucehoult]

Seems to have support by Debian : https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V#SiFiv...e_Unmatched.22
Here is how to install Debian on it : https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDe...bian_on_HiFive

Debian is rather "a lot of assembly required". Ubuntu has a 21.04 image for this exact board ready to burn onto a card.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V

Depending on how this performs I am almost tempted to swap out a Xeon E5335 (8 core) server with this. Looking forward to some benchmarks

The CPUs in this may be comparable to a 1 GHz P III. They're definitely a lot slower than a 2 GHz "Core". The modern M.2 SSD and DDR4 RAM should be better than a Core in some applications, but the CPU cores themselves are significantly weaker -- they're a little better than a Pi 3, probably about half the speed of a Pi 4 (but again with better I/O).

[microcode]

It'll be cool if, when they design something in the Cortex A78 or X1 range of complexity, they do another ATX compatible board.

The U8 thing looks to be sorta half way there, and it'll be their first OoO design.

[flower]

Why do you need more than 16GB for a NAS?

well "need" is strong - its just a preference. my current one has 64gb ecc ram.
ram is not that expensive and allows nice things. eg ramdisks

[TMM_]

they're a little better than a Pi 3, probably about half the speed of a Pi 4 (but again with better I/O).

Yeah, the various PCI-E ports on this thing make it very interesting to me at least. I got one.

[WorBlux]

Why do you need more than 16GB for a NAS?

ZFS can always use more. Or you want to run media transcode in RAM.

But this doesn't really seem like a NAS + media server. Unless you mean to run a single 4/8TB m.2 drive. It seems to be either stick in a Radeon RX550 as a media client* or basic dev. desktop. Or stick in an LSI 9211-8i and NAS it up. Anything for serious is looking at expansion limitation or CPU bottleneck. -

*As far as Emby - For a client, you'd have to ask them to compile to a Risc-V 64 Target. . The server or open source components will likely work. Debain stable nearly has full coverage for Risc-V. For video acceleartion you want to sick to AMD cards, as they have the best track record of closs-platform support.

[waxhead]

Debian is rather "a lot of assembly required". Ubuntu has a 21.04 image for this exact board ready to burn onto a card.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V

Well Ubuntu is not my cup of tea to be honest. I have had nothing but issues with it, and prefer to use Debian. Thanks for the tip though!

The CPUs in this may be comparable to a 1 GHz P III. They're definitely a lot slower than a 2 GHz "Core". The modern M.2 SSD and DDR4 RAM should be better than a Core in some applications, but the CPU cores themselves are significantly weaker -- they're a little better than a Pi 3, probably about half the speed of a Pi 4 (but again with better I/O).

So maybe not that bad after all. If there is essentially 5x ~ 1Ghz P III's with a lot faster memory access it might actually suffice. Again thanks for the info , looking forward to benchmarks!

[WorBlux]

The CPUs in this may be comparable to a 1 GHz P III. They're definitely a lot slower than a 2 GHz "Core". The modern M.2 SSD and DDR4 RAM should be better than a Core in some applications, but the CPU cores themselves are significantly weaker -- they're a little better than a Pi 3, probably about half the speed of a Pi 4 (but again with better I/O).

It's an 8-stage dual issue in-order cpu. It beats the P3 in DMIPS/Mhz. and coremark/Mhz. It's more comparable to the ARM A55, so closer to Pi 3 than Pi 4. With the big fat caveat that there is no Vector or SIMD extensions present.

[brucehoult]

It's an 8-stage dual issue in-order cpu. It beats the P3 in DMIPS/Mhz. and coremark/Mhz. It's more comparable to the ARM A55, so closer to Pi 3 than Pi 4. With the big fat caveat that there is no Vector or SIMD extensions present.

Where did you find Pentium III figures? I looked but failed so I'm going off general principles.

I believe Pentium III (like PowerPC G4) was actually several different micro-architectures with the later 900 MHz and 1 GHz ones being better. Also testing with a current compiler would probably produce better results than a compiler from 2000.

I've just pulled a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac Mini out of storage to try some comparisons. I don't have an Intel machine of that vintage (and I was using Athlon from 700 MHz to "3200+" anyway)