Official Ubuntu RISC-V Images Released For StarFive's VisionFive Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Official Ubuntu RISC-V Images Released For StarFive's VisionFive Board

Earlier this summer I wrote about Canonical working to provide good support for StarFive's VisionFive low-cost RISC-V board. That work has now culminated with an Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image for use on this Chinese RISC-V single board computer...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-22.04.1-VisionFive-RISCV

[ayumu]

Meanwhile StarFive is already teasing that the VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC will be coming out soon as its successor.

There's an announcement presentation in the RISC-V Summit schedule, which is happening next week.

[RedEyed]

Well done, Canonical

[rabcor]

I mean if you get me one of these RISC V boards that's capable of running simple games like league of legends and minecraft at 1080p 60fps, I'd probably buy one, strap it to the back of a monitor and use ot for some low-power general computing.

I know what I'm asking; but apple could do it (and quite a lot more) with ARM, surely someone can do it with RISC V.

[pppkin]

I bought this half a year ago and finally received it last month; Currently I run a archlinux port on it. It works great but from I can tell is really on the edge of overheating. I might add a fan to it later just to be safe.
Also the specs says it has a VPU(Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6) and neural engine on it. I failed to find useful documentation on these things. Does anyone know how to utilize them and maybe run some demos?

[arQon]

I know what I'm asking; but apple could do it (and quite a lot more) with ARM, surely someone can do it with RISC V.

ARM has a massive head start, and Apple can manufacture its chips on leading edge nodes. RISC-V is many years behind in design, and many many years behind in implementation. It's not that it "can't" be done, it's just that it can't practically be done *now* - and almost certainly not next year either, and probably not the year after that.

Even if the designs were ready, which AFAIK they aren't, there'd need to be a foundry for them and a customer wanting tens of millions of them. Since RISC-V seems to be mostly for the Chinese market, I'd guess the current political situation makes it unlikely that even the 8 series would be on anything smaller than 10nm.

[pkese]

ARM has a massive head start, and Apple can manufacture its chips on leading edge nodes. RISC-V is many years behind in design, and many many years behind in implementation. It's not that it "can't" be done, it's just that it can't practically be done *now* - and almost certainly not next year either, and probably not the year after that.

Even if the designs were ready, which AFAIK they aren't, there'd need to be a foundry for them and a customer wanting tens of millions of them. Since RISC-V seems to be mostly for the Chinese market, I'd guess the current political situation makes it unlikely that even the 8 series would be on anything smaller than 10nm.

They are about 3-4 years behind. SiFive's U78 released in 2019/2020 had similar performance as ARM A72 which was released in 2016.
Now their P650 is in the ballpark of A77 which came out in 2019, so again a 3-year difference.

However they need to popularize their vector extensions in order to actually get competitive beyond just integer benchmarks.
And until they deliver laptop class CPUs, they'll stay confined in the embedded world.

[PerformanceExpert]

They are about 3-4 years behind. SiFive's U78 released in 2019/2020 had similar performance as ARM A72 which was released in 2016.
Now their P650 is in the ballpark of A77 which came out in 2019, so again a 3-year difference.

However they need to popularize their vector extensions in order to actually get competitive beyond just integer benchmarks.
And until they deliver laptop class CPUs, they'll stay confined in the embedded world.

Anyone can post powerpoint slides about an amazing core that beats the competition years before it is finished and available. Cortex-A72 was announced early 2015 and available in Huawei Mate 8 early 2016. There hasn't been any news at all about U84, P550 or P650 being available in actual devices, so any claims of "only X years behind" are off by quite a few years...

Yes, those SiFive cores don't have vector extensions. And that means claims of similar performance as modern Cortex cores are even more dubious.