SiFive HiFive Premier P550 Announced As New RISC-V Developer Board

[Dawn]

Yes it's older, but the A75's are only marginally worse then A76's in many tasks. However you have double the ram, LPDDR5 ram at that. the RPI5 has no NPU, I can't comment on the gpu

also below is what is said, I think this adequately covers pretty much everything you listed

A75->A76 is a large difference at iso clock - tens of percent. Additionally, the A76 has a SIMD unit, while the P550 does not support the RISC-V vector extension. For some applications this will matter quite a bit - anything to do with encoding/decoding of audio or video.

Clock speed matters here too - the Pi5 is 2.4GHz. Even setting aside vectorizable code streams that will benefit from the Pi's NEON, if P550 really is A75 class, which is not proven, it would need to hit ~3GHz to match it on plain ol' scalar spaghetti. The original Hifive Pro "Horse Creek" board that was supposed to be the P550's showcase was targeted at 2.2GHz. As far as I can tell, Sifive hasn't disclosed a clock speed on the Premier, but I'd be surprised if it's above 2.5. (LinuxGizmos says 1.4GHz, but they also say the M.2 slot is SDIO, so I think they can be safely ignored on this one.)

tl;dr: LockedPotato's original claim of being "a lot faster than a Pi5" is clearly a lie.

[Quackdoc]

A75->A76 is a large difference at iso clock - tens of percent. Additionally, the A76 has a SIMD unit, while the P550 does not support the RISC-V vector extension. For some applications this will matter quite a bit - anything to do with encoding/decoding of audio or video.

Clock speed matters here too - the Pi5 is 2.4GHz. Even setting aside vectorizable code streams that will benefit from the Pi's NEON, if P550 really is A75 class, which is not proven, it would need to hit ~3GHz to match it on plain ol' scalar spaghetti. The original Hifive Pro "Horse Creek" board that was supposed to be the P550's showcase was targeted at 2.2GHz. As far as I can tell, Sifive hasn't disclosed a clock speed on the Premier, but I'd be surprised if it's above 2.5. (LinuxGizmos says 1.4GHz, but they also say the M.2 slot is SDIO, so I think they can be safely ignored on this one.)

tl;dr: LockedPotato's original claim of being "a lot faster than a Pi5" is clearly a lie.

So talking specifically and only about cpu (which is flawed at best) A75 -> A76 in real world tests I've found to rarely be actually that better when I have tested, I've tested mutliple android devices, Rockchips device for A76 and some chinese handheld for A75, I think it had a tiger soc? I didn't have as much time as I wanted. So yes, the cores themselves are A75 and lower speed then raspberry pi. But in my experience A75 -> A76 isn't so much of a significant different that it will matter too much. Especially when you look at existing SBCs (and "android boxes")

SiFive claims this on their p550 performance page

- 3x Performance per mm2 compared to Arm® Cortex®-A75
- Performance >8.6 SpecINT2k6/GHz, higher single thread performance than Arm Cortex-A75

But this is only when talking about raw CPU in isolation, As I mentioned the SOC that is shipping on these devices also have a NPU, now we don't know much about the NPU, but "a NPU" is better then "no NPU" and has at least 13 tops of int power. This absolutely has to be considered. Many people are now running "AI accelerated stuff" Especially for the market that this is designed for.

[Dawn]

So talking specifically and only about cpu (which is flawed at best) A75 -> A76 in real world tests I've found to rarely be actually that better when I have tested, I've tested mutliple android devices, Rockchips device for A76 and some chinese handheld for A75, I think it had a tiger soc? I didn't have as much time as I wanted. So yes, the cores themselves are A75 and lower speed then raspberry pi. But in my experience A75 -> A76 isn't so much of a significant different that it will matter too much. Especially when you look at existing SBCs (and "android boxes")

Cool, me too - actual benchmarks on a range of devices. I've literally never seen a serious CPU-throughput-bound application gain less than 15% from A75 to A76. Normal gains are 20-40% at iso clock. A76 is a wider, meaner machine across the board, and third-party benchmarks that aren't my anecdotes or yours (look at Anandtech's SPEC runs) confirm that.

I don't care about the NPU and I'm not inclined to comment on it. My expertise is CPU microarchitecture, not random accelerators for workloads I've seen nobody running IRL.

[pkese]

Cortex-A75 is very old, it is from 2017, it more than half a decade old.
Performing better than Cortex-A75 is not impressive. It is lame.

SiFive P550 came out in 2021.
Since then, they released also P670 and P870 (much more performant cores).

[PublicNuisance]

I regret not buying a HiFive Unleashed when I had the chance. Hopefully I won't make the same mistake with this if I have the money.

[rmfx]

Just get a Raspberry Pi 5 instead which is much, much, much cheaper and probably faster too.

This thing doesn't got GPU, audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, M.2 slot, SATA, or anything.

The point is to dev with a reference implementation of RISC-V, hence do some RISC-V assembly work and more...
It's absolutely not a Raspberry Pi competitor!

[Quackdoc]

The point is to dev with a reference implementation of RISC-V, hence do some RISC-V assembly work and more...
It's absolutely not a Raspberry Pi competitor!

yup, waiting for the lichee pi4a's succsessor for that, which also has p550 cores, and sipeed also announced products using the P670 cores which is cortex-a78 class cores. though I don't think sipeed has stated for sure that it will be their existing SOM format (so drop in compatibility with any of the lichee pi4a devices)

[uid313]

The point is to dev with a reference implementation of RISC-V, hence do some RISC-V assembly work and more...
It's absolutely not a Raspberry Pi competitor!

Well you could probably do that by cross-compiling RISC-V binaries on a x86 machine and running QEMU.

[microcode]

What is UFS...

Universal Flash Storage, a standardized connection for small device (tablets, phones, that sort of thing) flash storage. It's essentially meant to supersede eMMC.

[cb88]

A75->A76 is a large difference at iso clock - tens of percent. Additionally, the A76 has a SIMD unit, while the P550 does not support the RISC-V vector extension. For some applications this will matter quite a bit - anything to do with encoding/decoding of audio or video.

For which you can just plug in an AMD GPU and encode/decode all day long at faster rates than the pi5.

This also harks back to the whole issue of AVX512 mostly being crap except for a few corner cases.... if you are doing a real long running program you'd write it for the GPU not the CPU.