StarFive VisionFive 2 Quad-Core RISC-V Performance Benchmarks

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

That's pretty meaningless, the kernel used is very old and it should be compared to something similar like a pi 3b

Not meaningless at all actually. Using a 6.5 RC kernel isn't going to magically make this thing 2x or 10x faster. These are slow cores. We are a decade or more away from RISC-V being performant enough that most people would be able to tolerate using it as a daily driver in a desktop or laptop. The A76 cores in the Orange Pi 5 that are almost an order of magnitude faster in these benchmarks are already half a decade old and aren't even good "middle cores" in current smartphones.

[JEBjames]

Michael

Typo page 1

"Without having to jump through and crowdfunding / pre-orders" probably should be "Without having to jump through any crowdfunding / pre-orders"

[citral]

Not meaningless at all actually. Using a 6.5 RC kernel isn't going to magically make this thing 2x or 10x faster. These are slow cores. We are a decade or more away from RISC-V being performant enough that most people would be able to tolerate using it as a daily driver in a desktop or laptop. The A76 cores in the Orange Pi 5 that are almost an order of magnitude faster in these benchmarks are already half a decade old and aren't even good "middle cores" in current smartphones.

You'd be surprised, I've seen as much as 30% boosts over simple instructions implementations on mips.

[jorgepl]

How about Arch Linux RiscV or Fedora RiscV?

[coder]

These are slow cores. We are a decade or more away from RISC-V being performant enough that most people would be able to tolerate using it as a daily driver in a desktop or laptop.

Just because these cores are roughly where ARM was, a decade ago, doesn't mean it'll take that long for them to catch up. It won't. The RISC-V race is really heating up. There are lots of examples I could point to, but not if you want me to show you working systems you can buy, today.

Believe what you want. However, if you don't want to be surprised by the future, then you should open your eyes and look around a bit more.

The A76 cores in the Orange Pi 5 that are almost an order of magnitude faster in these benchmarks are already half a decade old and aren't even good "middle cores" in current smartphones.

Did you realize the SiFive cores in this SoC are probably less that a year newer than the A76? And they're not even the fastest SiFive cores of that vintage?

https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/11...d-u74-mc-cores

Yup, that was published at about the same time as the very first A76-powered smartphone started shipping!

This SoC was clearly not designed to be the fastest thing out there, or they'd have used newer, faster cores. I also can't tell what manufacturing node it was made on, but I seriously doubt it's comparable to the 8 nm node used to make the RK3588, which powers the Orange Pi 5.

[bloominstrong]

What about non cpu/gpu benchmarks?
For board like this people as well think about NAS or firewall usages, means (disk)I/O or Network could be interesting as well.

I have a couple of these boards I did use one as a firewall for testing, from memory I was getting ~600Mb/s max throughput and down to ~350Mb/s once I added in all the NAT firewall rules. I have been waiting for OpenWRT support to be a little more stable before giving that a try.

[brucehoult]

The price interests me but the lack of storage options would be my biggest nitpick. I wouldn't expect an NVME slot but even an EMMC spot would have been nice. As pricey as the Unmatched was I regret not getting one as it was perfect for me from a feature standpoint.

The board has both an eMMC socket (Odriod/Pine64 defacto standard) and NVMe via an M.2 slot.

[brucehoult]

Not meaningless at all actually. Using a 6.5 RC kernel isn't going to magically make this thing 2x or 10x faster. These are slow cores.

Agreed. I've been using Linux for 30 years. Anyone who thinks six months or two years difference between kernel versions is significant is showing how n00b they are.

We are a decade or more away from RISC-V being performant enough that most people would be able to tolerate using it as a daily driver in a desktop or laptop.

No. Other RISC-V boards you can buy off the shelf now (Beagle-V Ahead, Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A) are already actually comparable to Pi 4, the HiFive Pro P550 due out this year (Intel demonstrated the SoC at a conference a year ago) is comparable to A76.

RISC-V cores already announced (which means customers can start to design them into chips, which will be out in 2026 or 2027) are comparable to late 2020 Apple M1, which will be a tolerable machine even in 2027.

The A76 cores in the Orange Pi 5 that are almost an order of magnitude faster in these benchmarks are already half a decade old and aren't even good "middle cores" in current smartphones.

The A76 was announced in May 2018, the U74 in October 2018. The first SBCs with A76 (RK3588) shipped in May or so 2022, the first mass production SBCs with U74 in February 2023. They are nearly the same age.

The difference is that the A76 is simply a more advanced µarch. SiFive's A76-equivalent µarch, the P550, was announced in June 2021 -- three years behind Arm.

Don't forget Arm has been in business for over thirty years, while the base RISC-V ISA itself was frozen (ratified) only four years ago in July 2019.

Also, the RISC-V equivalent of NEON/SVE was ratified in November 2021, so current chips don't have it, so comparing libraries that heavily use NEON to a machine without SIMD at all is just stupid. OF COURSE the machine without SIMD will lose badly -- you don't even need to run the benchmark to know that.

Cheap RISC-V boards with A76-class or better cores (M1-class is likely) and the Vector extension will be here in 2026. That's not some wishful crystal ball gazing, that's just knowing what is already in the normal four-year hardware production pipeline.

"A decade or more"? No way.

[zexelon]

I predict "The Year of RISC-V" will happen in the same "Year of the Linux Desktop"...

[Paradigm Shifter]

I bought one of these a while ago basically to tinker around with as it's not x86 or ARM. At the time was a bit of a wossname to get working and the documentation was pretty minimal. I'll find a spare uSD and try from scratch again to see if it's improved.

An Orange Pi 5 would be interesting to play with as well, but they start at parity price here (for the bottom-end model) and work their way to around a 300-400% price difference for the higher specced models (and supporting bits 'n' bobs).

And honestly, if I'm going to blow 50-60,000JPY on a system, it's going to x86-64 and with at least some upgradability.