StarFive VisionFive 2 Quad-Core RISC-V Performance Benchmarks

SiFive's HiFive Unmatched development board was interesting when it began shipping in 2021 with 16GB of RAM and four U74-MC RISC-V cores along with one S7 core. But pricing was rather steep at $665 USD. Fast forward two years, the StarFive VisionFive 2 has begun to enjoy wide availability and for $100+ this RISC-V development board features a quad-core RISC-V processor via the StarFive JH7110 SoC with integrated GPU, up to 8GB of RAM, HDMI 2.0 output, dual Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB 3.0 ports, and more for around $100 USD. Here are some benchmarks of this most interesting RISC-V single board computer in the ~$100 space to be released yet.

I've been following the StarFive VisionFive 2 and with it having passed the pre-order phase, Ubuntu and other distros supporting it, and more upstream development work happening around it and the JH7110 SoC, I decided to finally buy one of these boards. Without having to jump through any crowdfunding / pre-orders, the VisionFive 2 these days can be easily ordered from Amazon.com (affiliate link). For my testing purposes I opted for this kit for $115 that comes complete with accessories and is the LPDDR4 8GB version, the largest capacity currently offered for this RISC-V SBC.

It was very easy to get going with the StarFive VisionFive 2 and using its Debian Linux based default operating system. But as mentioned other Linux distributions have been working on VisionFive 2 / JH7110 SoC support along with more upstream work happening, though for today's initial testing I limited it to the reference Debian-based image.

This board doesn't have any PCI Express slot or quite as many features as the SiFive HiFive Unmatched that's since been discontinued, but its pricing at around $100 USD is a lot more attractive than being a $600+ development board. At around $100 USD for a quad-core RISC-V CPU, Imagination IMG BXE-4-32 MC1 graphics, LPDDR4 8GB of RAM, dual Gigabit Ethernet, 40-pin GPIO header, and dual USB 3.0 ports is a decent deal for those wanting to tinker with RISC-V hands-on.

There is a 2-pin fan header for active cooling with the VisionFive 2, which is how I configured it for the most optimal benchmarking experience while users at least would be encouraged to use a passive heatsink on the JH7110 SoC. The SBC is powered by a USB-C connection.

Curious about the quad-core RISC-V 1.5GHz JH7110 potential, I ran some benchmarks of it against the Raspberry Pi 400 and the Orange Pi 5. The Orange Pi 5 8GB is priced similarly at around $108 USD while featuring a Rockchip RK3588S AArch64 SoC with eight Cortex-A76 cores at 2.4GHz and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 cores. The Raspberry Pi 400 (Pi 4 effectively) features a Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 AArch64 SoC at 1.8GHz. The respective reference operating systems were running on each of these ARM/RISC-V single board computers. In the case of the VisionFive 2 its reference image is already using Debian 12 Bookworm and the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel.