SiFive RISC-V Sees Some Performance Improvements On Ubuntu 22.04

While SiFive has sadly shutdown production on the current HiFive Unmatched development board in order to focus on new products expected later this year, those with a SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V developer board can enjoy seeing continued performance improvements with newer Linux distributions. Here is a look at the SiFive FU740 SoC performance under the recently released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the prior 21.10 and 20.04 releases.

As shown in my SiFive HiFive Unmatched review last year, the RISC-V software state has been improving nicely. There were significant improvements from Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10 in particular. Given the recent Ubuntu 22.04 long-term support release, I was curious to check in on the SiFive FU740 performance evolution with that newest release.

The HiFive Unmatched is the only performant RISC-V hardware I have for local benchmarking / performance testing and thus the sole focus of today's RISC-V Ubuntu 22.04 testing compared to the earlier 21.04 and 21.10 benchmark results.

With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS the performance uplift isn't as dramatic with this LTS release still using the GCC 11.2 system compiler like Ubuntu 21.10. But this new Ubuntu Linux release does roll in the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel and various other software updates over what was previously offered on Ubuntu RISC-V.

Let's see how the Ubuntu 22.04 performance is looking for this SiFive Freedom U740 SoC development board.