Comment by fresh_broccoli
7 hours ago
As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.
The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
The SpacemiT K3 with 8 SpacemiT X100 RVA23 cores, which are faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5, should be available in a couple of months:
geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076
rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/...
There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator for number crunshing.
The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
> The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
So the main difference between this Milk-V Titan and the upcoming SpacemiT K3 is that the latter has better vector performance?
The Titan has no SIMD/Vector support at all, so it doesn't support RVA23.
I'm not even sure it's just instruction support that's the problem with the RV2. I bought one since I thought it would be cool to write a bare metal os for it (especially after I found the AI results to be so bad.) But the lack of documentation has been making it very hard to get anything actually up and running. The best I've got is compiling their custom u-boot and linux repos, and even those come with some problems.
I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.
Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.
Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.
Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.
What is the difference in performance?
Titan hw docs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967
I’d also like an updated RISC-V Framework laptop board. There is one but it’s too limited. If they came out with that I’d try it as a laptop.
I mean a board with decent storage and better performance.