Comment by kombine
19 days ago
> 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?
19 days ago
> 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.
The K3 is able to run RVA23 code, the Titan is not; it lacks V.
It matters, as the ecosystem settled on RVA23 as the baseline for application processors.
Well, today it is only Ubuntu 25.10 and newer that require RVA23. Almost everything else will run on plain old RV64GC which this board handles no problem.
But you are correct that once RVA23 chips begin to appear, everybody will move to it quite quickly.
RVA23 provides essentially the same feature-set as ARM64 or x86-64v4 including both virtualization and vector capabilities. In other words, RVA23 is the first RISC-V profile to match what modern applications and workflows require.
The good news is that I expect this to remain the minimum profile for quite a long time. Even once RVA30 and future profiles appear, there may not be much pressure for things like Linux distributions to drop support for RVA23. This is a lot like the modern x86-64 space where almost all Linux distributions work just fine on x86-64 v1 even though there are now v2, v3, and v4 available as well. You can run the latest edition of Arch Linux on hardware from 2005. It is hard to predict the future but it would not surprise me if Ubuntu 30.04 LTS ran just fine on RISC-V hardware released later this year.
But ya, anything before RVA23, like the RVA22 Titan we are discussing here, will be stuck forever on older distros or custom builds (like Ubuntu 25.04).