Comment by brucehoult

Yes, I've been using a K3 for a few weeks now. It's quite pleasant, and if I use all 16 cores (8x X100 and 8x A100) then it builds a Linux kernel almost 3x faster than my one year old Milk-V Megrez and almost 5x faster than K1.

    14m25.56s  SpacemiT K3, 8 X100 cores + 8 A100 cores
    16m55.637s SpacemiT K3, 8 X100 cores @2.4 GHz
    19m12.787s i9-13900HX, 24C/32T @5.4 GHz, riscv64/ubuntu docker
    39m23.187s SpacemiT K3, 8 A100 cores @2.0 GHz
    42m12.414s Milk-V Megrez, 4 P550 cores @1.8 GHz
    67m35.189s VisionFive 2, 4 U74 cores @1.5 GHz
    70m57.001s LicheePi 3A, 8 X60 cores @1.6 GHz

It's also great that it's now faster than a recent high end x86 with a lot of cores running QEMU.

Note that the all-cores K3 result is running a distccd on each cluster, which adds quite a bit of overhead compared to a simple `make` on local cores. All the same it shaves 2.5 minutes off. In theory, doing Amdahl calculation on the X100 and A100 times, it might be possible to get close to 11m50s with a more efficient means of using heterogenous cores, but distcc was easy to do.

RISC-V SBC single-core performance has been better than x86+QEMU since the VisionFive 2 (or HiFive Unmatched) but we didn't have enough cores unless you spent $2500 for a Pioneer.