Comment by dmitrygr
2 months ago
IF you care to read the article, they indeed do not blame the architecture but the available silicon implementations.
2 months ago
IF you care to read the article, they indeed do not blame the architecture but the available silicon implementations.
I did read it. A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform. The title is misleading.
BTW, it's quite impressive how the s390x is so fast per core compared to the others. I mean, of course it's fast - we all knew that.
And don't let IBM legal see this can be considered a published benchmark, because they are very shy about s390x performance numbers.
> A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform.
What is the current fastest platform that isn’t exorbitantly expensive? Not upcoming releases, but something I can actually buy.
I check in every 3-6 months but the situation hasn’t changed significantly yet.
A P550 based board is the best you can get for now (~2-3x faster than the Banana Pi). In 2-3 months there should be a number of SpaceMIT k3 chips that are ~4-6x faster than the banana pi and somewhat reasonably priced (~200-300). By the end of the year, however, you should be able to get an ascalon chip which should be way way faster than that (roughly apple m1/zen3 speed)
What is the current fastest ppc64le implementation that isn’t exorbitantly expensive? How about the s390x?
I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.
What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.
The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.
1 reply →
Probably because that's just the infrastructure they have.
i686 builds even faster
>I did read it. A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform. The title is misleading.
Ironically, its SoC (spacemiT K1) is slower than the JH7110 used in the first mass-produced RISC-V SBC, VisionFive 2.
But unlike JH7110, it has vector 1.0, making it a very popular target.
Of course, none of these pre-RVA23 boards will be relevant anymore, once the first development boards with RVA23-compatible K3 ship next month.
These are also much faster than anything RISC-V currently purchasable. Developers have been playing with them for months through ssh access.
Which risc-v implementation is considered fast?
> Which risc-v implementation is considered fast?
SpacemiT K3 is 2010 Macbook performance single-core, 2019 Macbook Air multi-core, and better than M4 Apple Silicon for AI.
So I guess it depends on what you are going to do with it.
1 reply →
DC-ROMA 2 is on the Rasperry 4 level of performance last I heard
[flagged]
2 replies →
I keep checking in on Tenstorrent every few months thinking Keller is going to rock our world... losing hope.
At this point the most likely place for truly competitive RISC-V to appear is China.
Tenstorrent is supposedly taping out 8-wide Ascalon processors as we speak, with devboards projected to be available in Q2/Q3 this year.
BTW. Keller is also on the board of AheadComputing — founded by former Intel engineers behind the fabled "Royal Core".
I can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K.
That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.
2 replies →
>Ascalon tape out
Supposedly happened earlier this year. Tenstorrent says devboards in Q3.
Now we just wait.
> At this point the most likely place for fast RISC-V to appear is China.
Or we just adopt Loongson.
TBH I still don't really get how it's different from MIPS. As far as I can tell... Loongson seems to be really just MIPS, while LoongArch is MIPS with some extra instructions.
6 replies →
(purely on vibes) loongson feels to me like an intermediate step/backup strategy rather than a longterm target (though they'll probably power govt equipment for decades of legacy either way :p)
But they didn't reflect that in a title like "current RISC-V silicon Is Sloooow" ...
Then how do you justify the title?