[HN Gopher] RISC-V based Single Board Computers are getting there
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RISC-V based Single Board Computers are getting there
Author : bmlw
Score : 119 points
Date : 2022-07-31 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bret.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bret.dk)
| ffhhj wrote:
| Is there some single board computer without RAM, but that allows
| addressing SSD space as such?
| punnerud wrote:
| Wouldn't that kill the SSD after some time?
|
| HomeAssistant running SQLite on on a small cheap MicroSD card,
| kill it a couple of months.
|
| Each memory cell have a lifespan of [?] 1000 write cycles, if I
| remember correctly.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I've had Home Assistant running on the same 32GB SD card for
| over 3 years now, and the DB is several GB thanks to several
| _very_ chatty Z-Wave devices. Zero issues so far. So it 's
| not a given it'll die in a couple of months.
| ffhhj wrote:
| An SSD hard disk instead of SD card?
|
| Maybe such computer should use some sort of treadmill
| allocation.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| SD card and SSD's have a latency on the order of 500us, while
| even a Raspberry Pi 3 has a memory latency[1] of around 200ns.
| That's three orders of magnitude difference in latency, which
| would destroy performance.
|
| In addition, memory bandwidth is still at least an order of
| magnitude higher.
|
| [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/11296737
| ffhhj wrote:
| Sure, but old computers managed to get things done with much
| lower resources. What really seems missing in old computers
| is memory.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Sure but they had much lower resources all around. Why
| cripple a high-performance CPU by not having RAM?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Great to see alternatives.
|
| A tangent, but bear with me: after finishing the really good book
| The End of the World is Just Beginning, I think it makes a lot of
| sense to continue building cutting edge tech that requires
| international supply chains, BUT, also having locally
| manufactured tech good enough to power locally sourced computers,
| run tractors, etc. International supply chains have enriched many
| areas of the planet but to assume that they will last seems very
| risky. Always have a Plan B.
|
| EDIT: call this Plan B Tech
| [deleted]
| javajosh wrote:
| To what extent do we need computers? They feel indispensable
| but we could go back to more labor intensive information
| systems. And that wouldnt be all bad.
| arise wrote:
| Farmers use GPS and other technologies to plant crops with
| inch-level accuracy while maximizing land utilization and
| minimizing fuel/fertilizer. Take that away and somebody's
| going to starve (or start a war to keep from starving). This
| might play out in Africa soon with the collapse of Ukrainian
| grain imports.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| It's a good question, if we didn't have small microprocessors
| the alternatives would tend to be more material intensive (eg
| mechanical governors or clockwork) or be less efficient.
|
| We'd lose the Internet and cellphones, have to go back to
| mechanical telephone exchanges.
|
| I think we would miss CNC a lot, it's how the majority of
| production work gets done now in many industries, the manual
| machines are in the corner for one-offs.
|
| The computer controlled machines also tend to be making parts
| or doing QC or measurement to support the non computerised
| ones. So sure your injection moulder or box cutter might not
| need too many chips but wait until the molds and tooling wear
| out.
|
| Although who can send your factory orders anyway...
|
| We'd lose basically all capacity to print (billboards,
| t-shirts, books, office memos etc) , which seems bad. Like we
| had less digital ways to do all that stuff but they went
| away. It's not easy to go back.
|
| Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray.
|
| Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would
| disappear which would require massive rework. We'd lose the
| electric grid until people figured out how to decomputerise
| it. Probably trains, traffic lights, airlines, cars, shipping
| would be impacted in a variety of fundamental ways.
|
| The postal service would need to be re-architected (current
| reliance on parcel sorters and scanners).
|
| Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. Small words but huge
| implications.
|
| We'd have to move back to analog tv, radio and media
| production workflows would change dramatically.
|
| It's an interesting exercise to try and figure out what
| industries would hurt the most if chips disappeared tomorrow,
| I'm pretty sure it would be a catastrophe but it's not easy
| to follow it all through.
| dragonmost wrote:
| We need chips in everything. Cars could work without them but
| would be much less efficient and bad for the environnement.
| Lots of very important medical devices rely on chips or full
| computers. I would like to see the media industry roll back
| to a lower tech leaving only the big and very bias
| information go through. Imagine how hard it would be to keep
| them accountable.
|
| Is it possible to live without computers? Yes, but you don't
| want to.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| The C906 is very slow, but so is, it appears, the Pi Zero.
|
| The good news is that there are a lot of faster options right
| around the corner. The Pine folks is working on releasing Star64
| (quad SiFive FU740 1.5GHz) [1] and I know of at least two other
| RISC-V SBCs in the pipeline. I'm not quite ready to declare "2022
| is the year of the RISC-V desktop" yet though.
|
| [1] https://www.hackster.io/news/pine64-formally-unveils-the-
| sta...
|
| Note, the FU740 is in-order dual-issue with a comfortable L2
| cache.
| Narishma wrote:
| The Pi Zero uses the same SoC as the original 2012 Raspberry
| Pi, and it was already long in the tooth even then so that's
| not really surprising.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah it's already legacy hardware, it should be comparing
| against the Zero 2 if anything, the original Zero was
| comically underpowered.
|
| But the speed is all but irrelevant, the issue with these
| alternative boards is always in software support. No point in
| using them even if they're twice as fast if I can't apt get
| anything and have to compile shit from source wasting 10
| times as much time. Is there even an arch tag for riscv yet
| like armhf and arm64? I'd assume there is, but I can't find
| it and the support is likely to be abysmal this early on.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora have had distributions for _many
| years_. Others like FreeBSD, etc also exist. I often take a
| break and spend a day working _entirely_ on a RISC-V host
| (BeagleV beta). Everything I care about work 100% the same,
| most notably Emacs and all the dev tools (Rust, C,
| Haskell).
|
| The only thing that I hit in the (old) Fedora 33/RISC-V is
| Firefox's lacking support for WASM, but that could be
| working in the latest version.
|
| If you want to try it for yourself under QEMU, I'd
| recommend following the instruction here:
| https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Introduced 2010; 12 years ago
|
| Ok, am I going completely mad? Feels like the first
| RISC-V a person could actually buy released shortly
| before the pandemic...
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| SiFive released the Linux capable RISC-V dev kits years
| ago and for long time now there has been many options
| besides what SiFive offers. Only few however are "cheap".
|
| Maybe not mad, but certainly not very good at searching.
| rambambram wrote:
| I've been using a RPi 4 with 8GB RAM and Ubuntu Mate as the
| OS for a full year now as my daily workstation. I code, I
| design... even video-editing and opening multiple tabs with
| YouTube works perfectly fine (although maybe not as fast as
| a beefier machine).
|
| P.S. Besides, it's perfectly silent, since a passive
| aluminum cooling block with a rib structure cools it
| enough.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| You have to admire how long Broadcom has been manufacturing
| that chip considering it isn't an automotive or defense
| design...
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Kind of weird to perform extensive benchmarks against an outdated
| version. The Pi Zero 2 is a lot faster!
| bmlw wrote:
| It is, though these 2 boards are the closest in terms of
| specifications "on paper" as they both offer a single 1GHz
| core, 512MB of RAM (unless you go for the 1GB MQ Pro) etc.
| Comparing it to the RPi Zero 2 felt a bit pointless in a
| standalone head-to-head piece. There'll be a separate post in a
| few weeks comparing all of the "zero" style boards from the
| various vendors that may give you what you're looking for!
| bullen wrote:
| They need OpenGL ES 3, and apparently the Star64 will have that,
| remains to be seen how performant the GPU is:
|
| https://www.imaginationtech.com/product/img-bxe-2-32/
|
| Anything between VideoCore 6 and Jetson Nano would make Risc-V
| interesting!
| anewpersonality wrote:
| smoldesu wrote:
| > remains to be seen how performant the GPU is
|
| I think this is going to be the real make-or-break thing about
| RISC-V: early tests have shown super impressive SIMD/vector
| benchmarks compared to ARM/x86, but whether or not that will
| make it into production is another question entirely. I've got
| high hopes for RISC-V, but it's acceleration/HPC workload
| performance is going to determine whether it topples ARM or
| becomes the next Itanium.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Unlike Itanium, RISC-V is an ISA and there are many many
| different _implementations_ of the ISA. You cannot conclude
| anything about the former based on a few instances of the
| latter. Patience.
| csdvrx wrote:
| The Jetson nano being stuck on Ubuntu 18 is quite a shame...
| synergy20 wrote:
| and it is EOL...
| st3fan wrote:
| Right now the only metric I care about is: does it actually ship.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| In this regard RISC-V has a whole lot of catching up to do if
| it wants to be something other than a footnote in the story of
| the ARM takeover of the world.
|
| I know the openness of the RISC-V platform is ideal to hardcore
| FOSS fans, but they're far outnumbered by those who will be
| satisfied with the cheap, fast, and plentiful ARM chips
| currently on the market, and the cheaper and faster ones sure
| to come.
| bmlw wrote:
| Hah, it does! Though the 2 production runs they've done sold
| out pretty quickly. I think some 3rd party stores on AliExpress
| snapped some up and are reselling them, though if you follow
| their official twitter (@mangopi_sbc) they post their official
| page when there's more stock. They recently posted a picture of
| new boards being manufactured so there's hope!
| aarroyoc wrote:
| I bought the Mango Pi MQ-Pro a month ago and while at first the
| software support was missing (only Tina Linux was available),
| later some ISOs started to appear. Right now I'm using the
| Armbian headless image based on Ubuntu 22.04[0] which works
| almost perfect and allows me to work on porting things to RISC-V.
|
| [0]: https://bret.dk/armbian-on-the-mangopi-mq-pro/
| bb88 wrote:
| I would like more SBC options, rather than the solitary RPi right
| now. My sdcard shield popped off the RPi I have, and I had to
| resolder it back on. Two years ago, I would have just trashed it
| and bought another.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I suspect the high expense/unavailability of the Rpi is a
| result of supply chain issues and would affect other sbcs as
| well, am I wrong?
| bb88 wrote:
| MCU's are basically locked to a vendor currently. You choose
| a chip, make your design around it, and hope there won't be a
| shortage from that vendor, and it's high enough on the
| vendor's priority list to not hurt your product.
|
| If there was a RiscV chip that met a particular standard (x
| voltage range, y clock speed, same supporting circuitry and
| software), then we'd have multiple chip vendors creating the
| same part, and hopefully it would turn into a jelly bean
| chip.
| bmlw wrote:
| You have so many options! I have Raspberry, Banana, Mango and
| Orange Pi boards sat here. NanoPi, Rock Pi, Radxa, Beaglebone
| etc all have alternatives available too.
| guyomes wrote:
| Also Olinuxino from Olimex, chosen [1] to host the solar-
| powered website low tech magazine [2].
|
| [1] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-
| howto.html#serv...
|
| [2] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
| bb88 wrote:
| Loading octoprint on an RPi is a seamless experience today.
| Are other boards as seamless as the RPi?
| ephbit wrote:
| Also Odroid
| colonwqbang wrote:
| There is so much available beyond Rpi. I recently got one of
| these:
|
| https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/
|
| It has four lanes of PCI express so you can connect a big NVMe
| SSD or whatever. In my testing it seems to run OK on only
| passive cooling.
| tryptophan wrote:
| But do any of them have software support? Most of these rpi
| knockoffs only ever release 1 kernel version and you are
| stuck on it forever.
| sylware wrote:
| huho! Finally a RISC-V 64bits SOC with tons of GPIOs! But for a
| keyboard controller power would be provided via the usb-c from
| the host, it seems the mangopi expect power on a dedicated usb-c
| connector. Am I wrong?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| magicalhippo wrote:
| According to the schematics[1], both HOST and OTG ports have
| VBUS directly connected to the same VCCIN net, so either can
| provide power as far as I can see.
|
| [1]: https://mangopi.cc/_media/mq-pro-sch-v12.pdf (page 3 top
| left)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What if I don't want a SBC and want the ability to upgrade the
| memory?
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| The focus seems to currently be on SoC. Even ARM is not easy to
| get in a memory-upgradable form.
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