[HN Gopher] RISC-V HiFive Premier P550 Development Boards with U...
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RISC-V HiFive Premier P550 Development Boards with Ubuntu Now
Available
Author : fork-bomber
Score : 112 points
Date : 2024-12-11 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sifive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sifive.com)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Can someone who is more familiar with this SoC confirm for me
| that this P550 doesn't have the RISC-V "V" vector extensions? I'm
| seeing a GBC suffix which I guess means bit manipulation,
| compressed instructions, and whatever the G extension is which I
| don't fully understand (IMAFD plz explain?)
| insom wrote:
| G includes MAFD extensions for non-embedded (I) applications.
| That's multiplication and division, atomics, single and double-
| precision floating point. It also includes the control/status
| register and a instruction-fence instruction. I think it's
| there to mean "the base plus the standard bits that people
| generally want in a processor if they're writing C for it".
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Ah, ok, thanks for the clarification. When I last played with
| RISC-V it was in (hobby) FPGA stuff and the cores I was
| messing with did not specify G.
| lauriewired wrote:
| P550 cores don't have vector extensions. It's actually quite an
| old design, from 2021. What you'd want is SiFive P670 cores,
| which are RVA22 compliant with the vector 1.0 spec.
| brucehoult wrote:
| Three years from announcement of a core to SoCs on boards
| being available is actually on the quick side.
|
| Arm A53 (Pi 3, October 2012 - February 2016), A72 (Pi 4, Feb
| 2015 - June 2019), and A76 (Pi 5, May 2018 - September 2023,
| or January 2022 for Radxa Rock 5B) all took longer.
|
| P670 was only announced in November 2022. If a board ships by
| the end of 2025 it will be doing very well.
| aseipp wrote:
| The only board that is cheap and available with the ratified
| 1.0 vector extension I know of is the Kendryte K230, which you
| can find on some boards for about $40 USD:
| https://developer.canaan-creative.com/k230/dev/zh/00_hardwar...
|
| Note that it's only on one 1.6GHz core, and still pretty anemic
| otherwise (pi form factor, it's to be expected.) So something
| "deskop grade" with all the nice extensions and other goodies
| is probably still a ways off. Maybe next year; we'll have to
| see -- but lots of useful extensions continue to be ratified
| today, so it may still be a while before things "cool off."
| mshockwave wrote:
| SpacemiT K1 on BananaPi is another commonly seen RVV 1.0
| capable chip. IIRC both Kendryte K230 and SpacemiT K1 are in-
| order cores.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| it takes time (~2 years) for silicon designers to go from idea
| to taping out silicon. The P550's cores are advertised as
| having good area efficiency, so it could be both getting rid of
| the vector extensions to optimize area and they just couldn't
| incorporate them into the design.
|
| I is the base integer instructions
|
| M is integer multiplication
|
| A is atomic
|
| F is single precision float
|
| D is double precision
|
| G is shorthand for all of the above + 2 others that I honestly
| have no idea what they do
| mshockwave wrote:
| > 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
|
| CSR (i.e. status) register and instruction fence extensions.
| Instruction fences are most useful in cases where you modify
| text section during runtime (e.g. JIT or code hot reload)
| such that you need to ensure the consistency of code across
| different harts
| jecel wrote:
| > + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
|
| The original RV32I and RV64I required some control registers
| for high frequency counters and instruction counters. You
| also needed the instructions to access these registers. This
| proved to be too complex for the simplest implementations, so
| recently (five years ago?) this functionality has been moved
| to their own extensions.
|
| Including these extensions in G makes the current G have the
| same functionality as the original G.
| haunter wrote:
| $400 (16GB DDR5) and $500 (32GB DDR5) because that's not in the
| blog post.
|
| But I have some questions:
|
| Why the weird form factor? Mini-DTX is supported by a lot of
| cases but as a motherboard form factor it's incredibly niche
| compared to Mini-ITX and especially Micro-ATX.
|
| Edit: DTX supposed to be an open standard but it's already a
| "dead" platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTX_(form_factor)
|
| Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless
| connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs can't
| be used?
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| > Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless
| connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs
| can't be used?
|
| Presumably very limited pcie bandwidth. You should think of
| this more like a raspberry pi than a pc motherboard.
|
| E key slots typically provide 1 lane of pcie 2.0 (even on
| systems with 3.0 available), while m.2 is 4 lanes and
| frequently faster pcie 3.0
| haunter wrote:
| > You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc
| motherboard
|
| Thanks that makes perfectly sense! I kind of want to buy one
| now (too bad single 32GB boards can't be bought, minimum
| order is 256)
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Just checked: looks like it does provide a full size pcie
| slot. My guess is that the intended use case is for
| developers testing compatibility. You could almost certainly
| plug in an nvme drive through an adapter to that full size
| slot (although booting from it would likely require a custom
| uboot build) but if you use up the one slot for storage, you
| can't plug in any other peripherals to test.
| fer wrote:
| > You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc
| motherboard.
|
| For the price tag I think it should be more like a
| motherboard. Especially when Raspberry Pi 5 has official m.2
| hats.
| zamadatix wrote:
| You can connect M.2 NVMe, it just doesn't have a dedicated
| slot. If you're looking for a cheap device to plug a bunch
| of different PCIe devices into a RISC-V development board
| is probably not your ideal pick, look at a normal computer.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| This is effectively an industrial dev board not a product
| for normal users. They are usually expensive because of low
| volume
| connicpu wrote:
| Sometimes not even that. On my motherboard the E key slot is
| USB3!
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I believe the slot usually passes 4 wire usb2 as well as 1
| lane if pcie. I had no idea usb3 was an option. How does
| that affect compatibility?
| Palomides wrote:
| if you look on the product brief, the M.2 E key is only hooked
| up via SDIO, not PCIe
| zamadatix wrote:
| Unless something is particularly unique with this HiFive
| revision you can use PCIe SSDs it just looks like this one is
| relatively lane starved and you'll need to eat the PCIe slot to
| do so (it's a x16 slot physically but only x4 in terms of
| actual wired lanes). The E-keyed slot is listed as SDIO, but
| even if it had PCIe wired up it'd be a max of x2 lanes.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Honestly, this type of board is something that you aren't
| really going to just install in a case and forget about it. You
| are most likely going to have this on a test bench so you can
| swap out all kinds of different hardware for validation.
|
| Buttons on the bottom for power/reset, 2 different JTAG ports,
| DIP switches for settings, and remote board management aren't
| things that are normally found on consumer boards. Mini DTX
| probably allows them to have a marginally smaller width
| compared to Micro-ATX while still allowing space for all of
| that debug functionality with a 2 slot graphics card installed.
| eMMC is also kind of important for a SOM as well.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| mini-dtx is mini-itx with space for an extra slot - in practice
| a lot of cases support that as a mini-itx board plus dual slot
| gpu has the same footprint.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| > "As a result of increased production and economies of scale,
| we're excited to announce we are able to lower the price to
| just $399 for the 16GB version and $499 for the 32GB version"
|
| ? Also, both now listed as No Stock Available
| rwmj wrote:
| I benchmarked these against a few other RISC-V boards. They're
| pretty fast, relative to RISC-V (although not relative to x86):
| https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-sp...
|
| Note the benchmark is not very rigorous, but it reflects what we
| want to do with these boards which is to build Fedora packages.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why can't the packages be cross-compiled on a platform with
| reasonable performance?
| ahoka wrote:
| Not everything can be easily cross compiled, unfortunately.
| boredatoms wrote:
| Its also just plain annoying to configure in many cases
| rwmj wrote:
| There's a lot of cases where you want to build something and
| run it afterwards, such as tests or intermediate tooling used
| in later steps in the build.
|
| In any case, I actually want to use RISC-V machines for my
| development environment.
| fweimer wrote:
| The goal is to actually run RISC-V binaries on RISC-V
| hardware, to see what works and what doesn't. You wouldn't
| spot code generations bugs like this one if you merely cross-
| compile and never run the binaries: https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?
| p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=c65046ff2e...
|
| For quite some time to come, the main user of the Fedora
| riscv64 port will be the Fedora riscv64 builders. With cross-
| compilation, we wouldn't even have that limited use of the
| binaries produced.
| deivid wrote:
| Thanks for this, I was looking to upgrade my VF2 but I'm not
| sure it's worth it at this stage, the VF2 is painfully slow,
| and this board doesn't reach 2x perf
| drmpeg wrote:
| I get similar results here. The Banana Pi BPI-F3 was a big
| disappointment. I was expecting some improvement over the
| VisionFive 2, but no dice. A big Linux build at -j8 on the
| BPI-F3 takes essentially the same time as a -j4 build on the
| VF2.
|
| Apparently the small level 2 caches on the X60 are crippling.
|
| The P550 actually feels "snappy".
| brucehoult wrote:
| I'm surprised how much faster the Jupiter is than the BPI-F3:
| 28%.
|
| That's a lot for the same SoC.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| "Now Available" must mean something different to SiFive than it
| does to me. When I click the links in the press release that
| purport to let me acquire one, they all say "No Stock Available,"
| which means the opposite of "Now Available" to me.
|
| They weren't loading at all earlier, though, so saying that I
| can't get one but showing me the price I can't get it at is some
| kind of improvement, I guess.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| presumably that means that they had stock and then sold through
| all of it basically instantly.
| sedatk wrote:
| Don't capitalize every word in a title. I thought "Ubuntu Now"
| was a technology that I didn't know about.
| worik wrote:
| > Don't capitalize every word in a title
|
| It is what they taught me to do at school. So I do it still
| knorker wrote:
| I'm with parent commenter: please don't.
| stonogo wrote:
| Can it run a vanilla kernel or is it nailed forever to Sifive's
| Dev team?
| rwmj wrote:
| It can't run an upstream kernel _yet_ , although it's very
| likely that we'll get there. SiFive have in the past been very
| good about getting changes upstream.
| minroot wrote:
| Why is Ubuntu always the choice, why not fedora or opensuse?
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| In some sense, this question answers itself: the most important
| distro to support is the most popular distro in the space.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Because Canonical invested in it and they didn't.
| taffronaut wrote:
| Ubuntu has historically had a business model that is more open
| to supporting out-of-tree kernel patches
| yuumei wrote:
| The last SiFive board I had died after about a year of use and is
| no longer supported so buyer beware
| AshleysBrain wrote:
| Does anyone know if any browsers have Ubuntu RISC-V ports?
| Chromium or Firefox perhaps? Might be interesting to give it a
| spin.
| rwmj wrote:
| Firefox has been able to run on RISC-V for as long as I can
| remember. I'm pretty sure I remember SiFive doing a demo back
| in 2018 at FOSDEM which included the browser. However generally
| GUI environments are still quite slow, so it won't be very
| usable.
|
| Edit: This one I think:
| https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/ but I can
| only see them running Quake, not Firefox.
| boredatoms wrote:
| I hope they can put out an RVA23 level board soon
| knorker wrote:
| RV64GBC, so still no vector instructions?
|
| Does anyone know if there's a den board / soc that does the V set
| yet?
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| You can get vectorized instructions from Microchip at a much
| higher price point in a few months on RISCV with the
| forthcoming $1500ish Devboard - it has some nice specs, 10GigE
|
| https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
|
| This is similar to the High Performance Space Computer which
| will be coming out in Rad Hardened & Rad Tolerant versions, I
| think these devboards will be 40k-60k
|
| https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
|
| There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for the
| devkit is $150, currently shipping.
|
| https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
| camel-cdr wrote:
| Where did you get the $1500?
|
| That's an insane price for something which will perform
| similarly to the BPI-F3. It has double the DLEN, but it also
| only runs at 1GHz, while the BPI-F3 is available at 1.6GHz
| and 1.8GHz for way cheaper.
|
| > There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for
| the devkit is $150, currently shipping.
|
| This is an entirely different processor, the now very old
| SiFive U54 at 0.6GHz.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I get that RISC-V is exciting as an open-source phenomena, but
| that is a pretty expensive piece of kit.
|
| Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel
| processors at the same price level?
|
| Or more performance per watt?
|
| Or an instructino set that makes a lot of operation super fast?
|
| What is the upside?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Open source, open ISA, embedded systems. That's it.
|
| We are still years away from boards where they are interesting
| to people who are only interested in laptop or higher
| performance classes.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Huh. Its only 17:45 EST and Arrow is already sold out.
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