Wonder if any of the RISC-V cpus are fast enough as a daily driver running Linux? (Or maybe in phones or servers one day I’d that’s the intention) - I was trying to read about it and saw that people’s analysis show some of them are 28% slower than a raspberry pi 4[1] and “the RISC-V U74 core had roughly 1.8 times lower performance per clock compared to the ARM Cortex-A53”[2]. I guess if the gap between non-open cpus and risc-v is too large and you can’t have the same OS experience or battery experience etc then it might be hard to be successful in mainstream devices? I have no idea how it works but would love to hear what people think; and it’s cool that we have an open processor architecture that seems relatively capable and that’s making its way into different devices!
> Wonder if any of the RISC-V cpus are fast enough as a daily driver running Linux?
Short answer: Absolutely not, and you pretty much summarized it in your comment. RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago.
> RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago.
What do you mean "still"? Those are brand new RISC-V CPUs, or were a year ago when they came out.
The base RISC-V specification which the current cores implement (except the ones from the last couple of months) was not even formally frozen and published yet when the Pi 4 came out. Getting comparable RISC-V boards out in 4 years was a great effort. Note that the Pi 4 arrived eight years after the ARMv8-A spec was published.
That original spec doesn't contain a lot of important things such as SIMD which make a huge difference to those Geekbench scores. They are not comparing like to like.
By this time next year we'll have RISC-V boards performing better than the Pi 5, less than two years after it (possibly 1.5 years).
A year after that, RISC-V things currently well into their design pipeline will be somewhere between Zen 1 and Apple M1 performance.
The rate of progress is incredible. In the last 2-3 years many designers of current CPUs from Apple, Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm have moved to RISC-V companies.
When I was commuting 2 hours a day on the bus, my daily driver was an 8-inch iPad that I used with a logitec keyboard case tethered to my iPhone for internet, and would connect to my VSCode on my $10/mo droplet using Code-Server.
If you offload the computer to the cloud, and don't need to do anything graphically intense, it makes daily driving an underpowered tablet very easy.
I mean, I keep a 10 year old MacBook in my kitchen/dining room. If someone were still actually making a high-end Chromebook that would be fine. Unfortunately with Google's departure from doing that hardware, it's all pretty much lower-priced educational market stuff and if I really needed a lightweight travel device, I'd get a tablet (which I did recently) or a MacBook Air. MacBooks are low enough maintenance that a good high-res Chromebook wouldn't really be enough cheaper or lighter to really buy you much.
I don't think so, I run a CI on a VisionFive2 and it is terribly slow, takes ~8x compared to my Ryzen 3600 CPU. It's not helped by also having fairly limited IO speed on the NVMe side (board issue? unclear)
In boards you can buy, there is spacemiT K1, the first RVA22+Vector1.0 SoC.
The boards are Banana Pi BPi-F3 (small SBC) and Milk-V Jupiter (mini-ITX).
The cores in there perform similar to -still usable- Intel Core 2, but there's eight of these cores, and presents a sizable improvement over the older VisionFive2's JH7110.
This review[0] by Explaining Computers shows how it is already usable in practice, using a launch day software image. Take note that newer board variants offer a more workable 16GB RAM.
Of course, having these boards means developers can now run RVA22+V in real hardware rather than simulators.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1c1ikfp/eswin_eic770...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1coxdwm/whats_the_cu...