RISC-V isn't killing Arm (yet)

The Mars CM is neat. But is it an adequate replacement for the Raspberry Pi CM4?

Links:

#riscv

Contents:

00:00 - Mars CM
01:15 - Hardware overview
01:53 - Booting it up (it took effort)
03:29 - Exploring PCIe on JH7110
04:11 - Benchmark attempt, take 1
05:02 - Benchmarking (for real this time)
06:35 - RISC-V is very cool
07:59 - Raspberry Pi replacement?

[curtmack]

I'd like to take a moment here and appreciate how far this industry has come, that we can talk about a computer performing two _billion_ math operations per second and call it _slow._

[mbentley]

For historical perspective, in 1985 the Cray-2 scored 1.95 Gflops on the LINPACK benchmark while using 150–200 kW

[jeremyloveslinux]

I see RISC-V dominating the cheap (and maybe not so cheap) microcontroller space way, way before the compute space simply because the license fees are going to be a higher percentage with micros, and almost an afterthought for desktop class chips.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

Maybe RISC-V isn't killing ARM just yet, but Jeff Geerling is killin it with his vids lately.

[jmr]

I'm still excited for Risc-V. Google announced Risc-5 "Android tools" coming 2024.

[MichaelKlements]

It's exciting to see more and more RISC-V based SBC's being developed. As with most of these boards, the hardware looks promising but developers leave a lot of the software development to the community - which is just too small to make meaningful progress at the moment.

[Zuper]

Hopefully the CM5 will release soon and be readily available.

[drewswoods]

More than just boards and hardware, software support is essential. There needs to be community and developer passion. It'll be hard to unseat raspberry pis with their primacy and established reputation. I used my rpi4 as a primary desktop computer for about two years before going back to x86 because the software support just wasn't there, yet.

[beanologi]

This is so cool and I really like how you document and engage the community around the SBC!

[MistxTube]

I had lots of problems getting my RISC-V starfive board running, I'm optimistic that RISC-V will close the gap by making use of already researched techniques from arm and others. Not sure when but probably in time. Playing catchup with notes is a little easier then trail blazing. Anyways would love to see the 64c monster you mentioned at the end of your video.

[Jroonk]

Totally would love to see your opinion on the milk v pioneer. Mainly I appreciate your honest and knowledgeable review of the current progress of all things risc v.

[mathsDOTearth]

I would love to see you get your hands on the 64 core RISC-V pioneer.

[Ozymandi_as]

Jeff Geerling has transcended the roles of maker, hobbyist and enthusiast, and has become an authoratative voice for those communiries that the manufacturers and software developers trust and respect. It's an impressive achievement, and all the more so because he seems to be such a decent, thoughtful and likeable guy.

[brianogram]

Great video Jeff, and you pointed out that the support just isn't there. Pumping out new RISC boards is neat, but without support, or a solid community, they're going to stay niche. Watching the Raspberry Pi community grow was impressive, but took some time. Hopefully RISC can get the same love.

[adanufgail]

I really want to give MilkV the benefit of the doubt that they aren't just pushing out products without testing or finalizing development and hoping the community will do exactly what you did and do all that work for free, but I've seen too many Chinese companies in the tech space pull this.

[terrorpup]

I am glad someone has good luck with the RiSC-V, I got a StarFive 2 and it came where I couldn't boot. I been trying to update the SPI, but no luck. I hoping one day I can use it. having good luck with the Banana-Pi CM4, and the Orange-Pi CM4, though it has more pins that RPi CM4.

Thanks Jeff, I never hear of Mars Board until this video. I have to check them out.

[honkhonkler]

RISC V won't kill ARM just like ARM won't kill x86. The only reason x86 killed MIPS, DEC Alpha, 68K and PowerPC is because it was tied to an industry standard open hardware and software platform which allowed for greater flexibility and low cost through economies of scale. Neither RISC V or ARM have such a standard. At least not yet. That said, I think it's important to have a CPU architecture which is freely available to anyone just like open source software.

[anthonygascon]

thank you for your work, it's true that we often forget that there's more than just arm, x86/x64 architectures.
don't forget that risc-v architectures are often architectures with specific bricks, often used for video encoding, mathematical calculation, they are less modular than ARM.
i'd like to know what the 64 bits are worth, i'd like to set up a setup to do benchmarks.

[suhaskv]

As someone who is part of the industry that is actively designing and building RISC-V processors, I do agree that RISC-V is a very young ISA and needs a ton of work and time from enthusiastic developers. They are offering tons of software suites (Android, GNU etc.) for devs to pick it up and develop tools and applications for RISC-V systems. I do disagree with RISC-V systems not being on par with equivalent ARM systems, not too sure about the board you got but the RV systems we build take on ARM's offerings in price, performance and power consumption. Although, I do see you point; it's not wide-spread yet but it's promising! Great video!

[neur]

Regarding power measurements: Using a kill a watt is nice from a practical standpoint for effective power consumption.
But that includes the losses of the power supply and the efficiency of the power supply might not be linear.
For performance measurements I would probably try using a bench power supply which also shows the wattage directly if you get a nicer one.
For USB get an USB tester like the fnirsi fnb42.
Thanks for all you do and sharing everything in an organized way, allowing people to contribute.
It makes it so much easier since we all would have to solve the same problems getting something to run.
Also gives confidence the features like pcie in this example really work.
Thank you so much <3