The good: eight cores. The bad: it’s slow and still no V extension. On the bright side, it uses DDR4, so you might be able to find RAM for it. “Titan” feels like some wishful over marketing.
As a point of comparison, the Radxa Orion O6 shipped a year ago as a 12 core ARMv9 board on same form factor and TDP, for $100 less, with 5x the single core performance (and including a competent iGPU, NPU and VPU). These are very much developer/tinkerer only boards as is.
I've noticed that the sentence “Compliant with RVA23 excluding V extension” has apparently been a bit confusing to some reporters in the tech press lately.
It means that the UR-DP1000 chip would have been RVA23-compliant if only it had supported the V (Vector) extension. The Vector extension is mandatory in the RVA23 profile.
There are other chips out there even closer to being RVA23-compliant, that have V but not a couple of scalar extensions. The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty.
V is such a big extension, with many instructions and requiring more resources, that I don't think that it would be worth the effort.
> The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty.
This is a thing SoC vendors have done before without informing their customers until it's way too late. Quite a few players in that industry really do have shockingly poor ethical standards.
I'm not sure if it's intentional. AWS doesn't have CPU features in their EC2 product documentation, either. It doesn't necessarily mean that they can disable CPU features for instances covered by existing customer contracts.
I'm surprised we have not seen more investment into RISC-V from Chinese firms. I would think they want to decouple from ARM and the west in general as a dependency. Maybe they view the coup of ARM China as having secured ARM for the time being and not as much pressure?
Either way, it's currently hard to be excited about RISC-V ITX boards with performance below that of a RPi5. I can go on AliExpress right now and buy a mini itx board with a Ryzen 9 7845HX for the same price.
It's not better architecture so the gain is few pennies more per chip at cost of A LOT of work... work that can't just run Android or much else out of the box.
Isn’t that kind of like saying automated testing (for apps written without testing in mind) isn’t worth it because you have to spend time getting code into a state that is testable?
I do agree that it takes a lot of work to get something usable, and so I think we are a ways off from mainstream risc-v. I do also think there is a lot more value for low power devices like embedded/IoT or instances where you need special hardware. Facebook uses it to make special video transcoding hardware.
> I would think they want to decouple from ARM and the west in general as a dependency.
Why would you think that? ARM is not like x86 CPUs where you get the completed devices as a black box. Chinese silicon customers have access to the full design. I guess it's not completely impossible to hide backdoors at that level but it'd be extremely hard and would be a huge reputational risk if they were found.
They also can't really be locked out of ARM since if push comes to shove, Chinese silicon makers would just keep making chips without a license.
Everybody sane will want to move away from them, there is nothing chinese specific.
The most performant RISC-V implementations are from the US if I am not too mistaken.
Wonder if that hardware can handle an AMD 9070 XT (resizable bar). If so, we need the steam client to be recompiled for RISC-V and some games... if this RISC-V implementation is performant enough (I wish we would have trashed ELF before...)
Is there an actual U.S. RISC-V CPU that achieves competitive performance? I think the performance leaders are currently based in China.
There's a difference between announcement, offering IP for licensing (so you still have to make your own CPUs), shipping CPUs, and having those CPUs in systems that can actually boot something.
Most people would be better off waiting for the multiple RVA23 boards that are supposed to come out this year, at least if they don't want to be stuck running custom vendor distros. "RVA23 except V" at this price point and at this point in time is a pretty bad value proposition.
It's honestly a bit hard to understand why they bothered with this one. No hate for the Milk-V folks; I have 4 Jupiters sitting next to me running in Zig's CI. But hopefully they'll have something RVA23-compliant out soon (SpacemiT K3?).
I feel this is becoming a bit of a tech urban legend such as ZFS requires ECC.
As far as I understand the RVA23 requirement is an ubuntu thing only and only for current non LTS and future releases. Current LTS doesn't have such requirements and neither other distributions such as Fedora and Debian that support riscv64.
So no, you are not stuck running custom vendor distros because of this but more because the other weird device drivers and boot systems that have no mainline support.
I'm not completely sure, but I suspect Fedora will stick to the current baseline for quite some time.
But the baseline is quite minimal. It's biased towards efficient emulation of the instructions in portable C code. I'm not sure why anyone would target an enterprise distribution to that.
On the other hand, even RVA23 is quite poor at signed overflow checking. Like MIPS before it, RISC-V is a bet that we're going to write software in C-like languages for a long time.
I'm fairly sure I recall Fedora folks signaling that they intend to move to RVA23 as soon as hardware becomes generally available.
It is of course possible that Debian sticks with RV64GC for the long term, but I seriously doubt it. It's just too much performance to leave on the table for a relatively new port, especially when RVA23 will (very) soon be the expected baseline for general-purpose RISC-V systems.
The good: eight cores. The bad: it’s slow and still no V extension. On the bright side, it uses DDR4, so you might be able to find RAM for it. “Titan” feels like some wishful over marketing.
As a point of comparison, the Radxa Orion O6 shipped a year ago as a 12 core ARMv9 board on same form factor and TDP, for $100 less, with 5x the single core performance (and including a competent iGPU, NPU and VPU). These are very much developer/tinkerer only boards as is.
I've noticed that the sentence “Compliant with RVA23 excluding V extension” has apparently been a bit confusing to some reporters in the tech press lately.
It means that the UR-DP1000 chip would have been RVA23-compliant if only it had supported the V (Vector) extension. The Vector extension is mandatory in the RVA23 profile.
There are other chips out there even closer to being RVA23-compliant, that have V but not a couple of scalar extensions. The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty. V is such a big extension, with many instructions and requiring more resources, that I don't think that it would be worth the effort.
> The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty.
This is a thing SoC vendors have done before without informing their customers until it's way too late. Quite a few players in that industry really do have shockingly poor ethical standards.
I'm not sure if it's intentional. AWS doesn't have CPU features in their EC2 product documentation, either. It doesn't necessarily mean that they can disable CPU features for instances covered by existing customer contracts.
I'm sure it is in footnote in datasheet
No, they really are that grimy and will pull tricks like this until you call them out on them.
They will then issue errata later, after millions of devices have been shipped.
In 6pt mandarin.
I'm surprised we have not seen more investment into RISC-V from Chinese firms. I would think they want to decouple from ARM and the west in general as a dependency. Maybe they view the coup of ARM China as having secured ARM for the time being and not as much pressure?
Either way, it's currently hard to be excited about RISC-V ITX boards with performance below that of a RPi5. I can go on AliExpress right now and buy a mini itx board with a Ryzen 9 7845HX for the same price.
China also has LoongArch.
It's not better architecture so the gain is few pennies more per chip at cost of A LOT of work... work that can't just run Android or much else out of the box.
Isn’t that kind of like saying automated testing (for apps written without testing in mind) isn’t worth it because you have to spend time getting code into a state that is testable?
I do agree that it takes a lot of work to get something usable, and so I think we are a ways off from mainstream risc-v. I do also think there is a lot more value for low power devices like embedded/IoT or instances where you need special hardware. Facebook uses it to make special video transcoding hardware.
> I would think they want to decouple from ARM and the west in general as a dependency.
Why would you think that? ARM is not like x86 CPUs where you get the completed devices as a black box. Chinese silicon customers have access to the full design. I guess it's not completely impossible to hide backdoors at that level but it'd be extremely hard and would be a huge reputational risk if they were found.
They also can't really be locked out of ARM since if push comes to shove, Chinese silicon makers would just keep making chips without a license.
arm has toxic IP locks.
Everybody sane will want to move away from them, there is nothing chinese specific.
The most performant RISC-V implementations are from the US if I am not too mistaken.
Wonder if that hardware can handle an AMD 9070 XT (resizable bar). If so, we need the steam client to be recompiled for RISC-V and some games... if this RISC-V implementation is performant enough (I wish we would have trashed ELF before...)
Is there an actual U.S. RISC-V CPU that achieves competitive performance? I think the performance leaders are currently based in China.
There's a difference between announcement, offering IP for licensing (so you still have to make your own CPUs), shipping CPUs, and having those CPUs in systems that can actually boot something.
Most people would be better off waiting for the multiple RVA23 boards that are supposed to come out this year, at least if they don't want to be stuck running custom vendor distros. "RVA23 except V" at this price point and at this point in time is a pretty bad value proposition.
It's honestly a bit hard to understand why they bothered with this one. No hate for the Milk-V folks; I have 4 Jupiters sitting next to me running in Zig's CI. But hopefully they'll have something RVA23-compliant out soon (SpacemiT K3?).
I feel this is becoming a bit of a tech urban legend such as ZFS requires ECC.
As far as I understand the RVA23 requirement is an ubuntu thing only and only for current non LTS and future releases. Current LTS doesn't have such requirements and neither other distributions such as Fedora and Debian that support riscv64.
So no, you are not stuck running custom vendor distros because of this but more because the other weird device drivers and boot systems that have no mainline support.
I'm not completely sure, but I suspect Fedora will stick to the current baseline for quite some time.
But the baseline is quite minimal. It's biased towards efficient emulation of the instructions in portable C code. I'm not sure why anyone would target an enterprise distribution to that.
On the other hand, even RVA23 is quite poor at signed overflow checking. Like MIPS before it, RISC-V is a bet that we're going to write software in C-like languages for a long time.
I'm fairly sure I recall Fedora folks signaling that they intend to move to RVA23 as soon as hardware becomes generally available.
It is of course possible that Debian sticks with RV64GC for the long term, but I seriously doubt it. It's just too much performance to leave on the table for a relatively new port, especially when RVA23 will (very) soon be the expected baseline for general-purpose RISC-V systems.
Is it really this much slower than a Raspberry Pi 5? https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/23667112?baseli...
tldr; 236 vs 666 single core score
From your link it seems to be 3x slower. It's not clear to me why this comparison is relevant.
I was wondering about the value proposition. But I guess it's a more like a dev / tinkering board then.
So slow.