Lichee Pi 4A: Serious RISC-V Desktop Computing

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time it's very exciting indeed as we're going to take a look at this the lychee Pi 4A this is the most powerful ris5 computer I've so far tested and it even comes with a desktop version of Debian pre-installed on its emmc flash storage so let's go and take our closer look right here we have our lychee Pi 4A from cyped with its wrist five system on the chip in case you're not in the no risk 5 is a free and open instruction set architecture or Isa that provides an alternative to the closed isas used in today's x86 and arm CPUs verse 5 is already widely used in microcontrollers but it's still developmental in server and end user computing so it's important to stress that what we have here is a board for those who want to experiment with or develop for risk 5. in this box is an official release Pi 4A with eight gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of on-board flash storage for which I paid 135 dollars there's also a 16 128 version for a hundred and seventy nine dollars and initially there was an eight eight beta version but I decided to wait for this 8 32. so let's open it up I think we just slide the carton like that we do take the box and somehow get in come on lets us in very exciting oh there we are here's our new single board computer and it's even got a Wi-Fi antenna pre-connected Isn't that cool and what we have here is a lychee Pi module 4A or LM 4A plugged into a carrier board and scipy planned to release a cluster board which will take seven of these lm4a modules and they're also working on a tablet and a laptop indeed if we go across to this video clip that they've shared and what we used to call Twitter we can see an lm4a and if we play the video yes it's very exciting we're looking at a working wrist 5 laptop anyway let's remove the board from the packing we'll come back to this in a second we find what's this a label which tells us that the image on the MMC storage may be an old version we should update it we'd probably do that but other than that I'll get rid of that and they're all up we can lift this out and beneath here we find a little bag there's a thermal pad I think that's definitely a thermal pad so in here I would guess and indeed I know there should be a heatsink I can actually get inside this will be a cooler there we go what have we got in here we have this looks like a USB lead that's definitely a USB lead and yes this is a a cooler with a fan foreign let's delve into the hardware and we'll start with the lm4a system on a module or Som which isn't a sodium form factor and as far as I can see we can unclip this like this and yes we can and we'll take this out and put it down over here where we can see at the heart of the module we have a th1520 system on a chip this is from T head for chip division of Alibaba and has four 64-bit Zante c910 risk 5 processor cores clocked at 1.85 gigahertz there's also an imagination BX m464 GPU as well as a Four Tops neural Processing Unit or mpu also on the module we have our eight gigabytes of 64-bit low power ddr4 ram and our 32 gigabytes of MMC flash storage and if we take a look under the sum like that well we can see there's not a lot underneath if we return to the carrier board just before we plug the sum back in it's worth noting we have these boot selection switches so we can boot from MicroSD as well as the onboard emmc and clearly these switches are not ideally located beneath the sum but they weren't included at all on the beta boards so it's good they're now available anyway let's replace the sum Just Clips back in like this push down and click there it goes and let's now take a look at the board's connectivity and this starts with Wi-Fi if I do that there we are we can see a a wireless a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module meanwhile on the front edge we find lots of good computery stuff and specifically two one gigabit Ethernet ports and four Taipei USB 3 ports and then on the end we've got a 12 volt Barrel Jack that provides one option to power the board rotating 90 there's not a lot to see other than some switches but if we quarter turn again we find a full size HDMI 2.0 socket supporting up to 4K output as well as a 3.5 millimeter audio jack a 20 pin gpio header the wireless antenna connector a reset switch and a USB C Port which can be used to power the board with a 5 volt input and which also provides USB 2.0 connectivity for Imaging the onboard Flash finally on our last Edge we have a boot switch we have a two pin fan header and if you were thinking this must be the fan header it isn't this is a speaker connector and then also on this last Edge we have the potential to add a power over ethernet module if we turn the board over I'm sure it won't mind they really do the first thing I notice under here is the key here for the GPI open so we know what they are and also here we've got a Micro SD card slot and then at the bottom Edge we've got here to mipi CSI camera series interface connectors for connecting cameras and we've also got in the middle here mipi DSi displays here with interface connector for connecting an LCD display and it can be a touch panel because we've got a touch panel connector and so there we are the cyped lychee Pi for a sum and carrier board a wrist five computer with great potential and the final thing I'd note is that cyped even sell a metal case greetings and guess what it's now time for our first boot and as you can see I've fitted the cooler using the thermal pad and either attached the fan which doesn't apparently spin all of the time so it might not spin directly but in theory if I turn on the power this res 5 computer will boot straight into Debian so let's give it a go this is my first time powering this board I'm going to reach around here and press the switch and there we are we have got a small LED little red LED down here if you can see that other than that nothing on the screen so far it's very exciting isn't it all look it's going to boot we've got our little Linux Penguins there and uh I thought this might not work necessarily because I sometimes have to mess around to record sbcs but clearly this one is behaving so far and if you know anything about wrist five sbcs I was about to say that they're difficult to get going you can spend ages getting a working image but we've come straight to Debbie and that was amazing compared to any other risk five board I've tried out as you can see I'm rather excited so and I just have to put in a username and a password and I hope those are right I'm still being a bit shocked actually all the fans started to turn just for a little tiny bit and there we are we're in Debian and it's working I am astounded the out of the box experience here or the wrist five border is amazing and just go to the menu it's it's working as not bad at it can we go to a browser should we try to go to a browser I'm you're catching me being shocked as you can tell there we are we've got a browser it's come up and shall we try to go to the board's own website there we go I always think the board can look at its own website it's doing okay and we're getting somewhere I've got that slightly wrong haven't I never mind let me try again yes I think that's working better the only problem we've had here is me typing in the correct web address that's the only problem we have with this board that's amazing this is clearly a different level of experience on a risk 5 board than what I've what I've experienced previously this really is very impressive and this is part of the the documentation for the board there's very good documentation for this board it says it's in work in progress some of these pages and things but even so we have got quite good documentation again considering this is res5 hardware which is really you know this is this is Cutting Edge stuff anyway I'm going to stop being very excited by this I'm going to make a few changes to scaling things like that investigate exactly what's working here how recent the images I've got on the EMC but so far the experience on the light you ply 4A is very good indeed well here I am back again after some hours of testing and the first thing to report is that I've had no crashes at all so this is by far the most stable desktop Linux experience I've yet had on risk 5 Hardware having checked I believe that I'm running the official cyped version of Debian the valaichi pi 4A from July the 6th 2023 and whilst there are two later July releases and I might at some point try and upgrade to the last one of those right now I'm letting sleeping dogs lie as things are working well upgrading the image on this board is not a trivial task and the only issue I've come across which we'll see in a few minutes time is still listed as a known issue even in the very latest operating system image available so let's have a more detailed look around and note that so far I've not installed any software so everything I'm about to show you was pre-installed and I thought we'd start off by clicking on this readme file down there because you might be wondering what's in the readme file it sort of asks to be opened doesn't it and there isn't much in it at all actually there's one URL there it is but it does prove that LibreOffice writer is working which is a good and we've got in fact the rest of LibreOffice here pre-installed and working pretty well we can run up for example LibreOffice calc as you can see this is this is working nicely what I'm really trying to show you is this is a perfectly usable desktop system running on this 5 Hardware let's go across to the file system and just do a properties on that see what our storage situation is and you can see we've got a capacity of about 28 gigabytes on our 32 gigabyte MMC flash storage and we've got about four and a half gigabytes used with the operating system and the pre-installed software and about 23.6 gigabytes free so I am very pleased I waited to get the board with a 32 gigabyte EMC it leaves me with a lot of flexibility so let's go back to the menu this various accessories pre-installed here and one is the task manager I'll run that up because some of you really like to see the task manager there it is you can see we've only got about half a gig of memory being used here seven percent of our memories being used as we're idling along that's that's not too bad is it although let's be honest years ago that would have been the whole memory on the system but um anyway the other thing I want to show you here under accessories is that we've got a sensor viewer like that and this obviously shows us output from some sensors which are showing us here temperatures what 49 48 degrees and up here we can go to the sensor drop down there's also another Center there I think it's the same sensor actually that's showing 50 is that the same as this now no it isn't actually is it so who knows I don't know where these sensors are what they're exactly showing us but I'm guessing one or all of these are in the system on the chip which is obviously running at about just under 50 degrees C so it's a good thing it's got its fan which we can see is running away here and it is getting very slightly warm if I touch the heatsink on the edge the fan is clearly doing its job so let's look at something else let's go back into the menu and also pre-installed here we've got for gnu image manipulation program which comes up relatively quickly all the fans going slightly faster now as it's uh struggling to load in the mushrooms and everything else that make up there we are it's coming up and loading this isn't again it's not bad performance is it not the fastest in the world but certainly perfectly usable I go and do a new document it'll do it perfectly happily there we are and I could scribble this it's it's working this is a as you can tell I'm very impressed with the desktop experience without getting on a wrist five Hardware it isn't going to be that long before we have really really good desktop risk 5 systems next I'm going to plug in a external SSD Leica that and hopefully it'll come up and it does even that's amazing because that doesn't work in the software on some other risified boards right now but it works clearly over here and if we just scroll down here what I want to do is to play a video there is a local video 1080p video it's come up in VLC media player which is a pre-installed and we'll just uh false clean that and as you can see we're playing a video perfectly happily 1080p video is working perfectly well on this Hardware again you're probably thinking not amazing for a computer in general but this is very good in terms of the development of risk 5 Harbor we've got working local video playback at a HD resolution that is a rather good indeed and of course I'm sure you want to see what's going on in the browser so let's go back into a chromium which we looked at in the last segment of the video here it is again just get rid of that we've gone to explaining computers that's nice isn't it and I've also bookmarked a few other things I've bookmarked over here the Chrome's GPU internals well we can see that we have got Harbor acceleration it's one thing to have a GPU in a system on a chip it's quite another to have software that can actually make use of it and clearly it can make use of it here and just to prove that I also bookmark the webgl aquarium down there let's just bring that up and uh that'll go up like that let's do an f11 and bring It full screen and uh there we are we've got little fishes it's achieving about what um just over 30 frames a second with 500 fishes which is not you know spectacular compared to some systems but it gives us a perfectly nice sort of fish tank to look at doesn't it again I'm impressed this is massive progress in terms of the risk 5. anyway let's go back to uh explaining computers like that because the other thing I'm sure you want to see is YouTube playback how's that progressing on with five we'll go to the explaining computers YouTube channel and it'll come up hopefully fairly quickly the word browsing experience isn't too bad come on you can do it willing it on always helps of course and there we are and we can have a look at Maya Channel trailer there let's make that full screen and you might be able to hear here when the video audio keeps coming opposite the audio isn't good there is a problem with HDMI audio playback in chromium welcome to the explaining computers but this is playing pretty well isn't it what's it currently in it's in the 720p and let's just bring up stats for nerds and um there are some drop frames but it's not dropping a lot it's not dropping badly at all I test it quite a bit and I think you could watch 720p video perfectly happily you'd have to plug in headphones into the 3.5 millimeter audio to get good audio output or plug some speakers into that something like that but we've certainly got decent 720p video playback and let's just try 1080p this is not as good but I will show you it 1080p is going to struggle a bit hasn't dropped any frames at all so far but it will it's buffering isn't it it'll get there eventually oh yes I was going to say it's fine but no it is actually having a few problems so uh anyway I'm impressed this still demonstrates great progress with risk 5. risk 5 hardware and software for desktop application is still developmental but it continues to improve so much so that I think I can now do an experiment where I spend seven days doing all of my desktop Computing on risk 5 Hardware specifically I'm going to be using in this test the cyped light cheap Pi 4A as well as the star 5 Vision 5 2. so do look out for my forthcoming video called risk five week but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 199,663

Keywords: RISCV, RISC-V, LicheePi, LicheePi 4A, Lichee Pi 4A, Debian, Debian RISC-V, RISC-V Debian, desktop RISC-V, end-user RISC-V, RISC-V desktop, RISC-V SBC, Sipeed, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, RISC-V demo, LicheePi Module 4A, RISC-V SoM, TH1520, Alibaba RISC-V, T-Head RISC-VTH1520, RISC-V C910, Xuantie C910, C910, C910 RISC-V

Id: 1apoFXZ9ad8

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2023