RISC-V Business: Testing Gaming and More on the HiFive Unmatched from SiFive

[Music] high five unmatched but you know i'm interested in it because it's got a picture of a penguin penguin penguin penguin i'm excited about this product because risk five represents kind of a possible upheaval a disruption a disruption from below and possibly in the future disruption from above linux itself was kind of that in in the era in which linux was born there were pretty much nothing but proprietary operating systems and toy educational operating systems and now linux has completely taken over the universe i think that's the hope and the dream of the team behind risk five so this is an implementation of risk five this is a four core system on chip this is the upgrade over the board that i reviewed previously but with one important distinction one important twist this board is itx high five unmatched this is what you get in the box please read before using this product this is not a product for mass consumption this is a product for people who are very special people who are gifted uh code weavers if you will oh would you look at that it comes with a micro sd card i came prepared with my own and it's even the same brand we think i like look at this rear i o shield we have a little micro sd label oh it's so cute the other accessories here are some uh standoff mounts and your m.2 accessories because this thing has two m.2 ports one for a wi-fi card and one for m.2 storage so this is the dev board that you can pick up for around a thousand dollars this gives you pci express connectivity 16 gigabytes of memory you have the optional real-time clock backup battery in the corner here which is not included because well when they did regulations for lithium-ion batteries regular lithium batteries got swept up in that these batteries that have been around for 35 years and are insanely not dangerous and will definitely not catch an airplane on fire are no longer you know you still have to put special labeling on it if this kind of lithium battery is present because of international regulations when really they intended to just target the lithium-ion batteries those are the ones that the cheap ones that can't wait to catch on fire but uh yeah this is it's a story for another day we have a standard 24 pin atx power connector but no other power connectors because this board running full tilt is only going to consume about 50 watts at most this board like its predecessor is aimed at developers and programmers who want to sort of kick the tires of the platform this is pretty nice because sci-5 you know the folks behind risk five uh are sort of putting their money where their mouth is they're trying to do this development board um as accessibly as possible for developers and if you have a product that you want to be cross platform compatible around a thousand dollars is pretty reasonable for a dev kit for something as powerful as a risk five i mean you can do custom silicon with 90 day turnarounds if you're interested in having something custom built which of course is going to be many orders of magnitude more expensive than that but this gives you access to the risk 5 platform if you're doing embedded development you're building some kind of a you know a network widget you're building a new nas or san or whatever and you've been eyeing the raspberry pi you know things where typically arm or mips or something like that um would make sense you might be eyeing something like risk five it's probably the case that if you look around at mips and some of the other embedded non-arm architectures and you look at the tool chain like the developer side of it if you're a programmer and you've adopted a lot of really new cool stuff in programming things like stack smashing protection and you know address space layout randomization and things like that you've probably found your tool chain completely lacking on basically everything except arm the last five or ten years um a lot of people have been suffering under that paradigm it's really not a great situation to be doing embedded programming because the focus is on security because we've had things like you know your baby monitor at your nanny's house down the street is uh ddosing a hospital in kiev sort of unacceptable in the modern world it's a bit of a faux pas uh if you're running insecure iot things and in no small part of that it's because of poor software development practices and i'll poor software development practices also spill over into hardware design so you know lessons learned from one architecture don't necessarily spill over into the other well risk 5 kind of aims to change all that directly and indirectly because it's a modern tool chain it's a nice tool chain to work on uh it's a it's a feature full platform whenever you're going to have to do some of those porting operations to port it from some arbitrary embedded system to this western digital pretty famously is a huge supporter of risk five initiatives in general and is already using it in their products nvidia also has risk five and some of their products pretty much all the big names that have licensed arm or other architectures for embedded systems are looking at risk five and saying this is where we need to be so these companies can still invest and develop their own uh you know proprietary uh you know intellectual property but they can offer that intellectual property a la carte to customers that they may not even really be aware of through the initiatives that sci-fi and others are doing with the risk five platform it's sort of a fun you know uh smorgasbord i guess of hardware design and intellectual property you could cherry pick ram controllers and and interface io and analog to digital converters and have custom silicon produced to solve your exact problem but while still having a relatively robust and standardized software platform so that you get the benefit of all the tools that have things like address space layout randomization and a good memory allocator and you know efficient byte code you know mapping and that kind of thing there's a lot to like philosophically and organizationally for risk five they're not out to uh take over the universe by having superior intellectual property you know the best product everybody has no choice but to use it they're out to just be usable and a reasonable basis for things which kind of reminds me of linux again so this this motherboard itx itx layout let's do a build this is the dr zebra century this is pretty much the perfect case for this because this thing doesn't get hot it doesn't run really hard it's completely fine we don't even have to have a real power supply like a 400 watt power supply for this is going to be extreme maximum overkill this is the only time i will ever recommend a diablotech power supply oh man if only gamers nexus was around when diablotech was you know the thing that everybody would buy really cheaply because oh boy they haven't seen anything until they've seen a diablotech power supply fail uh you all timers the old timers in the comments you know what i'm talking about yeah yeah that's fine we're gonna go from zero to debian workstation on this thing with wi-fi i'm even gonna add a wi-fi adapter it doesn't come with a wi-fi after to get the little little m.2 and the cutouts for the antenna but we're going to add wi-fi or at least we're going to try to i don't know about the binary blobs loading on risk five but uh we'll roll the punches we'll see what happens you could have been the little tabs up out of the way oh no usb front panel header shucks on board we do have four five gigabit usb 3 ports and a gigabit ethernet nic a uh usb debug console it's a serial console basically in our micro sd slot we do also have a single three pin fan header on this motherboard now this motherboard does have a single x16 physical slot however looks can be deceiving that is only by eight electrical of course on a system like this that's not even remotely gonna bottleneck now getting set up and running with your risk five system is a little tricky it's not like there's a bios where you can go in and configure options and tell it that you want to boot from usb and do the traditional installer canonical has actually put a lot of work into making ubuntu available for both the hi5 unleashed the original risk 5 board and high five unmatched what we have in our dr zebra mini pc right now i've added the gpu i've got everything up and running there's a step-by-step guide on the level one forum but to walk you through it really quickly this motherboard basically is designed to boot from microsd it comes with a micro sd card because it is a little tricky and i think a lot of people would think their board was doa if they didn't have that pre-configured micro sd bootable image there is a dip switch on the board to be sure to configure some boot options i don't really want to get into that for this video the easiest way out if you're adding nvme storage like i did because nvme is a heck of a lot faster than that micro sd card is to uh use dd or if you're on windows balina etcher to etch the ubuntu image it's a pre-installed image so you don't even have an installer really it's just a disk image that's ready to go to use that to image the micro sd card and then once you image the micro sd card you boot off of the micro sd card download the image again and decompress it to the nvme so that your boot drive is still on the micro sd but slash and optionally your home directory are mounted off of the nvme that's what i've done now you'll find the repositories a little bit lacking things like installing firefox did not work for me properly on this platform even the mouse cursor is a little bit knackered it'll uh show up mostly correctly when you're in an application but when you're hovering on the desktop it just shows up kind of as a square you can install the graphical environment sort of as a second step once you've got the image set up but i did manage to install i did manage to install web the gnome gtk web browser uh but it was basically unusably sluggish on my machine i'm not really sure why because everything else was actually surprisingly snappy using other applications i think i can probably compile firefox on my own but it's going to take a little while i could cross-compile but i don't really want to get into that but the other thing that i was interested in was games and how's game performance now even though amd gpu is open source there are some binary blobs that go with that those are loaded under the gpu fortunately so they're not architecture specific and i'm happy to report that doing testing with my asrock phantom gaming gpus that i have on hand everything from an rx 580 to the 6600 xt that they sent me everything worked fine is he crazy enough to install a 6900 xt in a risk 5 system this is the oc formula yes it does work but you're going gonna have to wait for a future video on that because the 3d acceleration they're still working on that just because you got amd gpu doesn't mean that you have mesa and everything else yes yes it does work but you know it's pci express by eight on this platform and we're talking about four relatively anemic risk cores i mean a raspberry pi is a better user experience at this point but it is incredible how far risk five has come in just a few short years this is a perfectly usable you know relatively low-end desktop experience if you're somebody who's interested in porting your drivers to risk five or having a little bit more you know hands-on experience with risk five i found this to be a perfectly usable uh development environment i actually looked at doom 3 because the full sources for the doom 3 engine are available and i bought doom 3. so i was able to look at the source code and see what sort of changes were required for risk 5 spoiler nothing if you have the source basically everything compiles and works fine this is really an ideal situation and i'm definitely not the first to do this and get this up and running i think the first was probably rene rebe r-e-b-e can check him out he's streamed a lot of stuff to youtube actual developer working on actual developer things not just not just some internet computer janitor bozo actually doing really useful stuff you should check out his streams and other stuff like that if you're interested in risk five and some of the stuff that's required for forward movement on risk five i know that i've been following that because i'm interested in this platform and where it could go is x86 at a dead end is arm going to take over well just about the time that arm builds up enough inertia to take over risk five comes in from behind i don't know i don't know what the play by play is going to be but i do like keeping an eye on new platforms and things that could change other gaming quake 3 arena worked fine doom 3. it's perfectly reasonable pleasant experience so 3d acceleration 3d acceleration available in the context of web browsers because believe it or not those actually do use a lot of graphics acceleration all of the moving parts for this platform are basically here now it's up to the developers up to the developers to carry it forward will the inertia of x86 went out or will risk five rule the day i can stay tuned to level one figure that out

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 49,360

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: lgatG_i8UMg

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AwesomeBantha]

Good video, forgot that AMD GPUs will run with this thing, which is crazy, non-x86 is getting more and more usable every day

I would be surprised if even the next generation of consoles is still running on x86. RISC-V would be cool, but ARM is fine as well.