The RISC-V Revolution has begun!

it's Risky Business fighting Intel AMD and arm and that's exactly what star 5 is trying to do with this thing the chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a Computing Revolution at least that's what some people think risk architecture is going to change everything yeah risk is good Vision 5.2 and the jh-7110 on it has a new instruction set architecture or Isa called risk 5. on board are four 1.5 gigahertz CPU cores so it's no slouch and this is the high end configuration with 8 gigs of RAM an m.2 slot USB 3.0 and 2 gigabit Ethernet ports on paper this board looks like it can compete with something like a Raspberry Pi can it well yes and no risk 5 is the new kit on the Block it's so new software isn't really optimized for it yet and some software won't run at all but a lot will especially if we're talking about Linux and so I tested this thing Star 5 actually sent this one to me for early testing but I also have an order in for another one I welcome another competitor in the chip space especially when there's a more open Community around it Intel's x86 architecture and arms instruction sets are tightly controlled and licensed risk 5 has an open architecture though individual designs like the cores used in this particular chip are often proprietary and licensed since that's how chip manufacturers make money a few years ago I would have said risk 5 had a huge hurdle for adoption but now with a new geopolitical landscape trade Wars and the lawsuit between Qualcomm and arm yeah maybe it's not so risky after all but back to this board this is the first mass-market risk five board with compelling hardware specs so what should you expect if you pick one up initially not much like many other boards that I've tested from Chinese manufacturers the initial experience is a bit jarring especially if you're new to sbcs but considering the entire architecture's new I'm willing to cut it some slack it's still better than most of the picones but that's not saying much the board was hard to bring up I had to dig into some form threads to figure out how to upgrade the firmware just so I can install the latest OS upgrading the firmware involved running a special buildroot image and logging in with SSH so already just to start using the board it's not so simple and then I had trouble with HDMI this thing supposedly handles 4K but I couldn't even get it working with my old HD monitor I tried debugging it with mode set I tried using different cables but I just couldn't get that monitor working eventually I was able to get my atomos ninja working at least but it seems like HDMI is a little buggy right now to add insult to injury when I went to login over SSH I tried following the getting started guide but I found out it had the wrong login user it should be user but the guide said root right now this board definitely has a half-baked feel to it like if the Raspberry Pi came out of the oven warm and with a crisp tasty crust The Vision 5 never really went into the oven Star 5 gave us the ingredients for a pie but they want us to bake it but I'm willing to give this thing a lot of slack since it is different and there are a lot of fronts companies like Star five are working on from Hardware design to Linux support to documentation and advocacy with all that out of the way and knowing it's not going to be Plug and Play how does this thing perform form well right now not that well and it's complicated before I show you any test results I have to warn you to take them with a grain of salt my results today might be different than someone retesting everything in a month or even a year from now and that's because risk 5 and the processor on this board are so new that there are thousands of little optimizations that aren't even made yet most developers who could make those optimizations don't even have risk 5 Hardware to test them so especially for things like basic math operations or cryptography this Chip is going to look glacial and in some ways it isn't but it's not always clear if that's a hardware issue or software but I want to compare this thing to two boards you might already be familiar with the Raspberry Pi 3B plus and the Raspberry Pi 4B putting aside availability the vision 5.2 is marketed as something between those two boards but not quite as good as a pi 4. so how is it well just running a basic Benchmark like geekbench the vision 5 2 scored 78 single core and 276 multi-core and that's a lot slower than a pi 4 and it's even noticeably slower than a pi 3B plus but let's look a little deeper at the individual test results if I scroll down a bit you can see a lot of variants like in image related tests in Camera gaussian blur and structure from motion The Vision 5 2 scores are terrible and machine learning it's only getting like two to four percent of the performance of the pie what gives well let's look a little closer at what geekbench is testing in the documentation it says the machine learning workload performs an image classification task with a small image so another image based test and in this case it uses mobilenet V1 an older machine learning model that's probably not optimized for the chip on this board but it's not like geek results are useless if you buy this board today then for some things it really is that much slower like when you log in over SSH it definitely does feel slower than the pi and image processing and cryptography will be a lot slower on this board the lag is bad enough it feels like sometimes I'm working on an original Raspberry Pi and I was also going to run linpak to test floating Point performance but I had trouble compiling the python cryptography Library so I put that on hold before the risk 5 apologists crucify me I'll add that the jh-7110 is not the only risk 5 chip on the market and this year a bunch of other ones are coming out and a lot of them Implement more features that'll speed up image processing neural Nets and encryption this is a review of one particular board that happens to be risk 5. not the entire risk 5 ecosystem keep that in mind moving on to i o performance I tested both gigabit Ethernet ports and they were both pumping through a full gigabit on these little motorcom chips so no complaints there but what I really wanted to test is the m.2 slot on the bottom it's got one line of PCI Express Gen 2 just like the pi 4 on a compute module 4 I can get 350 to 400 megabytes per second with a good nvme SSD testing the vision 5.2 I only get about 250 megabytes per second the drive showed up at the correct speed but the board just couldn't put through much data I'll get back to the m.2 slot but I also wanted to test the micro SD card slot it's not amazing I only got about 24 megabytes per second the pi 4 gets double that so again this board is more in line with a pi 3. more of my test results can be found in the GitHub Link in the description next what about the GPU One Big Marketing point is the vision 5.2 is the world's first high performance risk 5 computer with an integrated GPU the hardware supports HDMI 2 with h.264 and 265 decoding at 4K courtesy of an imagination bxe GPU but can we even use it one of the curses of singleboard computers is how hard it is to get the GPU to do anything in Linux watching a 1080p video on YouTube is a typical use case and on this board it's excruciating just opening YouTube is painful enough I'm actually speeding up this clip because it took 30 seconds just to get to the home page and once you get a video to load playback is glacial at HD resolution almost all the frames were dropped it's early days so the experience should get better A lot is being worked on right now like this pull request that gets Hardware acceleration off the ground but forget all that this thing has an m.2 slot which means I can take this wacky adapter and plug in anything I want and I kind of have a thing for graphics cards on sbcs so of course I grabbed one and got to testing first I found this forum post about someone else already having some success getting an AMD graphics card working so I pulled out my old Radeon HD 7470 grabbed a copy of Linux and compiled my own custom kernel surprisingly compiling Linux for risk 5 using star 5's Linux Fork was super easy barely an inconvenience in my case I enabled the Radeon kernel module then compiled it on the board it took over an hour but once I copied the new kernel in place and rebooted the GPU worked on the Raspberry Pi I ran into memory access bugs and we had to write a bunch of ugly hacky patches I was expecting it to be even worse on an entirely new architecture but it wasn't I already have a working console without any Patches at all I did run into this weird issue with the screen flashing for a while and all these PVR underscore K errors were popping up on the screen so it's not entirely usable yet but I think there's definitely more fun to be had here I also tried this Nvidia card but the open source Nuvo drivers made the system freeze up so I put that on hold this uh rather massive 4090 it's gonna have to wait subscribe though because you don't want to miss what I'm doing with it someone did get a newer AMD card working on another risk 5 board so maybe risk 5 has a leg up on arm at least for these tiny spcs getting graphics cards running on low end arm is painful I also checked into Hardware video transcoding but like I said earlier that's still being worked on the vision 5.2 could be useful for things like Plex or jellyfin someday all that would be for not though if this thing isn't also efficient and it's not going to take the crown but it's decent using three Watts at idle and a little over 5 Watts fully stressed this board could be an efficient home lab companion as long as the software you need can run on it I haven't had a chance to test out other things like home assistant or Docker but I know for many things just getting the software running right now can be painful but arm boards even the darling child Raspberry Pi were in a similar State a decade ago Star 5 is coming into an already crowded market and creating a lot of Buzz right right now between the Raspberry Pi shortage and the Clone manufacturers dropping the ball in software and support risk 5 sbcs have a prime opportunity my biggest question and I'm not sure if this is Praise of the risk 5 Community or condemnation of the arm status quo but my biggest question is this how is it that this fledgling risk 5 board barely off the ground already has documentation and support that's miles ahead of most other sbcs I mean seriously besides a few small warts in the getting started guide the documentation is pretty good the forums are active and I didn't have to lurk on Discord just to get help and compared to the Raspberry Pi well the pie isn't unimpeachable but the vision 5.2 definitely isn't the board to take away its Crown what it is is an early warning shot across Arms Bow if each risk 5 board improves at the pace the pi has over the years we could see a more competitive landscape when it comes to energy efficient Linux socs the jh-7110 isn't amazing but it's not bad either I still wouldn't recommend most people buy this board unless you already know a lot about Linux and spcs in general that may change a year from now but right now this board isn't targeted at the same Market as a Raspberry Pi at around a hundred bucks and not being quite production ready I'm only recommending this board to people interested in exploring risk 5 for now but that's the risky business Star 5 finds themselves in today until next time I'm Jeff Gilling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 220,372

Keywords: risc-v, riscv, risc, isa, arm, arm64, aarch64, cpu, soc, visionfive, two, starfive, sifive, debian, linux, open source, open, license, x86, architecture, new, review, guide, comparison, raspberry pi, pi 4, pi 3, model b, wifi, hdmi, gpu, graphics card, pcie, pci express, m.2, x1, gen 2, lanes, amd, radeon, testing, test, ethernet, dual, gigabit, networking, sbc, single, board, computer, revolution, computing, nvme, ssd, adapter, x16, jh7110, bcm2711, compile, kernel

Id: aFze0XVhHZA

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/TelephoneOk3162]

Jeff Geerling rules

[u/superkoning]

What a honest video ... risc-v ... the good, the bad and the ugly

[u/Lord_Schnitzel]

How much the benchmarks could benefit with better drivers?

[u/romanrm]

Video thumbnail is a pure brainfart though.