This RISC-V cyberdeck is not for you

it's not often a company builds something and tells you not to buy it but that's exactly what happened with this little cyber deck but why not it has a CPU that some people say is going to bring down Intel's x86 Monopoly if you shouldn't buy it why does it exist and can it run Doom we'll get to Doom but as to why it exists it's the first risk 5 cyberdeck meant for developers who want to start trying out the latest fancy chip architecture in style but why shouldn't you buy this thing well I've been using it and it's just not that good even if it does fit nicely in my cargo pants and just based on performance it's a terrible deal compared to this tiny Intel n100 Netbook the n100 costs less while being 10 times faster and that's before we talk about software support cped sent me this tiny leash console 4A a couple months ago it's not meant to compete with Intel though at least not yet this thing's more like an older Raspberry Pi it's even slower than the arm CPUs in other tiny cyber ducks like the MNT pocket reform which admittedly isn't available yet so I guess this thing has that going for it the unique thing about this guy isn't the size or even the cute little mouse nubbing it's the processor inside but before we open it up let's take a look around the outside it's tiny so there's not a whole lot going on but they did manage a gigabit Ethernet Jack on the back which is more than most Pro laptops have these days the port's not the easiest to use but I'm happy it's there on the on the right side there's a headphone jack a little hole I presume is for a microphone a USB 3.0 port and a Micro SD card slot on the back besides ethernet there's a USB C Port mini HDMI power and another usba a port and flipping it over there's a little slot you can pop off to reveal a 2242 m.2 slot for an nvme SSD the high-end version of this thing includes a 1 terab SSD for an extra 100 bucks all models include a 12volt power adapter and mini HDMI cable overall it's nice and small a little heavy at 600 G but it fits in a lot of places a laptop won't like my pocket I don't want to tear this down until after I test it out so let's start by getting it booted up and that's funny it's actually booting sideways this display probably comes from a tablet with a portrait layout so all this boot text Scrolls across the display instead of down luckily the desktop environment turns back to landscape but that's one of the fun little quirks you get on a def kit like this also fun it's booted in Chinese the first time luckily some things are still in English so I clicked on Terminal and entered the incantation to get it back into English it connected to my Wi-Fi 6 Network and chromium worked fine just a little sluggish it feels to me somewhere between like a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 which is to say even a cheap Chromebook would be a lot faster if you just want to browse the web YouTube loads okay but anything above 480p is a waste it just makes things kind of choppy and it does have sound surprisingly the tinny speakers are are okay but don't expect much I played back a few videos and besides a cracking issue every now and then the speakers were audible just not very loud I also tested their two example videos and both of them played back okay but even with their optimized 4K video there was a little screen tearing the display itself is a touchcreen I fired up the included and tested painting with my finger it tracks decently out of the box but for General use the desktop environment is not touch friendly at all it's almost impossible to use the touchscreen for pretty much anything besides drawing not to mention if you use the touchcreen a lot you're going to smudge that camera not that it matters the camera isn't going to win any awards but it does work and the focus and exposure are fine it's just not amazing there's also this little hole on the right that I presumed was a built-in mic but I tried audacity and the pulse audio mixer and nothing detected a mic input so even if you love the camera you'll have to get a USB mic to get sound into this thing but overall this thing is slow but if you're willing to live with it it's not un bearable and quirks this thing has those in Spades I'm not going to harp on them because like I said earlier cped even says this thing isn't like a Chromebook or a Macbook it's a Dev machine but I'll run through those quirks really quick this red Point tracking nub is nowhere near as good as a track point the tracking is not amazing and it requires a lot of force to use it it's gotten a little better after a couple weeks but not much the keyboard layout is well it's a keyboard layout I used a netbook in college so I'm used to adjusting to tiny keyboard but some of the key placements here are baffling like the period is almost impossible to touch type since it's tiny and in the middle of two other keys and the apostrophe is tough to hit too generally though it's passable for being so small and I can type faster on it than my iPad for what that's worth the fan runs all the time and the screen stays on even when you close it there isn't any kind of lid sensor there's no brightness controls only a terminal command to set the brightness level you can charge it with USBC while it's booted up but not while it's shut down only the power adapter works then and to power it on you have to hold on the power button for like 5 Seconds four of the six tiny Phillip screws on the bottom came from the factory stripped so I couldn't even open up the bottom and show you the inside I also couldn't install an nvme SSD using the little access door because one of the screw posts was just barely in the way also one time the keyboard and mouse buttons just didn't work but a reboot fixed that like I said devs and Tinkers expect these kind of speed bumps but if you buy one of these and it's annoying you don't say I didn't warn you all that out of the way I ran some benchmarks I'll link to my full test report but there are a few things I want to highlight the Tad 1520 is a quad core risk 5 system on a chip it has four c910 cores and to save on battery and help keep this thing cool it's underclocked to 1.5 GHz I've tested a ton of arm sbcs and also high performance arm chips like the Snapdragon how does this new risk 5 chip Stack Up not well I mean it's not as slow as the JH 7110 in the Mars 5 and vision 52 I tested last year but it's definitely not fast it feels more like a pi 3 than a pi4 and that plays out in these benchmarks it's a big step up for risk 5 but it's still a far cry from where sbc's were even 5 years ago and here's the bottom line a lot of people keep telling me arms days are numbered and risk five is the next Revolution I mean maybe but when arms started eating away at Intel's lend it was already winning on efficiency with risk five at the very tiny microcontroller level it's doing pretty good but there still aren't any high performance cores that are even close to the efficiency of arm yet and this chart doesn't include even more efficient chips like the ones from Rock Chip apple or Amper add on the fact that the risk 5 CPUs are a lot slower and the only Advantage right now is the open Isa and that doesn't just magically save a company millions of dollars when they're building a new chip so am I still excited about risk 5 yeah do I see it eating arms lunch or Intel for that matter anytime soon no no at least not for anything beyond really low-end devices China especially would love to see that change and more power to them but it's going to take longer than most people think that's the CPU cores though for graphics this thing includes an imagination power VR GPU how does it hold up well for raw performance the G Mark I score is 614 that's about on par with a pi 4 but slower than the pi five that's not bad at all and I actually had some fun playing Super tux cart on it with the defaults at 1024x 768 I got 30 to 40 FPS everything worked fine but if I tried changing the resolution the game would crash but what about Doom I was worried I'd have to compile it from Source but luckily the dsda Doom package was available out of the box and easy to get installed it ran even more smoothly and Graphics wise this is a great little machine for it that is with an external Mouse the little red point was even more infering here it was just insane trying to aim with it luckily there's USB so carry along a mouse if you want to get those Frags moving on to General IO the S so's on par with most current arm chips lpddr4x Ram performance is pretty good and the built-in emmc is plenty fast I got over 200 megabytes per second read speeds but like I said earlier I couldn't get an nvme drive to fit in the expansion slot but even if that worked here's the bottom line the risk 5 CPU cores are the weakest part of this whole system with more speed or more power efficiency this thing could compete better even with all its warts but as it stands unless you're doing risk 5 development and want to try out the c910 course on this thing there's not much here at least not for 400 bucks for the novelty it's cool to have one of these things around it reminds me a lot of the little EC I used in college that thing was underpowered too but I still loved it and I just can't explain why and this thing isn't terrible it's just not a good value for around 400 bucks unless you really want a risk 5 cyber deck if you don't care about risk 5 and you want performance or efficiency there are better values out there and if you just want to try out risk 5 cped even makes other options for a lot less money but it is cool to see risk 5 in this new form factor and as a republic Senator once said we will watch your career with great interest but until next time I'm Jeff Garling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 232,353

Keywords: lichee, console, 4a, sipeed, risc-v, sbc, cyberdeck, netbook, mini, notebook, trackpoint, redpoint, mouse, nub, nubbin, red, keyboard, cramped, layout, linux, debian, intel, arm, x86, processor, tech, computer, technology, performance, slow, raspberry pi, comparison, benchmarking, som, soc, c910, t-head, th1520

Id: 8qDGV6LTOnk

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024