As a wise man has noted in the comments here, I should have entered an lscpu (list CPU details) in the terminal to get the CPU speed information for this board. I have now done this, and it lists "1600 MHz max, 614.4 MHz min". The 1600 MHz (max) figure is the one I ended up with in the video, but this information for the K1 X60 cores here is definitive. :)
@@MarquisDeSang Keep some money in reserve for the soon-to-arrive machines with quad SiFive P550 cores (comparable to RK3588 or Pi 5, but no vector) of which the Sipeed LM5A module might be the most economical if you already have a Lichee Pi 4A (it replaces the TH1520 LM4A module) and late in the year the SG2380 boards with 16x SiFive P670 cores running at around 2.5 GHz which *do* have vector and are roughly Arm A78 equivalent, so leapfrogging currently known Arm SBCs.
It might not have down clocked because of the scaling governor policy. The Armbian image defaults to the performance policy, which just uses the maximum frequency.
@@ExplainingComputers greetings Chris. I'm very excited about the progress of these RISC chips. I was always a huge fan of the Acorn Archimedes as it seemed far more advanced than other systems so it's really cool there's a new breed of these CPUs. Hopefully it won't be long until I can use one of these SBCs for my home server.
It may be aimed at development, but it seems capable of being used for much more. Plenty of I/O, good performance, and a decent price, it deserves to do well.
It just needs more RAM -- the SoC supports 16 GB, and the newly announced Muse Book laptop with the same chip is being offered with 16 GB for $415 with 256 GB SSD, 14" full HD screen, 8 hour battery. Great to see the 600+ MB/s NVMe speed -- two lanes at last, and more than 2x the NVMe speed of the VisionFive 2.
Honestly this SBC should be getting so much more attention. Previous RISC-V SBCs were incredibly slow, they were truly just for development. This one? Shockingly use able! And the extended ML instructions are really cool - it is showing the future of how RISC-V will fit into the new "AI" world.
This is the most iconic EC video ever. 1. Mr. Scissors 2. RISC -V 3. A.I. 4. New Linux Distro 5. Walking duck video 6. Stanley even got a mention Can’t wait for the sequel to this video.
The Banana Pi BPI-F3 is indeed another step closer to end-user RISC-V! I was pretty amazed at how responsive Bianbu was. Also, during the object detection part, I was yelling "FLIP THE CAMERA OFF! BLOW A KISS AT IT!!" at my screen. I know that's what I would do if I messed around with that kind of stuff. Don't know about showing my face though, I'd probably break the camera! 🤭😆 Jokes aside, I think this is the best out of all the RISC-V SBCs you've reviewed on EC so far.
To me, the fact that RISC-V has evolved so much only demonstrate that it has huge potential. Without that much software support, at least for consumer products, the experience is really good, while still being efficient and really cheap. If this architecture had the same resources as ARM or x86, I would be pretty confident on its superior qualities.
In MPV, you can press I (9th letter in English alphabet) for information overlay. It shows dropped frames on decoder output and video file information. Very useful.
The impressive part is the the stability. It looks like everything works right out of the box -that is amazing for a new board and chip. To consider that this is open source right down to the instruction set -that is simply unprecedented! Open source is normally a progressive game of 'find the bugs’. Open source doesn’t sneak up on industry and release a stable system! The one thing I realy wish you had included is the power draw while running that AI stressor. I am sure everyone is thinking the same thing “WOW, now if I just turn up the clock…..” The other thought is “Oh thank God there is a competent open source alternative to the corperate AI control being shoved down our throats!"
I love this channel, nothing else on YT captures that old school British tech program vibe better imo, you can relax as well as learn about new tech, A++.
No one else matches Chris in smoothly rolling those acronyms out... The board looks promising and the OS a welcome surprise.... nice! Thanks Chris, always a pleasure to watch you in your stride 🙂
I’m impressed with with how this board worked & the features it came with, I think the future is looking bright for RISC V on the Banana Pi BPI-F3. TH-cam playback seemed pretty good at 1080p after a few dropped frames. The 4K footage of the Ducks looked nice & smooth on my screen & it’s always good to see some Ducks. When you were showing the item recognition test I noticed the Temps hit 56 c it’ll be interesting to see how it performs with an active cooling fan attached! I’m looking forward to the next video, take care regards Alan :)
Love this risc V update. I want to point out, since I work as a PC tech, Crucial are great quality drives however, they are more fussy than nearly any brand of drive I've ever worked with. About 20% of various PCs and laptops simply won't detect crucial SSDs as a boot drive. Thanks for your constant videos!
Hi Christopher, I watch almost all of your videos, and just letting you know that I always find them very interesting and tought provoking, and friendly and funny too. And typically I am sad that I am not able to put a like on them, because I am more or less de-googled, and I watch them without being logged into google. (e.g. I use new-pipe app on android). I specifially logged into an old google account to let you know that you have more likes than actually shown on youtube :-)
For most important thing to know about such experimental boards is the status of GPU and wireless chip support in mainline kernel and software stack (Mesa). They are pointless if tied to binary blobs on unupdateable kernel.
Thank you Chris. A most interesting, and tempting, board. I look forward to hearing more about it, maybe after a firmware update gets the M.2 drive to boot?
How exciting, another impressive RISC-V board! Looking forward to another video exploring this one. Other than that, looking forward to your next video!
Man, I really wish I could study Embedded System Engineering. Making powerful computers that can fit in one's palm is definitely exciting! I will definitely miss ESE in my life. Keep up the good work, EC. ❤ your videos and presentation.
We're getting close to my dream edge router - all that's missing is OpenBSD support, intel ethernet chips instead of Realtek (for OpenBSD support) and Libreboot firmware (yeah I know that's extremely niche, I am quite the FOSS fanatic, but I like that we're getting closer to my view of perfection). Great board! Great price! Edit: There's an a Mini PCIe board from Kalea Informatique with dual gigabit RJ45 ports and Intel chips. Hmmmm...
I love seeing the tech advance on RISC V. That board might be usable if you can boot from the SSD, hopefully you can get that to work. Thanks for the great video as always Chris!
Hello Chris, Love watching you review the latest SBC Units, whether it be RISC-V, Arm or x86 based. I did notice in the video that you pointed out two microphones and really only pointed to one of them. they appear to be on the same side of the board, one below the other as marked by the silk screening. Great info as usual, thank you for this and all your informative videos.
Thanks for this -- I tried to point to both microphones. But you are right -- I pointed to one, and an entirely different (if very similar looking) component! The first microphone is above the second one on the opposite edge of the board.
Thanks Chris for another awesome and informative video. Good to know there are two “Stanley’s “ in your household it seems you gave Mr knife the video off while giving Mr NVME video glory 😂! Happy to see the RISC V SBCs are getting to be practical for the hobbyist, however, I am still waiting for your Raspberry Pi Quantum SBC video…👍😊! Have a great day!
I found one thing in banana pi documents, they indicated the K1 got 2 cpu clusters in the soc, and they got 2 kind of cpu core, the build in AI core/AI acceleator for each X60 core in the cluster 0, and the cluster 1 with the cpu core with out AI core
Yeah, only one of the clusters supports the custom integrated matrix extension instructions. There is a example benchmark of them on github, at pigirons/cpufp.
SiFive HiFive Unleashed is MiniITX and has been around for three years. The newly announced Milk-V Jupiter is MiniITX and uses the same SoC as this board.
Risc-V seems to be developing a lot faster than ARM and I do hope to see it in more end-user systems, although I do wonder if the graphical performance will let us play games eventually.
ARM probably has to be more careful with its designs. It has paying customers to keep happy. Once a design is agreed, it has to go off the the manufacturers to tool up to manufacture in volume.
The 16 core SG2038 SoC promises to leapfrog the per-core performance of the Arm A76 (RK3588, Pi 5) boards, and with more cores! They're still saying Q3 for those, but I'm picking Q1 next year. Milk-V say they'll have a board for $120, but I think that is with zero or very little RAM. I believe the SoC will support 64 GB RAM.
Soldering an spi flash (U3 component on the motherboard, see the schematic provided by bananapi) on the motherboard can boot from the nvme ssd, and I have tried it
Nice. These kits are getting better and better. Just imagine another 5 or 6 years of development hence. Nobody will really need a desktop PC if there is enough compute in these little boards for people's needs. I'm still planning to get around to building a huge capacity NAS out of a whole pile of little SBCs. Now that I'm semi-retired I should probably go for it :-)
gets me pretty excited, Ive been pining for an x86 and ARM alternative. Even the OS interface seems polished and elegant. Id be more excited with a 8GB or 16GB Main RAM option.
If you know how to use grub you should be able to have just the /boot uefi partition on the slower mediums and have the rest running from the SSD. Takes some playing around with the fstab and grub. I hope you'll be able to do another review once the mini pc version of this comes out.
@@alanthornton3530 Hi, Alan! My Sunday's only just begun. I went straight from the bed to the recliner to watch the new EC video when it popped up in my subscriptions feed. :)
I'm really excited to see more RISC-V boards! I have a dream to make my synthesizer based on risc-v chips o; Maybe..! Maybe someday I'll be able to make something worth boasting
nice review. the youyeetoo r1 has been the only rbc out of the box I've noticed that ran yt without any dropped frames. also I don't like how banna pi is advertising the specs on there site. just saying its 30% more power than a a53 or a55 chip which really means nothing.
When you do your next video do some performance comparisons against the other boards like the Visionfive2 so we can get an idea of the differences in speed
- Sir, ...thanks about your review ....somehow , the Laptop seemed interesting but ..............it surely MUST offer the Debian REPO of lots of free APPS otherwise it isn't nearly a good buy .........no ecosystem Sir, with it bieng an OCTA CORE i'd imagine the speed is very usable best wishes , and Blessings to you Ben
I'm looking forward to the day I can put some kind of Arm or RISC-V ATX board in a PC case and get the full desktop PC experience with that. Closest thing to that right now would have to be a current Mac Pro, which of course is entirely custom.
Slowly but surely... Interesting to see the platform's progress under RISC-5. Indeed, in a few years' time, we'll be able to foresee the transition from development to conventional use.
I was surprised that the HDMI output was limited to 1080px60, when this normally indicates 2.0, which should also support 4k. It is a step in the right direction and perhaps more mass take-up is not that far away, although with what Qualcomm are doing, the whole processor market might find itself in great upheaval in the next year, potentially rendering many correct SOC's looking as if they were suddenly from the dark ages.
Not true -- you do not need HDMI 2.0 for 60 fps output -- this is only for 60p at 4K. A computer limited to 30fps at 1080p would be very unusual. Even HDMI 1.0 offered 60fps at 1920x1080. :)
I think this board may support the rvv 1.0 extensions. If it does it would be nice to see some examples of how much it boosts performance. They say Powerful Vector Computing Power The world’s first RISC-V AI CPU supports RVA22 Profile and 256-bit RVV 1.0 standard, provides 2 times SIMD parallel processing capability than Neon.
It is indeed the second board/SoC available that supports RVV 1.0, after the single core CanMV-K230 last November. Supporting the vector ISA is great, but there still remains the question of the quality of implementation, the register width, how many cycles for each instruction, how many vector pipelines etc. This is a relatively low-end RVV implementation. The one to watch for will be the SG2380 with 16x SiFive P670 cores, hopefully arriving late this year (though I suspect early 2025).
Interesting board and a nice display that RISC-V is moving forward with pretty big steps. But I still guess that the first consumer-ready devices we might see with RISC-V inside will be stuff like routers and other network or "smart" devices where no one will notice it unless they look at the spec sheet. Still, I think RISC-V is heading towards a bright future and might become a worthy rival for x86 and ARM soon-ish.
The SpacemiT chips are hot right now, the couple of laptops announced look excellent value and would be even better if memory and storage prices weren't so high.
The big question is though, will RISC-V adoption speed up and surpass ARM in the future, especially with one of its major attractions are it being open source?
LOL, I came to youtube, speciffically to see if you had any new videos around new SBC's since I am again looking for better boards, more efficient, faster, or just more foss. kind of to see if there is anything that can beat the orangepi 5(since that board is cheap but also idles bellow 2W while reaching quite serious performance, and when it idles it still is almost as fast as a raspberry pi 4 can reach at max speed, so very capable for home server or other 24/7 use). then I start up this site and see you just published a video 1 hour ago, speciffically about another new sbc. which has 8 cores(nice), and risc-v(super nice).
It won't be able to beat the orange pi 5 board. Keep in mind that the cpu is supposed to be similar to an Cortex-A55 in performance. The cortex-A76 cores in the opi5 will be a lot faster.
interesting board, even though power usage metrics would also be very nice, especially with modern day electricity costs, but it is very suprising to see how stable and well supported that board is, I guess that spacemit must have great support/development behind it.
@@oj0024 yeah, I kind of assumed that as well from the video, but speed isn't all. in ost cases the orange pi 5 would already be fast enough at roughly idle speeds for most tasks which would need to constantly run(excluding perhaps some things I would add due to having free processing power anyway or such. it being RISC-V however also is a bonus. and for me energy usage is also very important, both due to actual running cost, but also kind of for the idea of just how good it can get. the orange pi 5 is kind of overkill often in many things, but still typically the best option evenif you don't need close to such performance due to all other things just also being quite good. still since orange pi 5 seems to currently kind of be the peak of cheap consumer(as in non enterprise aimed and available to normal users) sbc's while there are similar boards they tend to cost a lot more. so it is obvioust to compare things against the orange pi 5, since if it competes with that then it is a really good sign. also it said in the video something like 20% or 30% faster than the A55 while using 20% or 30% less power or such forgot the exact numbers. but since the orange pi 5 uses 4 a55 cores and 4 A76 cores that might give the BPI-F3 a clear potential advantage in efficiency, and still more than enough performance.
@@DJDocsVideos yeah indeed, kind of seems to be the best SBC chip on the market currently due to still okay price but also great performance and super good power efficiency, and greatly beats most other options. even though it is getting a older chip by now, and there is a lot of acive development in that area so I also wonder when we will see something better than or competingto the rk3588. not because I don't like that chip since for sure it is my nr1 choice rigth now based on the ones I know being available in sbc's well these new risc-v chips might be competors actually if their efficiency actually works as well as they claim. the main reason to look for alternatives is because right now it kind of seemed like the one so clearly the best option that it might be dangerous to get stuck only looking for that chip even if there mightbe something new out or coming, like this new risc-v chip. even though I don't know and can't seem to find what node size they used, and the documentation tells of a tdp of 3W-5W which I hope is load and not idle since if idle is 3w then it would have quitesome issues at idle power usage. but it's performance is somewhat lower(much lower in AI however), but still fast enough for most taks and the price is just over half of that of the orangepi 5 so a valid competor even before knowing the node size. so even if it would idle at 3w which is very high compared to the stated max tdp of 5w it would still be a valid option even before counting in that it is risc-v
Thank you for showing the BananaPi. It should be mentioned though, that all Imagination GPUs currently have a massive driver problem. It's cool hearing about what they can provide but without drivers, that doesn't do anything for you. OpenSource drivers are under development but thay are far away from using the chip according to it's specs.
But, as noted in this video, there is now some RISC-V driver support with certain Imagination GPUs. :) The desktop in Bianbu OS is using the GPU as intended.
@@ExplainingComputers yes but it uses (exactly like the one in the VF2) an older version of the closed source driver from Imagination which is no longer in development. If you want to see the open source driver in action, check out the Irradium image for the VF2. That uses kernel 6.9 and the open source driver (and mesa).
ImgTech of course supplies driver for their GPUs to the chip manufacturers who use their GPUs, and the official OS from the board manufacturer will include the driver -- here Bianbu OS, a derivative of Debian. If you want to run some generic OS on the board then of course that probably doesn't include the drivers from ImgTech. The only thing missing is an OPEN SOURCE driver. But that's true for NVidia GPUs too, and that doesn't stop people using them. (There is a 3rd party reverse-engineered driver, Nouveau but it's not that great).
@@BruceHoult the NVIDIA binary driver is feature complete. The one for Img-GPUs isn't. So even when using the Imagination driver, you'll not get most 3D stuff working. Also KDE Plasma is difficult. So that is not compareable to the NVIDIA situation.
@@Nightwulf1269 If the manufacturer's driver doesn't support some hardware feature, and they don't document it so you can write your own driver, does that feature truly exist?
Would love of you opened the videos on the terminal with mpv, to see if they are using the GPU for decoding. Its often only a line on the config file that's needed for it to use the GPU
Greetings, very interesting topic, good looking board. Probably because I knew the topic, I decided to watch on my 15" mobile workstation running Zorin 17 pro. Nice to see Mr .
Bianbu OS looks aesthetically pleasing compared to other distros. God help us all when the Chinese start polishing their products. It will be the final nail on western industry.
As a wise man has noted in the comments here, I should have entered an lscpu (list CPU details) in the terminal to get the CPU speed information for this board. I have now done this, and it lists "1600 MHz max, 614.4 MHz min". The 1600 MHz (max) figure is the one I ended up with in the video, but this information for the K1 X60 cores here is definitive. :)
Nooooooooooooooooooooo! A new Risc-V SBC and I am broke. Will definitely get one in th upcomming months.
@@MarquisDeSang well I guess the increase in RISC-V devellopmeant and support might have made or might make you broke XD.
@@MarquisDeSang Keep some money in reserve for the soon-to-arrive machines with quad SiFive P550 cores (comparable to RK3588 or Pi 5, but no vector) of which the Sipeed LM5A module might be the most economical if you already have a Lichee Pi 4A (it replaces the TH1520 LM4A module) and late in the year the SG2380 boards with 16x SiFive P670 cores running at around 2.5 GHz which *do* have vector and are roughly Arm A78 equivalent, so leapfrogging currently known Arm SBCs.
Thank god for the chinese for the breakneck speed at which the risc v platforms are maturing
It might not have down clocked because of the scaling governor policy. The Armbian image defaults to the performance policy, which just uses the maximum frequency.
It is Father's Day in the US. I'm sipping a good cup of coffee and watching Explaining Computers with my dad. Thank you
Ugghh cofee, lucifer liquid! LOL!!!
And the UK!
In most of the civilized world.😆🍻🥂🍾
Greetings!
@@ExplainingComputers greetings Chris. I'm very excited about the progress of these RISC chips. I was always a huge fan of the Acorn Archimedes as it seemed far more advanced than other systems so it's really cool there's a new breed of these CPUs. Hopefully it won't be long until I can use one of these SBCs for my home server.
It may be aimed at development, but it seems capable of being used for much more. Plenty of I/O, good performance, and a decent price, it deserves to do well.
Very much agreed. I've just built a RAID NAS with this, as you will see in a video two weeks today. Works well.
@@ExplainingComputersvery much looking forward to this 🎉
It just needs more RAM -- the SoC supports 16 GB, and the newly announced Muse Book laptop with the same chip is being offered with 16 GB for $415 with 256 GB SSD, 14" full HD screen, 8 hour battery. Great to see the 600+ MB/s NVMe speed -- two lanes at last, and more than 2x the NVMe speed of the VisionFive 2.
Honestly this SBC should be getting so much more attention. Previous RISC-V SBCs were incredibly slow, they were truly just for development. This one? Shockingly use able! And the extended ML instructions are really cool - it is showing the future of how RISC-V will fit into the new "AI" world.
I agree, this is a significant new board.
This is the most iconic EC video ever.
1. Mr. Scissors
2. RISC -V
3. A.I.
4. New Linux Distro
5. Walking duck video
6. Stanley even got a mention
Can’t wait for the sequel to this video.
I forgot solitairetoo
8. Chris showing his face during the object-detection demo
Wow! I had not realized! The sequel posts a week on Sunday, and is one of my favourite videos for some time. No ducks though . . .
Big shout out to Mr Scissors
All it's missing is the 'puppets
The Banana Pi BPI-F3 is indeed another step closer to end-user RISC-V! I was pretty amazed at how responsive Bianbu was.
Also, during the object detection part, I was yelling "FLIP THE CAMERA OFF! BLOW A KISS AT IT!!" at my screen. I know that's what I would do if I messed around with that kind of stuff. Don't know about showing my face though, I'd probably break the camera! 🤭😆
Jokes aside, I think this is the best out of all the RISC-V SBCs you've reviewed on EC so far.
That board has insane connectivity! Also, looks like the first RISC-V system worth anything beyond a system demonstration.
Great vid!
To me, the fact that RISC-V has evolved so much only demonstrate that it has huge potential. Without that much software support, at least for consumer products, the experience is really good, while still being efficient and really cheap. If this architecture had the same resources as ARM or x86, I would be pretty confident on its superior qualities.
In MPV, you can press I (9th letter in English alphabet) for information overlay. It shows dropped frames on decoder output and video file information. Very useful.
Impressive what they have setup already. Focus on stability and now can go for speed. Well done.
The impressive part is the the stability. It looks like everything works right out of the box -that is amazing for a new board and chip. To consider that this is open source right down to the instruction set -that is simply unprecedented! Open source is normally a progressive game of 'find the bugs’. Open source doesn’t sneak up on industry and release a stable system!
The one thing I realy wish you had included is the power draw while running that AI stressor.
I am sure everyone is thinking the same thing “WOW, now if I just turn up the clock…..”
The other thought is “Oh thank God there is a competent open source alternative to the corperate AI control being shoved down our throats!"
I love this channel, nothing else on YT captures that old school British tech program vibe better imo, you can relax as well as learn about new tech, A++.
No one else matches Chris in smoothly rolling those acronyms out... The board looks promising and the OS a welcome surprise.... nice!
Thanks Chris, always a pleasure to watch you in your stride 🙂
Yeah, if he keeps this up he will graduate to TH-cam production guru. :-)
Thanks for this -- but you would not believe the number of takes and retakes to get them right! Well, maybe you would. :)
@@ExplainingComputers Hence, guru status! :-)
cant wait for a full riscv high end desktop / laptop
Always look forward to your videos. RISC has always intrigued me, and I believe that it has great potential for the future.
I see some tablets are using RISC-V now, Lichee , Pinetab, a review on those would be interesting.
Yes, I must look at one of those. :)
Thanks!
Thanks for your support. :) I hope that you are doing OK.
I love it! Thanks for the review! I hope for the best for RISC-V.
great video. I learned about risc v from your channel. please keep following the latest developments and sharing them with us
Great overview of a well equipped board and a capable Linux distro. RISC-V is definitely moving forward.
Pretty snappy for RISC V. Future looks good.
I’m impressed with with how this board worked & the features it came with, I think the future is looking bright for RISC V on the Banana Pi BPI-F3. TH-cam playback seemed pretty good at 1080p after a few dropped frames. The 4K footage of the Ducks looked nice & smooth on my screen & it’s always good to see some Ducks.
When you were showing the item recognition test I noticed the Temps hit 56 c it’ll be interesting to see how it performs with an active cooling fan attached! I’m looking forward to the next video, take care regards Alan :)
Ducks are the best! 🦆
Hello Chris, thank you for testing on the board
Love this risc V update. I want to point out, since I work as a PC tech, Crucial are great quality drives however, they are more fussy than nearly any brand of drive I've ever worked with. About 20% of various PCs and laptops simply won't detect crucial SSDs as a boot drive. Thanks for your constant videos!
Hi Christopher, I watch almost all of your videos, and just letting you know that I always find them very interesting and tought provoking, and friendly and funny too. And typically I am sad that I am not able to put a like on them, because I am more or less de-googled, and I watch them without being logged into google. (e.g. I use new-pipe app on android). I specifially logged into an old google account to let you know that you have more likes than actually shown on youtube :-)
Thanks for this post and for watching -- most appreciated. :)
The quality of your videos has increased so much over the years.
For most important thing to know about such experimental boards is the status of GPU and wireless chip support in mainline kernel and software stack (Mesa). They are pointless if tied to binary blobs on unupdateable kernel.
Afternoon, Chris!! Thank god no AI this week. 😊 What an interesting board.
Greetings!
Thanks for sharing this material, it is really cool to see this kind of development of risc-v
Thank you Chris. A most interesting, and tempting, board.
I look forward to hearing more about it, maybe after a firmware update gets the M.2 drive to boot?
Thanks for this. I'm image you are right -- there must in time be an M.2 boot option.
How exciting, another impressive RISC-V board! Looking forward to another video exploring this one. Other than that, looking forward to your next video!
Greetings Perry.
Wow 1.02M .... i was here since 140K. Well Done Sir!!!
Good to see Mr. Scissors make an appearance again. Cheers!
Ah I love pi boards thanks for making videos about them
:)
Man, I really wish I could study Embedded System Engineering. Making powerful computers that can fit in one's palm is definitely exciting! I will definitely miss ESE in my life.
Keep up the good work, EC. ❤ your videos and presentation.
More storage options, gpio access, affordability. Very nice indeed. Thanks for another great video Chris.
amazed by the progress of risc-v based systems
We're getting close to my dream edge router - all that's missing is OpenBSD support, intel ethernet chips instead of Realtek (for OpenBSD support) and Libreboot firmware (yeah I know that's extremely niche, I am quite the FOSS fanatic, but I like that we're getting closer to my view of perfection). Great board! Great price!
Edit: There's an a Mini PCIe board from Kalea Informatique with dual gigabit RJ45 ports and Intel chips. Hmmmm...
Go Linux, Go Go 🐧
🐧
🐧🐧🐧
I love the UI for this distro. I wish more used that
I love seeing the tech advance on RISC V. That board might be usable if you can boot from the SSD, hopefully you can get that to work. Thanks for the great video as always Chris!
Thank you for covering niche boards!
You and your vids are one of a kind
Greetings. This board seems fantastic with lots of I/O. And the performance seems okay which is neat. 👍👍👍
Hello Chris, Love watching you review the latest SBC Units, whether it be RISC-V, Arm or x86 based. I did notice in the video that you pointed out two microphones and really only pointed to one of them. they appear to be on the same side of the board, one below the other as marked by the silk screening. Great info as usual, thank you for this and all your informative videos.
Thanks for this -- I tried to point to both microphones. But you are right -- I pointed to one, and an entirely different (if very similar looking) component! The first microphone is above the second one on the opposite edge of the board.
Thanks Chris for another awesome and informative video. Good to know there are two “Stanley’s “ in your household it seems you gave Mr knife the video off while giving Mr NVME video glory 😂!
Happy to see the RISC V SBCs are getting to be practical for the hobbyist, however, I am still waiting for your Raspberry Pi Quantum SBC video…👍😊!
Have a great day!
Interesting thing to note - the risc-v laptop that Canonical just announced, made by DeepComputing, uses the same SOC.
Which is rather exciting!
Very exciting, and suggests we will get Ubuntu for K1.
Thanks, Chris! I would have loved to see this with the OS on other storage! (PCIE, EEMC) Maybe an idea for a separate video?
I found one thing in banana pi documents, they indicated the K1 got 2 cpu clusters in the soc, and they got 2 kind of cpu core, the build in AI core/AI acceleator for each X60 core in the cluster 0, and the cluster 1 with the cpu core with out AI core
Yeah, only one of the clusters supports the custom integrated matrix extension instructions. There is a example benchmark of them on github, at pigirons/cpufp.
Can't wait for RISC-V ITX motherboards
SiFive HiFive Unleashed is MiniITX and has been around for three years. The newly announced Milk-V Jupiter is MiniITX and uses the same SoC as this board.
19:23 surpassing ducks ❤👍
Kindest regards, neighbours
Passionnant !
Exciting !
Great video, as always. Thank you.
Risc-V seems to be developing a lot faster than ARM and I do hope to see it in more end-user systems, although I do wonder if the graphical performance will let us play games eventually.
I'm sure that RISC-V gaming will get there! :)
ARM probably has to be more careful with its designs. It has paying customers to keep happy. Once a design is agreed, it has to go off the the manufacturers to tool up to manufacture in volume.
That's because ARM's phase of rapid development happened years ago and RISC V still has some distance to catch up.
This is the best RISC-V sbc I have seen so far. Probably better in some ways than the Pi5.
2 NICs (albeit just 1 Gbit) already beat the pi 5.
RISC-V is catching up to ARM quite quickly. Looking forward to RISC-V based laptops and motherboards.
The 16 core SG2038 SoC promises to leapfrog the per-core performance of the Arm A76 (RK3588, Pi 5) boards, and with more cores! They're still saying Q3 for those, but I'm picking Q1 next year. Milk-V say they'll have a board for $120, but I think that is with zero or very little RAM. I believe the SoC will support 64 GB RAM.
Nice video Chris! Thanks for always sharing with us!👍💖😎JP
I wish it had a 2nd m.2 NVMe port to use it as a NAS! And one more USB C port would also add more flexibility 😊
I hope all the software gets into regular Debian, etc. as well. Just saw that this is the same chip as Ubuntu is working on, so probably good news.
This is a REAL computer scientist
Soldering an spi flash (U3 component on the motherboard, see the schematic provided by bananapi) on the motherboard can boot from the nvme ssd, and I have tried it
Cool.
hopefully we will see more soc/sbc this year
I'm thinking they should provide a bit more through cpu cooler and things.. Always a great video!
This is the same SoC that will be used in the Milk-V Jupiter it seems.
Indeed so.
Nice. These kits are getting better and better. Just imagine another 5 or 6 years of development hence. Nobody will really need a desktop PC if there is enough compute in these little boards for people's needs. I'm still planning to get around to building a huge capacity NAS out of a whole pile of little SBCs. Now that I'm semi-retired I should probably go for it :-)
Yes, you have to see this RISC-V hardware as part of a journey.
gets me pretty excited, Ive been pining for an x86 and ARM alternative.
Even the OS interface seems polished and elegant.
Id be more excited with a 8GB or 16GB Main RAM option.
Excellent review.
it's imprevvise seeing it running fully fledged modern gnome, especially knowing how taxing ti can be even on some x86 systems
If you know how to use grub you should be able to have just the /boot uefi partition on the slower mediums and have the rest running from the SSD. Takes some playing around with the fstab and grub. I hope you'll be able to do another review once the mini pc version of this comes out.
It's probably running U-boot or something like that
Good morning/afternoon!
Greetings!
@@ExplainingComputersHi, Chris! ☺️
@@Praxibetel-Ix G'day Ford, I'm just glad to be here soaking up more educational teachings my Sundays complete ;)
@@alanthornton3530 Hi, Alan! My Sunday's only just begun. I went straight from the bed to the recliner to watch the new EC video when it popped up in my subscriptions feed. :)
I'm really excited to see more RISC-V boards! I have a dream to make my synthesizer based on risc-v chips o; Maybe..! Maybe someday I'll be able to make something worth boasting
nice review. the youyeetoo r1 has been the only rbc out of the box I've noticed that ran yt without any dropped frames. also I don't like how banna pi is advertising the specs on there site. just saying its 30% more power than a a53 or a55 chip which really means nothing.
Always love RISC-V content.
When you do your next video do some performance comparisons against the other boards like the Visionfive2 so we can get an idea of the differences in speed
Thank you! excellent movie.
-
Sir,
...thanks about your review ....somehow , the Laptop seemed interesting
but
..............it surely MUST offer the Debian REPO of lots of free APPS otherwise it
isn't nearly a good buy .........no ecosystem
Sir, with it bieng an OCTA CORE i'd imagine the speed is very usable
best wishes ,
and Blessings to you
Ben
The repros are indeed an issue thus far . . .
Another great video Chris!!
RISC has always intrigued me, don`t know why.
Do you mean RISC in general, as opposed to CISC, or RISC-V specifically?
@@johnm2012 risc-v architecture
I'm looking forward to the day I can put some kind of Arm or RISC-V ATX board in a PC case and get the full desktop PC experience with that. Closest thing to that right now would have to be a current Mac Pro, which of course is entirely custom.
Another great video, thanks!
I can’t wait to get a RISC-V PC of my own.
Would you consider making a video on Linux desk tops?
Over the years Chris has built and upgraded several desktop computers and he's reviewed several desktop Linux distributions on them.
Please do a video with this board + Hailo NPU !!! revolutionary opensource no x86 AI dev kit !!! YESSS!!!
SUPER video nice adventure love new things. Thanks peter Mike
I thought you would test the video codecs with a video editor export. Nice looking specifications. Thanks.
Slowly but surely... Interesting to see the platform's progress under RISC-5. Indeed, in a few years' time, we'll be able to foresee the transition from development to conventional use.
The armbian image works well, but only the cli image.
Hi. Can you test OpenGL and Vulkan performance? May be play SuperTuxKart or some other 3D games.
I was surprised that the HDMI output was limited to 1080px60, when this normally indicates 2.0, which should also support 4k.
It is a step in the right direction and perhaps more mass take-up is not that far away, although with what Qualcomm are doing, the whole processor market might find itself in great upheaval in the next year, potentially rendering many correct SOC's looking as if they were suddenly from the dark ages.
Not true -- you do not need HDMI 2.0 for 60 fps output -- this is only for 60p at 4K. A computer limited to 30fps at 1080p would be very unusual. Even HDMI 1.0 offered 60fps at 1920x1080. :)
I think this board may support the rvv 1.0 extensions. If it does it would be nice to see some examples of how much it boosts performance.
They say Powerful Vector Computing Power
The world’s first RISC-V AI CPU supports RVA22 Profile and 256-bit RVV 1.0 standard, provides 2 times SIMD parallel processing capability than Neon.
You are correct!
It is indeed the second board/SoC available that supports RVV 1.0, after the single core CanMV-K230 last November. Supporting the vector ISA is great, but there still remains the question of the quality of implementation, the register width, how many cycles for each instruction, how many vector pipelines etc. This is a relatively low-end RVV implementation. The one to watch for will be the SG2380 with 16x SiFive P670 cores, hopefully arriving late this year (though I suspect early 2025).
Thanks a lot for sharing!
Interesting board and a nice display that RISC-V is moving forward with pretty big steps. But I still guess that the first consumer-ready devices we might see with RISC-V inside will be stuff like routers and other network or "smart" devices where no one will notice it unless they look at the spec sheet.
Still, I think RISC-V is heading towards a bright future and might become a worthy rival for x86 and ARM soon-ish.
The SpacemiT chips are hot right now, the couple of laptops announced look excellent value and would be even better if memory and storage prices weren't so high.
The big question is though, will RISC-V adoption speed up and surpass ARM in the future, especially with one of its major attractions are it being open source?
Not bad, it would be interesting to see if we could assign the cores independently.
LOL, I came to youtube, speciffically to see if you had any new videos around new SBC's since I am again looking for better boards, more efficient, faster, or just more foss.
kind of to see if there is anything that can beat the orangepi 5(since that board is cheap but also idles bellow 2W while reaching quite serious performance, and when it idles it still is almost as fast as a raspberry pi 4 can reach at max speed, so very capable for home server or other 24/7 use).
then I start up this site and see you just published a video 1 hour ago, speciffically about another new sbc.
which has 8 cores(nice), and risc-v(super nice).
It won't be able to beat the orange pi 5 board. Keep in mind that the cpu is supposed to be similar to an Cortex-A55 in performance. The cortex-A76 cores in the opi5 will be a lot faster.
interesting board, even though power usage metrics would also be very nice, especially with modern day electricity costs, but it is very suprising to see how stable and well supported that board is, I guess that spacemit must have great support/development behind it.
The the Rockchip RK3588 is a pretty good little CPU 👍
@@oj0024 yeah, I kind of assumed that as well from the video, but speed isn't all. in ost cases the orange pi 5 would already be fast enough at roughly idle speeds for most tasks which would need to constantly run(excluding perhaps some things I would add due to having free processing power anyway or such.
it being RISC-V however also is a bonus.
and for me energy usage is also very important, both due to actual running cost, but also kind of for the idea of just how good it can get.
the orange pi 5 is kind of overkill often in many things, but still typically the best option evenif you don't need close to such performance due to all other things just also being quite good. still since orange pi 5 seems to currently kind of be the peak of cheap consumer(as in non enterprise aimed and available to normal users) sbc's while there are similar boards they tend to cost a lot more.
so it is obvioust to compare things against the orange pi 5, since if it competes with that then it is a really good sign.
also it said in the video something like 20% or 30% faster than the A55 while using 20% or 30% less power or such forgot the exact numbers. but since the orange pi 5 uses 4 a55 cores and 4 A76 cores that might give the BPI-F3 a clear potential advantage in efficiency, and still more than enough performance.
@@DJDocsVideos yeah indeed, kind of seems to be the best SBC chip on the market currently due to still okay price but also great performance and super good power efficiency, and greatly beats most other options. even though it is getting a older chip by now, and there is a lot of acive development in that area so I also wonder when we will see something better than or competingto the rk3588.
not because I don't like that chip since for sure it is my nr1 choice rigth now based on the ones I know being available in sbc's well these new risc-v chips might be competors actually if their efficiency actually works as well as they claim.
the main reason to look for alternatives is because right now it kind of seemed like the one so clearly the best option that it might be dangerous to get stuck only looking for that chip even if there mightbe something new out or coming, like this new risc-v chip.
even though I don't know and can't seem to find what node size they used, and the documentation tells of a tdp of 3W-5W which I hope is load and not idle since if idle is 3w then it would have quitesome issues at idle power usage.
but it's performance is somewhat lower(much lower in AI however), but still fast enough for most taks and the price is just over half of that of the orangepi 5 so a valid competor even before knowing the node size. so even if it would idle at 3w which is very high compared to the stated max tdp of 5w it would still be a valid option even before counting in that it is risc-v
Thank you for showing the BananaPi. It should be mentioned though, that all Imagination GPUs currently have a massive driver problem. It's cool hearing about what they can provide but without drivers, that doesn't do anything for you. OpenSource drivers are under development but thay are far away from using the chip according to it's specs.
But, as noted in this video, there is now some RISC-V driver support with certain Imagination GPUs. :) The desktop in Bianbu OS is using the GPU as intended.
@@ExplainingComputers yes but it uses (exactly like the one in the VF2) an older version of the closed source driver from Imagination which is no longer in development. If you want to see the open source driver in action, check out the Irradium image for the VF2. That uses kernel 6.9 and the open source driver (and mesa).
ImgTech of course supplies driver for their GPUs to the chip manufacturers who use their GPUs, and the official OS from the board manufacturer will include the driver -- here Bianbu OS, a derivative of Debian. If you want to run some generic OS on the board then of course that probably doesn't include the drivers from ImgTech. The only thing missing is an OPEN SOURCE driver. But that's true for NVidia GPUs too, and that doesn't stop people using them. (There is a 3rd party reverse-engineered driver, Nouveau but it's not that great).
@@BruceHoult the NVIDIA binary driver is feature complete. The one for Img-GPUs isn't. So even when using the Imagination driver, you'll not get most 3D stuff working. Also KDE Plasma is difficult. So that is not compareable to the NVIDIA situation.
@@Nightwulf1269 If the manufacturer's driver doesn't support some hardware feature, and they don't document it so you can write your own driver, does that feature truly exist?
It would be cool if you could test the vector extension support in the followup video.
Agreed and noted.
Would love of you opened the videos on the terminal with mpv, to see if they are using the GPU for decoding. Its often only a line on the config file that's needed for it to use the GPU
Noted.
Greetings, very interesting topic, good looking board. Probably because I knew the topic, I decided to watch on my 15" mobile workstation running Zorin 17 pro. Nice to see Mr .
Greetings my friend. :)
Sunday With The Professor! But Can It Run Crysis? Okay Seriously, What About Booting From A Flash Drive? It Is A Shame About The M.2, Huh? Thank You.
Bianbu OS looks aesthetically pleasing compared to other distros. God help us all when the Chinese start polishing their products. It will be the final nail on western industry.