I just wish they had chosen a GPU from a design firm that was more open than Imagination; for years they just about refused to acknowledge that open source software existed. I suspect it was because they had 3rd party IP in their designs, but ofc they aren't saying. In the past Imagination would say "if you want open source drivers then approach your hardware vendor" but what Imagination failed to mention is that they made it infeasible for their counterparties to provide details and also made it infeasible for their counterparties to even acknowledge that Imagination was making it so difficult. So now that they've had a new CEO for the last two years this change in the way they are engaging with the open source community is a genuine sea change.
@@TankEnMatewell I'll give you great news that some of their GPUs have open source drivers now with more on the way the problem now is they need to redo all firmware for the GPU for the open source version and that's going to take a second
@@vixea I know Imagination has open source drivers (kernel (not merged just yet) and mesa), but from my reading it only supports Vulkan 1.0 at the moment (as opposed to 1.3 for AMD / Intel). Not that this is a problem for most people, but it also "supports" OpenGL via Zink; ... it doesn't currently support any of the Vulkan physical device features and only a couple of the (dozen or so) Vulkan extensions to get Zink to work; which means no open source OpenGL on open source Vulkan drivers. So I would contend that it is going to take far more than a second to get this working reliably (let alone usably) in even the medium time frame. Imagination may be on the way to open source land but they still have a long way to go.
It’s likely the image processing tasks are so slow because the image libraries used have hand-optimized assembly implementations for things like decoding, and they just don’t exist yet for RISC-V. Same thing probably applies to things like video decoding, and possibly even the cryptography you mentioned. Edit: Also, love to see that PCIe works well out of the box!
Either that or compilers for spir-v aren't mature enough yet and produce suboptimal code (no auto-vectorization would be a killer for image libraries for example)
Although this SBC was honestly a pain to get running (I have the v1.2a version which needed to be updated by TTL-UART), RISCV has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it extremely viable in this day and age - the first being the significant amount of microcontrollers being released using the architecture, with some even having enough power to run a full linux install. Having some sort of parity between desktop-grade compute and embedded compute like this is extremely helpful for development. On top of this, being able to emulate RISCV cores in FPGAs without any sort of restrictive licensing has essentially enabled an entirely new avenue for hobbyists and small businesses to design truly high performance hardware applications.
RISC V on FPGAs is something I don't see most people mention and it's a pretty big deal for open source hardware. Just having open RISCV based cores would be huge even if it needs to run on an FPGA. People can iterate on the core designs petty rapidly this way.
The potential problem with RISC-V is how variable and modular it can be. Most microcontrollers will only use a 32 bit core and may not have many extensions, compared to a SBC that will probably be 64 bit and have at least the basic set of extensions. Something that might make this even worse is RV32E which is specifically for embedded devices and changes some main aspects of the architecture. If companies make a habit of adding in custom extensions for things like AI then it could get messy as some software may only run on a specific brand of cores, essentially leading to vendor lock in or needing to rewrite a program to use a different brand, that wouldn’t be a problem if everyone just agreed to work together and only use official extensions but that may not happen. Another potential issue could be large differences in performance based on the architecture of that specific chip, all of the chips may be RISC-V and may have all the same extensions and even run at the same clock speed but differences in how it is implemented could create a large difference in performance, this could make comparing performance of different chips a lot harder than it currently is. On top of that with it being open you might end up with lots of companies all releasing their own RISC-V chips and you end up with a market stuffed full of ever so slightly different chips and cores and it may make it more difficult to find what you actually need.
@@shadow7037932 there are open source RISC-V cores that already exist but unless there is serious work done to them they won’t compete with cores made by dedicated companies and they don’t need to open source their implementation. It is relatively easy to implement a basic RISC-V core but if you want more advanced features like pipelining or out of order processing then it gets a lot more difficult. Companies that make more advanced cores will license them, just like ARM does and there is a good chance those cores will be much better than the open source ones available, so if you want a good core that has been developed by a team of engineers and thoroughly tested and documented then you will probably still have to license it. Most small companies have enough to worry about without having to design or modify the processor before they even start on their actual product, they would also have to hire engineers that specialise in processor design which is a skill on its own and is not the same as implementing other things on FPGAs. So it is far faster, easier and probably overall cheaper for them to license a core that is known to work and then build their product around that. Everyone saying things like, “small companies and hobbyists can make their own RISC-V cores”, are really underestimating how much work and knowledge goes into making a decent processor. If it was so easy then companies like ARM wouldn’t have such a hold on the industry and making your own processor would have been much more of a thing before now.
@@conorstewart2214 this is all true, but one of the pure, crystalline, truly good things about computing is how, if they're passionate and dedicated, a single person can move mountains. you could equally make the same statement about creating a AAA game engine or programming language - but you can do it, and people like Muratori, Blow, Tarn and Zach Adams, and many others are proof positive that you can actually make the journey of a thousand miles if you just keep stepping. the "road never traveled" always looks prohibitively difficult...until the first person decides to walk it. this is a drastic perspective shift to the conversation, but i believe the future of computing as a force for good in the world rests on the chip being "opened up". we already live in a world where top-down control of computing infrastructure is used to facilitate a total surveillance state, down to assassinations of journalists and political dissidents. corporate capture of the internet has created a situation where the global commons we became used to is now centralized and controlled through a few siloed "TV channel" style platforms, with all of our data being scraped constantly, invisible censorship, and complete top-down information shaping (will this comment disappear into the ether because i used the word "assassination" twice? let's find out! ) all attempts to empower regular people with technology will be futile until we are able to start reclaiming the stack from the very ground up, and that starts with chips that are truly open, even if anemic at first. is it a lofty goal? sure, it's an insanely lofty goal. but that journey of a thousand miles looks more and more necessary. the current technological paradigm is quite literally driving people insane. getting out from that will require a drastic adjustment of expectations and willingness to rebuild from the ground level. opening up the chip represents the first and most important lock on the technological cage we find ourselves in.
As a huge RISC-V advocate, I agree that if you want to get a RISC-V board right now, do it because you're interested in RISC-V development. It's really early, and it's definitely exciting, but if you want to do anything productive, this generation just isn't there _yet_.
Thanks for your honest and technical review, I will be very excited about these as they continue to solidify the ecosystem. We have to build it, and you're an integral part of the community. Your videos show people how not to be daunted by compiling or changing code, we need more brave people to explore it and fix it.
Really liked that movie. Don't look at what you see on the screens. But the story and hacking community / world was totally not bad for a film... Maybe add the end, just disconnect de server from the internet :)
We all know that Jeff has already bought many of these boards. As with raspberry Pi's, this will create a global shortage but he will be able to continue delivering his so interesting videos. 🤣
Love that Rocky Linux t-shirt. I'm a big fan of that distro. It's been great seeing the Linux community rally so quickly in the wake of the CentOS debacle.
I currently try to shift over most of my dev work to using Risc-V mcu and hopefully sbc s , its for sure the future and software support and actual application use are critical so every helping hand counts.
This is pretty exciting - lots of potential and room for improvement! I don't know if I would buy one today but will definitely be watching the RISC-V space for signs of maturity. Thanks for sharing your experience with getting this board running!
Risc V has to start somewhere. It has a fight against ARM but folks seem to value the positives enough where we should see a lot of software development over the next few years. Thanks for the video!
Wait, so they did a complete actual PCI-E implementation? Impressive! The rumor I've heard is that the compatibility on the arm boards is low because the soc vendors often don't really implement all of PCI-E, just enough for one or two specific use cases
One thing I learned over the years is that no matter how clear the spec is, harware vendors will find no shortage of ways to violate it, and no limit of creativity on how to disappoint you. You can't rely on anything that is mandatory according to the spec if the vendor doesn't specifically mention support for that feature and has tested for it. Just lower your standards by like a LOT what is acceptable, and then lower your expectations even further and then you have industry practice.
Oooh, I love this! I've never done anything with RISC-V but I have been rooting for it all along! The computing landscape will be so much more interesting with this! And many gadgets will be much easier to produce
My prediction: RISC-V will first eat up the microcontroller and embedded space (because hopefully less licensing hassle, hopefully lots of open source development tooling available and ability to just get the hardware you need without anything more), it will need a good-enough SBC so people can use it for easier development, testing, etc. And it looks like this will soonish be a reality.
yes, this is still a real devboard, the software is not mature enough for general consumption. But the RISC-V scene it's improving fast, far faster than ARM is going.
@@marcogenovesi8570 this is annoyingly true. When Apple released the M series it really seemed like ARM was gonna make leaps and bounds but it just sort of fizzled out.
@@Freshbott2 Quite frankly I didn't share that hope. ARM's licensing structure has always cultivated mostly lazy OEM customers that just do the bare minimum integration of whatever very very underwhelming bs ARM designs and licenses out to the "plebs" and call it a day. Yes a few high end licensees like Apple and Ampere/Nvidia are out there doing their designs but that's it. With Risc-V there is no "higher authority" that drip feeds the same OEMs with a "good enough" product so you get plenty of "ARM-like" CPU design firms that create new designs and compete with each other.
@@Freshbott2 I mean, wtf is Qualcomm even doing at this point. They were supposed to herald the "windows on ARM" revolution and that thing went like a fart in the wind. That's because they are mostly just "licensed CPU integrators" and not doing true CPU design
@@marcogenovesi8570 I agree with you about ARM, I was more naive than you but looking back it’s obvious. But I’m not going to dupe myself over RISC-V. It’ll cultivate the same laziness but cheaper and more accessible. In the end it’s still an off-the-shelf model. Just because you can go custom doesn’t mean OEMs will do it outside the embedded/daughter chip space.
A risc-v enter to the bar...a new contender is always great news. However is too early to tell how it will perform, definitively a pre-alpha era. For the early testers, this is a Risky-V-usiness haha. Wonderful video as always!
Nobody who touched one of these should think it will start a revolution in the industry. It's just plain not ready. I would be promoting this board so hard if it was ready. It's just not. Everything Jeff covered here is true. Will RISC-V be a revolution? Honestly if we can get people to value open source hardware like they value open source hardware yes, it could be. The companies don't really live up to it being fully open source hardware if you look into the details. That part doesn't concern me. If we can get people to believe in open-source hardware then it doesn't matter that the companies aren't living up to it today. It's more an educational problem just like open-source software. Once people understand what it does for them they will like it. The problem is the consumer devices are not ready. This device is not ready. We'll have to look at it 6 months to a year from now where a lot of this will be fixed (and thanks for discussing that so much in the video Jeff, I agree 100%). Today they're not ready though. I can't emphasize enough how disappointing that firmware update process was to even run the latest OS. That is just plain unacceptable!
@@JeffGeerling Oh wow, I'm glad you saw that one! That was from my own journey with this board and frankly I reached much of the same conclusions you did. Most importantly this board is not ready for Pi fans or even SBC fans to jump into unless they are experts. I don't recall one with a worse firmware update process in recent memory that I've had to do! Very good testing with the GPU as well. That's not one I had tried on there but I'm not surprised. You couldn't be more right about how difficult it is to get anything GPU accelerated going in Linux and that's a huge problem on a lot of alternative SBCs that aren't ARM as well and it's always worth mentioning. Take care Jeff!
@@realms4219 That's already happening. My Google Pixel 7 Pro uses a RISC-V chip. Companies that want to make their own silicon are doing this. RISC-V is also showing up a lot in microcontrollers that are fantastic to use today (ESP32-C3). The question is when will someone make a good enough single board computer powered by RISC-V. We already have good enough phones. We already have good enough microcontrollers. When will we get a good enough SBC? Not yet unfortunately but it's only a matter of time.
@@JamesAChambers How much is 'open source' hardware going to matter when ccomputer/chip designers are going to be making their own secret sauce parts or custom derivatives?
Hi Jeff, thanks for the video, very interesting and thought-provoking. Given the lack of RPi's atm this looks like it could gain a lot of traction and interest in the soc space. Look forward to more videos from you on RISC soc's. Perhaps I should look at using these kind of RISC based soc's for the many projects I have planned. I am due to finally get my cytoreductive surgery on the 15th so I won't be around for 2 to 3 months but when I get back home I look forward viewing some more content from you. Great to see you looking so well, cheers Jeff.
Nice review, thank you Jeff. It's really good to see there's finally a RISC-V SBC... as I watched the video, I was thinking "ooh, I could have a tinker with that".
I spent about two hours browsing the forum and documentation before buying one of these SBCs. Things don't look any worse than in the early days of Arduino or Raspberry PI :) I look forward to seeing if this upstart can disrupt the Arm ecosystem. Ironically, I was also passionate about Arm challenging Intel back in the day.
I'm just happy you got through the surgery OK and are back making interesting videos again. You ever find yourself in Kansas City, gimme a hollar and the BBQ is on me.
I have this card! I've been using since day one, I had to compile the RISC-V tool chain to cross compile U-Boot, OpenSBI and a custom kernel. This took so much time but I got a Linux working on it by compiling everything myself ! However I haven't touched the card since then.
I'm currently on my first year on university studying computer science, and, instead of ARM or something similar, we are starting to learn RISC-V as our first assembly, the revolution is real!
We're still far from true RISC-V for consumers, but we're getting there. Give it 3 more years, we can have competitive RISC-V SBCs being deployed in our home server labs or probably as low-power desktop PCs. I'm excited for the external GPU support, maybe I can host some sort of AI with machine learning at home with my aging graphics card.
IBM introduced the IBM PC on August 12, 1981. Compaq had a working BIOS for their first compatible computer, the Compaq Portable, by November 1982. So the time between the introduction of the IBM PC and Compaq having a working BIOS was approximately 15 months. It has been 11 years since the Raspberry Pi was introduced. Since then, no one has created effective competitor. Seems like all the small SBC talent is local to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
China does a lot of RISC. Propriety Architecture structures in a chip are all good. I'd be interested to see an analysis of the RISC Architecture by NIST for functional operation. The differences in test results are startling and the build provides a lot of insight in to design decisions. Your presentations Rock. Thanks Jeff
I'm really, really excited about what the future of CPU architectures hold for us. RISC-V is already being utilized in a bunch of chips by lots of companies like NVidia and Google, but the main CPU is the last piece! This is even more probable now that Google announced they'd fully support RISC-V as a first class citizen in Android.
@@GoogleDoesEvil Windows is proprietary software and doesn’t respect your freedom. While most android distributions are proprietary, some (like GrapheneOS) are free software and respect your freedoms as a user.
@@speedytruck android is so locked down and limited that you can't even install any adblocker, and if you think privacy is bad on windows then it's universes upon universes worse on android.
I've been into riscv for some time, and I can definitely say that it is a great computer architecture. Many lessons have been learned and applied to the creation of RISCV, and I think it is superior to ARM and x86.
Thanks Jeff, I really enjoyed this video. I've been following the RISC-V market for a few years now and I'm really excited for an open competitor in this field that is already dominated by proprietary technology.
Jeff I think in your presentation it would have helped some of us if you made a little recap on what RISC and RISC-V is and what is the significance about the board in this video using a different instruction set compared to e.g: The Pi 4. Or maybe I just need to watch the video again! Thank you.
Heh, I was waffling on how much time to spend on RISC-V itself, and I had an initial script with more... I might go back to it again next time I approach a RISC-V board.
Risc-V ISA is so brilliant, the design is so perfect and well planned it makes you cringe to return to ARM and X64. To be fair, Risc-V assembly programming is only possible because we have good assembler with pseudos instructions (and the optimisations at linking time). I am glad we had CISC in 80-90's, but now Risc-V is the only possible future. I have the Nezha Sipeed Risc-V SBC and I love it. The hardware guys did their job, it is now the time for programmers to optimize their code for Risc-V.
I got a couple of Ox64 in the mail just yesterday, and while they'll be a fun excursion for learning to use RISC-V, something able to run self contained like this sounds like it would be more useful. Unless you want to limit yourself to an IoT device that you ssh into anyway.
Thank you for getting in on this topic so early, the whole RISC-V thing seems like it has so much possibility, but it's all "potential energy" right now and needs to be converted to "kinetic", or something. A whole lot of bootstrapping going on! I hope it will help democratize lower-end hardware, and maybe even challenge mid to high-end performance some day. It seems perfect for a lot of embedded uses... maybe. Will have to compete with ARM there. But why *not* compete with ARM there? Anything is possible. ARM's own origin story if very "something out of nothing", low expectations, big results. So, once again, very interesting! Maybe RISC-V can chart that "bolt out of the blue" path again, like ARM once did!
The answer to the documentation is simple: The manufacturer has a vested interest. StarFive, and other companies in the field, need to create themselves a market - SBCs are the entry point for them to get their hardware in the hands of developers. The companies behind the SoCs on most ARM SBCs don't actually care about the SBC market - they're busy selling into phones, set-top boxes, security cameras, and so forth, where nobody cares about proprietary blobs or complying with licence requirements. This puts the burden of documentation on the SBC manufacturers, who also don't care because people will buy their boards anyway, because it's that or a Raspberry Pi.
RISC was also a big thing in the 90's, RISC stands for reduced instruction computer. The plus side of risc is that it is easy to make a CPU that implements all the instructions in hardware rather than internal microcode, so that means each instruction can complete in one cycle, the downside is that the limited instruction set means it takes a lot more instructions to get a task done, this means more memory accesses, and these days memory bandwidth is more often than not your limiting factor.
You say that as though the most ubiquitous processor in use today isn't a RISC architecture. RISC-V is hardly a recent resurgence of a 30-year-old idea.
I wish it was available in a desktop form factor (M-ATX). I'm dying for a modern, high end, reasonably affordable non-X86 desktop platform for high end low power desktop builds. especially if it has good linux support, and ESPECIALLY if one could get games running on it. If one of these companies want to become a new defacto arcitecture, they really need to get them out into the hands of influential people and get these out for development
![วันเกิดเธอ (TO YOU) - PHUWIN [ OFFICIAL MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_ROx1Bj3T0Y/mqdefault.jpg)
This video deserves an award based on thumbnail image lone. 😆
agreed! thats a well awesome thumbnail!
Yep, was about to say the same thing. 😂
True. 😂😂😂
yes
Yes! 😊
Alternatively:
Risc-V
/
Business
(Or wait to they release model y) 😁
I love how dedicated GPU is easier to setup on a rather new RISC V SBC compared to your previous Raspberry Pi.
risk-V is just shiat
I just wish they had chosen a GPU from a design firm that was more open than Imagination; for years they just about refused to acknowledge that open source software existed. I suspect it was because they had 3rd party IP in their designs, but ofc they aren't saying. In the past Imagination would say "if you want open source drivers then approach your hardware vendor" but what Imagination failed to mention is that they made it infeasible for their counterparties to provide details and also made it infeasible for their counterparties to even acknowledge that Imagination was making it so difficult. So now that they've had a new CEO for the last two years this change in the way they are engaging with the open source community is a genuine sea change.
@@TankEnMatewell I'll give you great news that some of their GPUs have open source drivers now with more on the way the problem now is they need to redo all firmware for the GPU for the open source version and that's going to take a second
@@vixea I know Imagination has open source drivers (kernel (not merged just yet) and mesa), but from my reading it only supports Vulkan 1.0 at the moment (as opposed to 1.3 for AMD / Intel). Not that this is a problem for most people, but it also "supports" OpenGL via Zink; ... it doesn't currently support any of the Vulkan physical device features and only a couple of the (dozen or so) Vulkan extensions to get Zink to work; which means no open source OpenGL on open source Vulkan drivers. So I would contend that it is going to take far more than a second to get this working reliably (let alone usably) in even the medium time frame. Imagination may be on the way to open source land but they still have a long way to go.
@@TankEnMate nope the kernel driver was merged of course you need to use a mainline kernel
It’s likely the image processing tasks are so slow because the image libraries used have hand-optimized assembly implementations for things like decoding, and they just don’t exist yet for RISC-V. Same thing probably applies to things like video decoding, and possibly even the cryptography you mentioned.
Edit: Also, love to see that PCIe works well out of the box!
Either that or compilers for spir-v aren't mature enough yet and produce suboptimal code (no auto-vectorization would be a killer for image libraries for example)
Although this SBC was honestly a pain to get running (I have the v1.2a version which needed to be updated by TTL-UART), RISCV has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it extremely viable in this day and age - the first being the significant amount of microcontrollers being released using the architecture, with some even having enough power to run a full linux install. Having some sort of parity between desktop-grade compute and embedded compute like this is extremely helpful for development. On top of this, being able to emulate RISCV cores in FPGAs without any sort of restrictive licensing has essentially enabled an entirely new avenue for hobbyists and small businesses to design truly high performance hardware applications.
RISC V on FPGAs is something I don't see most people mention and it's a pretty big deal for open source hardware. Just having open RISCV based cores would be huge even if it needs to run on an FPGA. People can iterate on the core designs petty rapidly this way.
The potential problem with RISC-V is how variable and modular it can be. Most microcontrollers will only use a 32 bit core and may not have many extensions, compared to a SBC that will probably be 64 bit and have at least the basic set of extensions. Something that might make this even worse is RV32E which is specifically for embedded devices and changes some main aspects of the architecture. If companies make a habit of adding in custom extensions for things like AI then it could get messy as some software may only run on a specific brand of cores, essentially leading to vendor lock in or needing to rewrite a program to use a different brand, that wouldn’t be a problem if everyone just agreed to work together and only use official extensions but that may not happen.
Another potential issue could be large differences in performance based on the architecture of that specific chip, all of the chips may be RISC-V and may have all the same extensions and even run at the same clock speed but differences in how it is implemented could create a large difference in performance, this could make comparing performance of different chips a lot harder than it currently is. On top of that with it being open you might end up with lots of companies all releasing their own RISC-V chips and you end up with a market stuffed full of ever so slightly different chips and cores and it may make it more difficult to find what you actually need.
@@shadow7037932 there are open source RISC-V cores that already exist but unless there is serious work done to them they won’t compete with cores made by dedicated companies and they don’t need to open source their implementation. It is relatively easy to implement a basic RISC-V core but if you want more advanced features like pipelining or out of order processing then it gets a lot more difficult. Companies that make more advanced cores will license them, just like ARM does and there is a good chance those cores will be much better than the open source ones available, so if you want a good core that has been developed by a team of engineers and thoroughly tested and documented then you will probably still have to license it.
Most small companies have enough to worry about without having to design or modify the processor before they even start on their actual product, they would also have to hire engineers that specialise in processor design which is a skill on its own and is not the same as implementing other things on FPGAs. So it is far faster, easier and probably overall cheaper for them to license a core that is known to work and then build their product around that.
Everyone saying things like, “small companies and hobbyists can make their own RISC-V cores”, are really underestimating how much work and knowledge goes into making a decent processor. If it was so easy then companies like ARM wouldn’t have such a hold on the industry and making your own processor would have been much more of a thing before now.
Nah. I will buy one when it becomes as easy as RPi to install an OS and use it.
@@conorstewart2214 this is all true, but one of the pure, crystalline, truly good things about computing is how, if they're passionate and dedicated, a single person can move mountains. you could equally make the same statement about creating a AAA game engine or programming language - but you can do it, and people like Muratori, Blow, Tarn and Zach Adams, and many others are proof positive that you can actually make the journey of a thousand miles if you just keep stepping. the "road never traveled" always looks prohibitively difficult...until the first person decides to walk it.
this is a drastic perspective shift to the conversation, but i believe the future of computing as a force for good in the world rests on the chip being "opened up". we already live in a world where top-down control of computing infrastructure is used to facilitate a total surveillance state, down to assassinations of journalists and political dissidents. corporate capture of the internet has created a situation where the global commons we became used to is now centralized and controlled through a few siloed "TV channel" style platforms, with all of our data being scraped constantly, invisible censorship, and complete top-down information shaping (will this comment disappear into the ether because i used the word "assassination" twice? let's find out! )
all attempts to empower regular people with technology will be futile until we are able to start reclaiming the stack from the very ground up, and that starts with chips that are truly open, even if anemic at first. is it a lofty goal? sure, it's an insanely lofty goal. but that journey of a thousand miles looks more and more necessary. the current technological paradigm is quite literally driving people insane. getting out from that will require a drastic adjustment of expectations and willingness to rebuild from the ground level. opening up the chip represents the first and most important lock on the technological cage we find ourselves in.
This review seems like a pitch meeting for this Risc V board. It was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
RISC V-based SBCs are tight!
All the documentation on RISC V sounds more like exposition
Wow wow wow, wow!
I see what you're all doing here !
So, you have a single-board computer idea for me?
As a huge RISC-V advocate, I agree that if you want to get a RISC-V board right now, do it because you're interested in RISC-V development. It's really early, and it's definitely exciting, but if you want to do anything productive, this generation just isn't there _yet_.
Clicking the Like button was super easy, barely an inconvenience
Replying to this comment is _tight_!
Wowowowow. Wow.
Thanks for your honest and technical review, I will be very excited about these as they continue to solidify the ecosystem. We have to build it, and you're an integral part of the community. Your videos show people how not to be daunted by compiling or changing code, we need more brave people to explore it and fix it.
Thanks Jeff, just got mine last week.
Hours of frustration and fun ahead.
Great video, thanks.
recompiling kernel until morale improves
For anyone wondering, the movie is "Hackers" from 1995.
Really liked that movie. Don't look at what you see on the screens. But the story and hacking community / world was totally not bad for a film... Maybe add the end, just disconnect de server from the internet :)
Love the Pitch Meeting reference, bravo sir. Keep up the great work!
Having notifications on for awesome Jeff Geerling and Geerling engineering videos is also super easy, barely an inconvenience ❤️😁
This comment is tight!
@@JeffGeerling yeah yeah yeah ..
@@Palmamontt *TIGHT TIGHT TIGHT*
Wowowowow wow, finding people who get it in the comments is super easy, barely an inconvenience
Wow wow wow............................... Wow
Between YOU and "Explaining Computers?" - You're Just TRYING to kill my pay check!!!! LOL
Thank You. Definitely worth watching out for new RISC boards and improvements to this one.
YES!!! I've been waiting for someone to use that clip from Hackers about this topic for SO LONG, I knew I couldn't be the only one to remember it !!!
I would love to see a follow up after the RISC-V optimizations start trickling in.
I'm sure it will happen, but it might be 6 months or a 1 year before it happens.
see you in 2024
Super easy, barely an inconvenience! I love subtle channel crossovers. 😊
Wow wow wow wow wow. Wow
it's called reference, I decided
Subtle channel crossovers are TIGHT!
"So you have a new SBC for me?"....."Yes sir I do."
@@nathangoddard8115 haha, I like that one :-)
We all know that Jeff has already bought many of these boards. As with raspberry Pi's, this will create a global shortage but he will be able to continue delivering his so interesting videos. 🤣
I like the idea that Jeff is singlehandedly responsible for the shortage
Love that Rocky Linux t-shirt. I'm a big fan of that distro. It's been great seeing the Linux community rally so quickly in the wake of the CentOS debacle.
I currently try to shift over most of my dev work to using Risc-V mcu and hopefully sbc s , its for sure the future and software support and actual application use are critical so every helping hand counts.
Easily the best thumbnails on TH-cam. Outstanding.
This is pretty exciting - lots of potential and room for improvement! I don't know if I would buy one today but will definitely be watching the RISC-V space for signs of maturity.
Thanks for sharing your experience with getting this board running!
Risc V has to start somewhere. It has a fight against ARM but folks seem to value the positives enough where we should see a lot of software development over the next few years. Thanks for the video!
Love the shoutout to Pitch Meeting by Ryan George - "Super easy, barely an inconvenience!" (if you know, you know)
"super easy, barely an inconvenience" - reminded me i haven't watched movie pitch videos in a while!
That thumbnail is the stuff of legends - fine work, Jeff.
First we had red shirt Jeff. Now we have sunglasses Jeff in the thumbnail. I approve of adding characters to the Geerliverse.
Wait, so they did a complete actual PCI-E implementation? Impressive! The rumor I've heard is that the compatibility on the arm boards is low because the soc vendors often don't really implement all of PCI-E, just enough for one or two specific use cases
One thing I learned over the years is that no matter how clear the spec is, harware vendors will find no shortage of ways to violate it, and no limit of creativity on how to disappoint you. You can't rely on anything that is mandatory according to the spec if the vendor doesn't specifically mention support for that feature and has tested for it.
Just lower your standards by like a LOT what is acceptable, and then lower your expectations even further and then you have industry practice.
You made my son smile when you did the pitch guy's line.
I'm glad I could help, it was _barely an inconvenience!_
Glad to see you in action again! I hope you are doing good (as good as possible).
Oooh, I love this! I've never done anything with RISC-V but I have been rooting for it all along! The computing landscape will be so much more interesting with this! And many gadgets will be much easier to produce
My prediction: RISC-V will first eat up the microcontroller and embedded space (because hopefully less licensing hassle, hopefully lots of open source development tooling available and ability to just get the hardware you need without anything more), it will need a good-enough SBC so people can use it for easier development, testing, etc. And it looks like this will soonish be a reality.
Start with a microcontroller. Esp32c3 is risc-v.
"super easy, barely an inconvenience" - subtle reference. I love it.
Appreciate your take on RISC-V. I would agree that it is still early development for RISC-V. Definitely not for a beginner like me.
yes, this is still a real devboard, the software is not mature enough for general consumption. But the RISC-V scene it's improving fast, far faster than ARM is going.
@@marcogenovesi8570 this is annoyingly true. When Apple released the M series it really seemed like ARM was gonna make leaps and bounds but it just sort of fizzled out.
@@Freshbott2 Quite frankly I didn't share that hope. ARM's licensing structure has always cultivated mostly lazy OEM customers that just do the bare minimum integration of whatever very very underwhelming bs ARM designs and licenses out to the "plebs" and call it a day. Yes a few high end licensees like Apple and Ampere/Nvidia are out there doing their designs but that's it.
With Risc-V there is no "higher authority" that drip feeds the same OEMs with a "good enough" product so you get plenty of "ARM-like" CPU design firms that create new designs and compete with each other.
@@Freshbott2 I mean, wtf is Qualcomm even doing at this point. They were supposed to herald the "windows on ARM" revolution and that thing went like a fart in the wind. That's because they are mostly just "licensed CPU integrators" and not doing true CPU design
@@marcogenovesi8570 I agree with you about ARM, I was more naive than you but looking back it’s obvious. But I’m not going to dupe myself over RISC-V. It’ll cultivate the same laziness but cheaper and more accessible. In the end it’s still an off-the-shelf model. Just because you can go custom doesn’t mean OEMs will do it outside the embedded/daughter chip space.
This man continues to grew ever-creative on his thumbnails...
Props for decent documentation. That's a good indicator this board will lead to something good eventually, if it's not quite there now.
A risc-v enter to the bar...a new contender is always great news. However is too early to tell how it will perform, definitively a pre-alpha era.
For the early testers, this is a Risky-V-usiness haha. Wonderful video as always!
Thumbnail game always on point! Fantastic!
I have forgotten why Risk V was so good. It was that long ago. The Hackers clip was perfectly on point.
Perfect timing on this since I'll be working more with my VisionFive 2 this weekend. It's been sitting around for a week as I work on other projects.
Jeff never disappoints with the thumbnails 10/10
that thumbnail:
slow clap
smirk smile (I'm sure i've done a typo here)
"well done, jeff. well done"
Kudos for the clip from Hackers!
I wonder if the pool on the roof still has a leak?!
Only one way to find out!
Love everything you do, but We'd be lying if We said We weren't specifically desiring a Hackers reference...you did not disappoint.
Love it. I'd like to see more RISC-V videos every 3-6 months charting any progress.
I have so much hope for this new open-source architecture :D
Nobody who touched one of these should think it will start a revolution in the industry. It's just plain not ready. I would be promoting this board so hard if it was ready. It's just not. Everything Jeff covered here is true.
Will RISC-V be a revolution? Honestly if we can get people to value open source hardware like they value open source hardware yes, it could be. The companies don't really live up to it being fully open source hardware if you look into the details. That part doesn't concern me.
If we can get people to believe in open-source hardware then it doesn't matter that the companies aren't living up to it today. It's more an educational problem just like open-source software. Once people understand what it does for them they will like it.
The problem is the consumer devices are not ready. This device is not ready. We'll have to look at it 6 months to a year from now where a lot of this will be fixed (and thanks for discussing that so much in the video Jeff, I agree 100%). Today they're not ready though.
I can't emphasize enough how disappointing that firmware update process was to even run the latest OS. That is just plain unacceptable!
Thanks SO much for that post on the firmware update-it was incredibly helpful, more so than the official docs :)
@@JeffGeerling Oh wow, I'm glad you saw that one! That was from my own journey with this board and frankly I reached much of the same conclusions you did. Most importantly this board is not ready for Pi fans or even SBC fans to jump into unless they are experts. I don't recall one with a worse firmware update process in recent memory that I've had to do!
Very good testing with the GPU as well. That's not one I had tried on there but I'm not surprised. You couldn't be more right about how difficult it is to get anything GPU accelerated going in Linux and that's a huge problem on a lot of alternative SBCs that aren't ARM as well and it's always worth mentioning.
Take care Jeff!
Once companies consider these viable, the entire market will shift.
@@realms4219 That's already happening. My Google Pixel 7 Pro uses a RISC-V chip. Companies that want to make their own silicon are doing this. RISC-V is also showing up a lot in microcontrollers that are fantastic to use today (ESP32-C3).
The question is when will someone make a good enough single board computer powered by RISC-V. We already have good enough phones. We already have good enough microcontrollers. When will we get a good enough SBC? Not yet unfortunately but it's only a matter of time.
@@JamesAChambers
How much is 'open source' hardware going to matter when ccomputer/chip designers are going to be making their own secret sauce parts or custom derivatives?
Thx for the inside of your journey
I always argue with you and always love some of your video and the effort you give us. Take love.
Hi Jeff, thanks for the video, very interesting and thought-provoking. Given the lack of RPi's atm this looks like it could gain a lot of traction and interest in the soc space. Look forward to more videos from you on RISC soc's. Perhaps I should look at using these kind of RISC based soc's for the many projects I have planned. I am due to finally get my cytoreductive surgery on the 15th so I won't be around for 2 to 3 months but when I get back home I look forward viewing some more content from you. Great to see you looking so well, cheers Jeff.
Nice review, thank you Jeff. It's really good to see there's finally a RISC-V SBC... as I watched the video, I was thinking "ooh, I could have a tinker with that".
RISC-V is the future!
I look forward to a RISC-V chiplet cpu with an fpga chiplet.
Jeff Geerling X René Rebe = RiscV + AMD driver! 🤩🤩🤩🤩
Using the "Hackers " footage, was a perfect cut. Every time I hear RISC, that scene goes through my head. Lol
Yeees I was waiting for you to check this out, awesome!
I spent about two hours browsing the forum and documentation before buying one of these SBCs. Things don't look any worse than in the early days of Arduino or Raspberry PI :) I look forward to seeing if this upstart can disrupt the Arm ecosystem. Ironically, I was also passionate about Arm challenging Intel back in the day.
That'd alot of research. Your going to know so much about RISC I can't wait to see what the futures like
I'm just happy you got through the surgery OK and are back making interesting videos again. You ever find yourself in Kansas City, gimme a hollar and the BBQ is on me.
I have this card! I've been using since day one, I had to compile the RISC-V tool chain to cross compile U-Boot, OpenSBI and a custom kernel. This took so much time but I got a Linux working on it by compiling everything myself ! However I haven't touched the card since then.
I love love love the Ryan reference "Compiling Linux ... on this board is super easy, barely an inconvenience!"
I find myself always looking forward to another geerling video
More options, more competition, and ultimately more innovation.
I'm currently on my first year on university studying computer science, and, instead of ARM or something similar, we are starting to learn RISC-V as our first assembly, the revolution is real!
We're still far from true RISC-V for consumers, but we're getting there. Give it 3 more years, we can have competitive RISC-V SBCs being deployed in our home server labs or probably as low-power desktop PCs. I'm excited for the external GPU support, maybe I can host some sort of AI with machine learning at home with my aging graphics card.
RISC Unix box back in the day were rock solid and loved the old IBM and Apple PowerPC
You had me smiling on this one, and kudos to you! Do think I'll wait a while, and stay out of trouble with the other half.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience.......awesome :D
IBM introduced the IBM PC on August 12, 1981. Compaq had a working BIOS for their first compatible computer, the Compaq Portable, by November 1982. So the time between the introduction of the IBM PC and Compaq having a working BIOS was approximately 15 months.
It has been 11 years since the Raspberry Pi was introduced. Since then, no one has created effective competitor.
Seems like all the small SBC talent is local to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
very nice and balanced review. Kudos!
China does a lot of RISC. Propriety Architecture structures in a chip are all good. I'd be interested to see an analysis of the RISC Architecture by NIST for functional operation. The differences in test results are startling and the build provides a lot of insight in to design decisions. Your presentations Rock. Thanks Jeff
Jeff keeps killing these thumbnails!!! 😎😂🤣😂
I'm really, really excited about what the future of CPU architectures hold for us. RISC-V is already being utilized in a bunch of chips by lots of companies like NVidia and Google, but the main CPU is the last piece! This is even more probable now that Google announced they'd fully support RISC-V as a first class citizen in Android.
@@GoogleDoesEvil Windows is proprietary software and doesn’t respect your freedom. While most android distributions are proprietary, some (like GrapheneOS) are free software and respect your freedoms as a user.
@@speedytruck android is so locked down and limited that you can't even install any adblocker, and if you think privacy is bad on windows then it's universes upon universes worse on android.
0:13 - Hackers (1995) - back then - It was a good teen movie!
On the topic of the video - Jeff, continue good work! 🙂👍
awsome. I was hoping your take on the StarFive VisionFive 2
Thank God we didn't have to see Redshirt Jeff do the sock slide in his underoos to the Bob Seger song .
"super easy barely any inconvenience"
I see what you did there
Compiling the kernel is tight!
Super easy, Barely an inconvenience ;) NICE !
Lmao love that you went all in on that pun. The thumbnail's fantastic.
I've been into riscv for some time, and I can definitely say that it is a great computer architecture.
Many lessons have been learned and applied to the creation of RISCV, and I think it is superior to ARM and x86.
7:58 shoutout to the pitch meeting channel. Shoutouts are tight!
Comments like this are tight!
Watching Jeff Geerling is always a RISC...y business.
Thanks Jeff, I really enjoyed this video.
I've been following the RISC-V market for a few years now and I'm really excited for an open competitor in this field that is already dominated by proprietary technology.
Speed of risc v development is quite astonishing. I wonder if they can keep it up for a few more years.
Jeff I think in your presentation it would have helped some of us if you made a little recap on what RISC and RISC-V is and what is the significance about the board in this video using a different instruction set compared to e.g: The Pi 4. Or maybe I just need to watch the video again! Thank you.
Heh, I was waffling on how much time to spend on RISC-V itself, and I had an initial script with more... I might go back to it again next time I approach a RISC-V board.
Risc-V ISA is so brilliant, the design is so perfect and well planned it makes you cringe to return to ARM and X64. To be fair, Risc-V assembly programming is only possible because we have good assembler with pseudos instructions (and the optimisations at linking time). I am glad we had CISC in 80-90's, but now Risc-V is the only possible future. I have the Nezha Sipeed Risc-V SBC and I love it.
The hardware guys did their job, it is now the time for programmers to optimize their code for Risc-V.
I got a couple of Ox64 in the mail just yesterday, and while they'll be a fun excursion for learning to use RISC-V, something able to run self contained like this sounds like it would be more useful. Unless you want to limit yourself to an IoT device that you ssh into anyway.
I remember RISC was going to be a revolution back in 1990, when I was waiting for an upgrade for my Amiga A1200 ... :D
Thank you for getting in on this topic so early, the whole RISC-V thing seems like it has so much possibility, but it's all "potential energy" right now and needs to be converted to "kinetic", or something. A whole lot of bootstrapping going on!
I hope it will help democratize lower-end hardware, and maybe even challenge mid to high-end performance some day. It seems perfect for a lot of embedded uses... maybe. Will have to compete with ARM there. But why *not* compete with ARM there? Anything is possible. ARM's own origin story if very "something out of nothing", low expectations, big results.
So, once again, very interesting! Maybe RISC-V can chart that "bolt out of the blue" path again, like ARM once did!
I'm so happy that he made the "Hackers" reference
The answer to the documentation is simple: The manufacturer has a vested interest. StarFive, and other companies in the field, need to create themselves a market - SBCs are the entry point for them to get their hardware in the hands of developers. The companies behind the SoCs on most ARM SBCs don't actually care about the SBC market - they're busy selling into phones, set-top boxes, security cameras, and so forth, where nobody cares about proprietary blobs or complying with licence requirements. This puts the burden of documentation on the SBC manufacturers, who also don't care because people will buy their boards anyway, because it's that or a Raspberry Pi.
I barely understand these technical terminologies, but hey.. at least I enjoy listening to them.
Good one Jeff. Those boards definitely have potential well see what the community does over the years.
i am super excited for RISC V, finally an open architecture that in future may be competitive to arm and x86.
Interesting video as always 👍
Hope the support, in SW, is growing
Would love to see this take off, and even see laptops made from them when the software support improves.
RISC was also a big thing in the 90's, RISC stands for reduced instruction computer. The plus side of risc is that it is easy to make a CPU that implements all the instructions in hardware rather than internal microcode, so that means each instruction can complete in one cycle, the downside is that the limited instruction set means it takes a lot more instructions to get a task done, this means more memory accesses, and these days memory bandwidth is more often than not your limiting factor.
You say that as though the most ubiquitous processor in use today isn't a RISC architecture. RISC-V is hardly a recent resurgence of a 30-year-old idea.
RISC-V wasn't a big thing in the 90's. Didn't exist.
Risc V will take several years to close the gaps with ARM. But eventually, they will be there.
Including Ryan George's catchphrase is tight. Wow wow wow. Wow.
Oopsie!
I wish it was available in a desktop form factor (M-ATX). I'm dying for a modern, high end, reasonably affordable non-X86 desktop platform for high end low power desktop builds. especially if it has good linux support, and ESPECIALLY if one could get games running on it. If one of these companies want to become a new defacto arcitecture, they really need to get them out into the hands of influential people and get these out for development
i hope one day have a more computers based on the riscv :D