Mar 17, 2023 06:00:00

Can China's RISC-V adopted CPU development company 'StarFive' break Intel and AMD's stronghold?

A company based in China '

StarFive ' develops CPUs and single board computers that use the RISC-V architecture. Jeff Gearing, who is involved in the development of Linux and Raspberry Pi, is conducting a performance evaluation of the single board computer `` VisionFive 2 '' developed by StarFive.

RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC | Jeff Geerling
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/risc-v-business-testing-starfives-visionfive-2-sbc

CPUs are designed according to a basic design called 'Instruction Set Architecture'. There are multiple types of instruction set architectures, but most of the CPUs on the market at the time of writing the article use either the ``x64 architecture'' developed by AMD or Intel or the ``Arm architecture'' developed by Arm. I'm here. When a company other than AMD, Intel, and Arm develops a CPU, it is necessary to receive a license for the instruction set architecture from each company, but it is difficult for other companies to enter for a long time because the license fee is very expensive. situation continued.

Meanwhile, the development of the open source instruction set architecture ' RISC-V ' has become active since the latter half of the 2010s, creating a situation where it is easy for start-up companies to enter CPU development.

The open source CPU instruction set 'RISC-V' is one step ahead of popularization - GIGAZINE

StarFive, which has become a hot topic, is also developing CPUs and single board computers that use RISC-V one after another. We are selling .

Below is the result of Mr. Gearing running the benchmark software ' Geekbench 5 ' with 'VisionFive 2 (blue)', 'Raspberry Pi 4 model B (green)' and 'Raspberry Pi 3 model B + (orange)'. VisionFive 2 scored the lowest for both single-core and multi-core performance.

Checking

the detailed benchmark results of 'VisionFive 2' and 'Raspberry Pi 4 model B' , 'VisionFive 2' surpasses 'Raspberry Pi 4 model B' in some processes such as 'Text Compression' Although the score is recorded, you can see that 'Image Compression' records a significantly low score.

According to Mr. Gearing, the difference in benchmark scores matches the difference in comfort when actually operated. For example, with 'VisionFive 2', problems such as 'It takes time to log in via SSH' and 'Slow image processing and encryption processing' were confirmed. Also, as a result of inserting 'an SSD that operates at 350-400MB/s on 'Raspberry Pi 4 model B'' in the M.2 slot of 'VisionFive 2', it only worked at 250MB/s.

Mr. Gearing concludes from the above verification results that 'VisionFive 2' has only the same performance as the original Raspberry Pi. On the other hand, Mr. Gearing said, ``The Raspberry Pi was in a similar state 10 years ago,'' and the possibility that the performance of RISC-V adopting computers such as ``VisionFive 2'' will improve depending on future development. I am emphasizing.