Orange Pi RV2 - $64 RiscV Linux board w. official Ubuntu support

[bingo600]

If $64 holds for the 8GB model, it's not bad ...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Linux-On-OrangePi-RV2
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-RV2.html
https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-developer-images-now-available-for-orangepi-rv2-a-low-cost-risc-v-sbc


Let's hope linux patches will get upstream, in a timely matter.
So we don't end up like with the Rock5 ... I dropped that one, due to missing "official kernel support"

[brucehoult]

Note that this is not a microcontroller, but a full Linux-capable computer similar to Raspberry Pi etc.

TLDR:

The OrangePi RV2 a good board at a good price from a good (traditionally Arm) company, but some people will be better off with the OrangePi RV at the same price with the StarFive JH7110 SoC with SiFive U74 cores as it performs slightly better in the real-world if you don't need SIMD/vector.

----

I ordered an 8 GB on March 11 from the official OrangePi store on Aliexpress for US$49.90 which came to a total of US$67.20 including shipping to New Zealand and our 15% GST and received it on March 20:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1jeqt28/well_that_was_quick/

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008612193589.html

Despite the different chip labelling, it is as expected the same as the Spacemit K1/M1 chips that have been in the Banana Pi BPI-F3 for a year (orders taken in March 2024, customers had them in May), followed by the LicheePi 3A (which I have), Milk-V Jupiter, MusePi, MuseBook laptop, DC-Roma II laptop etc.

> Let's hope linux patches will get upstream, in a timely matter.

The same Bianbu Linux (Ubuntu with manufacturer's patches) image works on all boards, has been regularly updated, and upstreaming is in progress.

Upstreaming always takes a while, so in the rapidly-moving RISC-V world (and to an only slightly lesser extent with Arm) if you wait until upstream works then the board is already obsolete.

Note that there is also the OrangePi RV with the StarFive JH7110 SoC with 4 SiFive U74 cores at the exact same price for the same amount of RAM i.e. also $49.90 for the 8 GB.

Note that the Spacemit boards are available with 16 GB RAM from other manufacturers (and my LicheePi 3A has 16 GB) but 8 GB is the maximum from OrangePI at present. The JH7110 is not available anywhere with more than 8 GB.

The OrangePi RV2 also has the advantage of having a newer RVA22-compliant instruction set, and the RVV 1.0 vector extension with 256 bit vectors. The OrangePi RV has only the original RV64GC plus Zba and Zbb (bit manipulation).

Despite the JH7110 having 4 U74 cores and the Spacemit 8 X60 cores, overall performance is very similar.

On micro-benchmarks the two cores perform very similarly:

Code: [Select]

//    14.685 sec Lichee Pi 3A SpacemiT X60 @1.6 GHz    214 bytes  23.5 billion clocks
//    14.885 sec VisionFive 2 U74 _zba_zbb @ 1.5 GHz   214 bytes  22.3 billion clocks

On tasks that generally fit into L1 cache the 8 X60 cores on the OrangePi RV2 will give an advantage over the 4 U74 cores in the OrangePi RV.

However the JH7110 gives 2 MB L2 cache, while the K1/M1 has only 512 KB L2 cache per four core cluster.

Doing "real world" tasks such as compiling a Linux kernel or gcc the end result is very similar:

Code: [Select]

Linux kernel:

 42m12s EIC7700X Milk-V Megrez 16 GB ($199) with 4x SiFive P550 cores @ 1.8 GHz
 67m35s JH7110 4x U74 @ 1.5 GHz with -j4
 70m57s K1 8x X60 @ 1.8 GHz with -j8
 97m59s TH1520 4x THead C910 @1.85 GHz with -j4

108m01s K1 with -j4

227m52s JH7110 with -j1
354m44s K1 with -j1


Building the GCC 9.2 toolchain supporting RVV 0.7.1 (snapshot on my github). This needs more than 8 GB RAM so I don't have VisionFive 2 figures.

 68m56s EIC7700X
132m33s Spacemit K1
138m50s TH1520

See also my recent post on GNU MP library performance:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1jsnbdr/gnu_mp_bignum_library_test_riscv_vs_arm/

[Nominal Animal]

@brucehoult: Do you have any idea how much waste heat does this "Ky X1" SoC generate (assuming rebadged SpacemiT K1 or M1)?

I know the RV2 is specced for a 5V5A USB-C supply, so maximum sustained thermal power ought to be less than 25 watts; I just cannot find any thermal information for this SoC (or SpacemiT K1 or M1), at all.

I very recently realized that with dual GbE and M.2 (2-lane PCIe 2.0 for SSDs), it seems quite well suited for my firewall and router needs.  (For 4G/5G/LTE modems I have and use, I use ADT-Link USB 2.0 adapters for now.)  I don't really need the GPU support, although I see that Imagination is slowly working on the BXE-2-32 drivers (AXE-1-32 and BXE-4-64 are more of a priority), so using the MIPI DSI connector with some small displays might be useful; AliExpress lists some 2.1" round IPS panels with 30-pin MIPI DSI connectors for example.  (As I've stated before, I like doing non-technical-human status UIs for such Linux appliances.)

[brucehoult]

Yearling (@geerlingguy) tests that kind of thing

https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/47

The Jupiter is a bigger board and has the 1.8 GHz version not 1.6 so I'm guessing its power use is strictly higher than the RV2.

Of course once you add SSDs anything can happen.

[Nominal Animal]

Right-o; that (10W or so) seems quite manageable.  I only intend to use one M.2 SSD, the bottom-side 2280 one, so essentially the RV2 could be sandwiched between two aluminium heatsinks larger than the board (or inside a cast-alu box with custom milled lid).  The other option I've been looking at is Radxa Rock 3B (Rockchip RK3568 SoC, quad ARM A55 at 2.0GHz), but right now the RV2 is about half the price (when including shipping and VAT) at AliExpress.

[BadeBhaiya]

Kind of a tall order but has anyone tested the LLM performance on these boards? I have an old gaming laptop which is running my custom LLM chatbots 24/7 and its like 30W idle. I would love to replace it with a more power efficient setup. I could probably fit a 12B Q4 model on it (or 7B worst case)

[brucehoult]

Right-o; that (10W or so) seems quite manageable.  I only intend to use one M.2 SSD, the bottom-side 2280 one, so essentially the RV2 could be sandwiched between two aluminium heatsinks larger than the board (or inside a cast-alu box with custom milled lid).  The other option I've been looking at is Radxa Rock 3B (Rockchip RK3568 SoC, quad ARM A55 at 2.0GHz), but right now the RV2 is about half the price (when including shipping and VAT) at AliExpress.

The X60 cores (really THead C908 we believe) are comparable to an A55 or SiFive U74, significantly better than A53. Plus you get twice as many of them! And RVV 1.0 is great if you like that kind of thing -- it's a low end implementation but fully comparable in performance to NEON on A53/A55 and a lot easier to program.

The K1 has good DRAM streaming bandwidth, 4x better than the JH7110 in the OrangePi RV or VisionFive 2 etc.

https://hoult.org/K1_memcpy.txt

https://hoult.org/JH7110_memcpy.txt

However the JH7110 slays both the K1 and the TH1520 (which has much faster 3-wide OoO cores) when it comes to software compile performance, whether single core or all-cores. I believe this is due to the JH7110 having 2 MB of L2 cache for its 4 cores vs the K1 having only 0.5 MB per four core cluster. But the RK3568 also only has 0.5 MB so probably has similar characteristics.

As a firewall / router or even file server it should be great.

I believe the RV2 is super easy to get booting from an SSD. Just boot from SD card and dd the exact same image (or the sd card itself...) to the SSD, shit down, take out the sd card, and it just automatically boots from SSD instead