At least we're getting close to Raspberry Pi level performance now.
An original November 2020 M1 Mini (4P+4E 3.4 GHz) is still my main computer to sit in front of, and I have zero plans to change that right now.
You'll be able to buy RISC-V at that level sometime next year.
Will you? What exactly are Tenstorrent's plans for Ascalon? They are chasing the AI market, and I haven't seen any clear indication that they intend to sell their RISC-V CPUs as unbundled SKUs, or on "main computer" PCBs (ATX/mATX/ITX/etc.) I'm not sure they even care about that market.
I hope they'll do this, but that's all I have right now. If you know something in particular, please share. If I could buy a M1 or better class Ascalon desktop system I'd be happy to pay an Apple-esq premium, and I believe many others would as well.
The known intent of LG is as main processor on its smart TVs.
Not just expensive servers, unlike some of the other high performance CPUs coming soon.
One figure from that: "36 SPECINT2K17 Rate" for the "8 core Athena Chiplet." That is on par[2] with a Intel Core i5-9600K (circa 2018 CPU.) That's enough for useful workloads. I'm actually still using one for Linux work on a daily basis.
That's about what I would expect: it's in the ballpark of plausibility, given the givens. It's not reasonable to expect parity with Zen 5 or whatever. They'll need some years yet to ramp up their designs.
I excited about Tenstorrent. Keller as the boss: one can hope for great things.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h61k4wOOzZU [2] https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2019q1/cpu2017-20190...
Also the K1 chip offers support for 16 GB RAM, but the RV2 only offers 8 GB. I have 16 GB on the same chip on my LicheePi 3A.
VisionFive 2
... with -j4, 3.37x faster than -j1
real 67m35.189s
user 249m55.469s
sys 13m35.877s
real 227m52.130s
user 215m19.648s
sys 12m7.831s
... with -j8 5x faster than -j1
real 70m57.001s
user 514m33.367s
sys 39m43.167s
real 108m0.979s
user 399m0.734s
sys 30m47.136s
real 354m44.285s
user 330m24.508s
sys 24m12.196s
On other tasks that don't stress the caches so much the SpacemiT can do well.
Anyone that believes semiconductor performance claims before device availability is in for a rough time.
This is a chicken and the egg problem. You need interest in the architecture and belief in performance for device availability to start to pop, after all who would invest a lot of money in something they don't think will have a market, but you also need device availability to support performance claims.
So I think for newer products, performance claims will have to do.
The first two can be checked at the verilator (or commercial equivalent) stage, and SPEC in FPGA, both long before physical chips.
The only things in doubt are:
- whether they hit the hoped-for MHz
- whether the code you want to run has the same characteristics as their benchmark
For example SG2044 GeekBench results have been appearing on the site from time to time for more than half a year now. GB as a whole is pretty much worthless for what I care about, but the Clang test within it aligns closely with what I do, including the rqtio between multi-thread and single-thread.
"RISC chipset adds in proprietary CISC features" has been in my headlines so often that I assumed nobody cared. Helluva time to go up-in-arms, in Q3 2025.
snvzz•6mo ago
These CPUs are above that.
brucehoult•6mo ago
snvzz•6mo ago
RVA23 requires V. These incoming CPUs are the real deal, a perfectly usable performance level in the present day.
(unless they cache-starve them or some other such fuck up)
My 4790k was still my main PC until I recently (weeks) built a new PC with 9800x3d, 96GB ECC, rx7900gre.
4790k had 4 cores. If these new chips clock reasonably, say, 3+ GHz, and have 8 or 16 cores, they'll easily generally outdo this old -but very usable still- Intel chip.
sitkack•6mo ago
nubinetwork•6mo ago
camel-cdr•6mo ago
The SpacemiT X100 is slightly below that, but has 256-bit RVV and RVA23 support.
6SixTy•6mo ago
snvzz•6mo ago
Two of the three processors seem to be RVA23.
6SixTy•6mo ago
karunamurti•6mo ago
snvzz•6mo ago