Jeff is so worried about advertisers at this point he cant even call it what it is. Double rainbows are odd, and so are axolotls. This thing is not odd, its just bad.
brucehoult•1mo ago
Why "bad"? It seems to me it does exactly what it sets out to do.
Obviously, if you just want a fast laptop with a long battery life and you don't care what is inside it then you should get a Mac, or possibly something with the latest Qualcomm SoC, or an x86.
If so then this isn't for you anyway.
Jeff's facts are, obviously, correct but I really wish he'd drop all the snark. Just start off right at the start by saying "If you don't want this BECAUSE it's the RISC-V then it's not for you, wait for the 8-wide RVA23 machines in a year or so" and then stick to the facts from then on.
The people who are actually interested in something like this need a machine to work on for the next year, and this is by far the best option at the moment (unless you need RVV).
It's, so far, and for many purposes, the fastest RISC-V machine you can buy [1] and you can carry it around and even use it without power in a cafe or something for a while.
I don't even know what the last time was I wanted to use my laptop away from AC for more than 2-3 hours. As a 24 core i9 the battery life is only slightly longer anyway -- about 5 hours of light editing and browsing in Linux, but if I start to actually do heavy compiling using 200W then it's dead really quickly.
[1] the Milk-V Pioneer with 64 slower cores is faster for some things, but there isn't all that much that can really use more than 8 cores, even most software builds. And it's been out of production for a year, and costs $2500+ anyway.
rasz•1mo ago
I suspect normal laptop with QEMU would run RISC-V code faster.
brucehoult•1mo ago
No, not on a laptop with anything like a comparable number of cores.
Any x86 or Apple Silicon laptop that can match the DC-ROMA II in QEMU will need around three times as many cores -- if the task even scales to that many cores -- and will cost a lot more.
I tried compiling GCC 13 on my i9-13900HX laptop with 24 cores, and on Milk-V Megrez which is the same chip but only one of them (4 cores, not 8):
on Megrez:
real 260m14.453s
user 872m5.662s
sys 32m13.826s
On docker/QEMU on i9:
real 209m15.492s
user 2848m3.082s
sys 29m29.787s
Only just 25% faster on the x86 laptop. Compared to an 8 core RISC-V it would be slower.
And 3.2x more CPU time on the x86 with QEMU than on the RISC-V natively, so you'd need that many more "performance" cores than the either this RISC-V laptop has RISC-V.
Or build Linux kernel 7503345ac5f5 (almost exactly a year old at this point) using RISC-V defconfig:
VisionFive 2 (4x U74 in-order cores @1.5 GHz, similar to RPi 3)
real 67m35.189s
user 249m55.469s
sys 13m35.877s
Milk-V Megrez (4x P550 cores @1.8 GHz)
real 42m12.414s
user 149m5.034s
sys 11m33.624s
The cheap (~$50) VisionFive 2 is the same speed as an M1 Mac with qemu, or twice as fast as the 6 core Zen 2).
The 4 core Megrez takes around twice as long as the 24 core i9 with qemu. Eight of the same cores in the DC-Roma II will match the 24 core i9 and be more than three times faster than the 8 core M1 Mac.
rasz•1mo ago
brucehoult•1mo ago
Obviously, if you just want a fast laptop with a long battery life and you don't care what is inside it then you should get a Mac, or possibly something with the latest Qualcomm SoC, or an x86.
If so then this isn't for you anyway.
Jeff's facts are, obviously, correct but I really wish he'd drop all the snark. Just start off right at the start by saying "If you don't want this BECAUSE it's the RISC-V then it's not for you, wait for the 8-wide RVA23 machines in a year or so" and then stick to the facts from then on.
The people who are actually interested in something like this need a machine to work on for the next year, and this is by far the best option at the moment (unless you need RVV).
It's, so far, and for many purposes, the fastest RISC-V machine you can buy [1] and you can carry it around and even use it without power in a cafe or something for a while.
I don't even know what the last time was I wanted to use my laptop away from AC for more than 2-3 hours. As a 24 core i9 the battery life is only slightly longer anyway -- about 5 hours of light editing and browsing in Linux, but if I start to actually do heavy compiling using 200W then it's dead really quickly.
[1] the Milk-V Pioneer with 64 slower cores is faster for some things, but there isn't all that much that can really use more than 8 cores, even most software builds. And it's been out of production for a year, and costs $2500+ anyway.
rasz•1mo ago
brucehoult•1mo ago
Any x86 or Apple Silicon laptop that can match the DC-ROMA II in QEMU will need around three times as many cores -- if the task even scales to that many cores -- and will cost a lot more.
I tried compiling GCC 13 on my i9-13900HX laptop with 24 cores, and on Milk-V Megrez which is the same chip but only one of them (4 cores, not 8):
on Megrez:
On docker/QEMU on i9: Only just 25% faster on the x86 laptop. Compared to an 8 core RISC-V it would be slower.And 3.2x more CPU time on the x86 with QEMU than on the RISC-V natively, so you'd need that many more "performance" cores than the either this RISC-V laptop has RISC-V.
Or build Linux kernel 7503345ac5f5 (almost exactly a year old at this point) using RISC-V defconfig:
i9-13900HX docker/qemu
Ryzen 5 4500U laptop docker/qemu (Zen2 6 cores, Win11) Mac Mini M1 docker/qemu (4P + 4E cores) VisionFive 2 (4x U74 in-order cores @1.5 GHz, similar to RPi 3) Milk-V Megrez (4x P550 cores @1.8 GHz) The cheap (~$50) VisionFive 2 is the same speed as an M1 Mac with qemu, or twice as fast as the 6 core Zen 2).The 4 core Megrez takes around twice as long as the 24 core i9 with qemu. Eight of the same cores in the DC-Roma II will match the 24 core i9 and be more than three times faster than the 8 core M1 Mac.