Hi all, a couple of things. Firstly, I was clearly wrong about GIMP Lava test being multi-threaded. My bad. Secondly, it is now possible (just over a day after this video posted) to run the Kdenlive video editing on the Lichee Pi 4A. Yes, we can now video edit on RISC-V hardware! I knew it would happen -- but not that fast. If you've interested, I've done a quick post over in the Community Tab for this channel, and will demosntrate in a video fairly soon.
And a simple matter of installing a library. The question here was why the library wasn't in the Kdenlive package dependencies to be installed automatically..
@@BruceHoult Probably because no other nutters are running kdenlive on a Risc-V ;-) But that's the Linux way... things get fixed when someone finds a fault.
hi im interested in risc-v for monero mining any chance you could try and mine some monero loves to know the hashrate these could be good for stacking and mining the coin thanks.
RISC-V represents the future of computing-an open, flexible, and innovative architecture that empowers developers worldwide. The freedom to design, adapt, and improve is what drives progress, and in the end, freedom always prevails! ⭐
Not just that, it has all the basic life tools. Other than the obvious "getting used to linux" difficulties, it's already doing basic daily tasks normal people need a computer for and a few more advanced jobs, the first board (the LP4A) I daresay is already grandma-ready after installation. Would be nice if these chips were generally faster though, but that's just a problem for the 1st generation of any SBC type.
Greetings Jeff. And here's a thing -- that is my actual phone. :) I swapped my smartphone for a flip-phone (and a MiFi unit that I use with a tablet or laptop when I travel) in 2016. Some days I go 8+ hours without being online!
That's amazing! We can all use a bit more time separated from the Internet, it takes effort these days! Also I think Arm having 32/64 bit for a while was helpful in getting many open source projects to convert from x86 + a separate arm build to "x86, x64, arm7, arm64" style builds, which makes adding on "riscv" to that list that much easier. Especially for things like Docker images (which is my major interest!)
I'm having to use a Raspberry Pi 400 on a semi-permanent basis until all my computers etc are taken out of storage, and it's a capable machine.... I can see RISC-V machines along the same vein as the Pi 400 in scope and design also being capable as you say in about 18 months time. We are living in a new mini-golden age of low power-consuming machines, and it's great -) Cheers Chris, thanks for your videos and your dedication.
Much more worked than I expected, seems to be about where the ARM SBC's were only a few years ago, and it seems that RISCV is progressing faster, very impressive 👍
Many governments around the world have an incentive to accelerate development, but this is truly astounding and nice to see. Hoping this will produce new software paradigms and OS's to go with it!.
Considering it is faster than a RPI4 it is already faster than most of the ARM SBC out there, the only exception being the RK3588 ones, thats really impressive considering RISC-V is just starting.
@@shivanSpSIt's super impressive. I could see the right combination of CPU, GPU, RAM, and software support rivaling the Celeron / Intel N-series boards we have seen in not a whole lot of time.
@@shivanSpS expect RK3588-class RISC-V boards mid 2024. They might not meet RK3588S prices, but full-on RK3588 boards aren't cheap and seem a realistic target.
Outstanding video Chris. Getting through your week at a slower pace isn't always a bad thing. My internet is quite slow as I live in the countryside but it definitely makes you more patient. I'm amazed at how well the hardware/software worked for most of your tasks, even if a few things didn't. Early days and exciting times ahead for RISC-V 😁
An important video, and an eye opener. I've been informing myself about what's going on about RISC-V for a number of years now, but only very occasionally. I was able to see some progress here and there but would have been entirely unable to tell how RISC-V currently compares to the established competition - and would have tended to believe that it's very far behind. I certainly wouldn't have expected what I saw in this video and I have to say that I am very positively surprised!
I'm somewhat amazed that the Gnome desktop is used. Don't get me wrong, it's my favorite desktop. But, it's not known for being the best in using system resources. XFCE (used on the first board) is way more efficient. But nowadays, KDE Plasma is also very efficient on system resources, which would make it a better option than Gnome, IMHO. But cool to see that RISC-V, although in development, is already usable. Very nice!
Thanks for your commitment. Somehow your experience got me reminiscing about the pace of work using my Compaq Deskpro 386 three short decades ago (which, in all fairness, sped up considerably after my dear wife purchased a math co-processor for me).
Very nicely done, Dr. Barnatt. In a previous century you would probably have been our bravest and most reliable wilderness scout, leading us through the unknown dangers and hostile forces toward safety in our wonderful new homes. I find it highly admirable, sir, that (mixing my metaphors) for our sake, and to maintain your leadership credibility, you are willing to eat your own dogfood for an entire week. As you so honestly advised us, it is clearly too early for embarking on the RISC-V journey for most of us pilgrims, but the future looks very bright now and we will soon be able to uncircle our wagons and proceed to our destiny. Thank you, sir!
Blessed Sunday greetings all! Thank you for this fine video sir! It looks like RISC-V has come a long way with much more to go but nice progress. An open alternative would be most welcome in today's closed off world. I do hope to get some time soon to start tinkering with these fine boards. Looking forward to the availability of that LP4A cluster board to run alongside my Pi3B cluster and my soon to be up and running Pi4 cluster. But now that's it for another comment and I hope to talk to you all again, very soon! (Sorry for the plagiarism. It just works so well.)
Anyone remember when a 733mhz pentium 3 could load rich text documents faster than this? It wasn't a faster cpu, but it sure ran faster software. I miss high performance/low overhead software.
He should’ve done it on a IBM Mainframe or server with an IBM Power Processor running AIX. RISC Processors from IBM are really powerful. Why would you use such a low powered device as shown in the video.
@@ernestoditerribile because the Lichee Pi 4A (and BeagleBoard Ahead with the same SoC) is the fastest RISC-V computer on sale as at August 2023. It's likely to hold that title no more than two to three months, but it will probably remain the fastest RISC-V under $200 for 6-12 months until the VisionFive 3 (presumably) with JH8100 SoC comes out. The IBMs (and Talos) are not only a completely different ISA with completely different software, but also at least 20 times more expensive.
Really well done. I can really imagine the hours behind the scenes getting things to work. Clearly not ready for mainstream use, but likely in a few years it will be. Thank you.
voneschenbachmusic Germans need it ? General Computing ? This is not that, only Germans need it for general computing, Merkel boycott crap solutions you need ?
Hello Chris! As always very informative and interesting. Such 7 days with new hardware can also be dangerous, because a harmless attempt turns into something serious. My test with RPI 4 started in 2019 and is still running without interruption. That's over 4 years and I see absolutely no reason to end it. Wait a minute! RPI 5 should come next year.🤔
nobody is willing to update the systems, only for some newly released chips. if it runs, it's good enough ! What system u use that it needs to be updates for RPI 4 ?
I remember seeing your first video on RISC V boards and it's amazing how far they've come. It still has a long way to go, but This is really interesting. Great analysis and another great video, Chris.
I totally remembered the last installment! The raspberry pi one! Very cool to see another installment of this. EDIT:I mean the original pi week video from 7 yrs back. I haven't watched the 2nd newest installment yet 😢
Im looking forward to seeing the day when we get risk v based routers and wifi access points, as well as thin clients. I wouldn't mind building a nas with a risk v board when they are more widely available. But seeing how far they have come gives me hope for the future.
Really great video Chris! I use Debian Stable as a daily driver, finding it reliable but the type of OS that doesn't like being messed with at times. I am amazed that they've managed to get Debian to do what they have across so many applications, but the problems with multimedia once updates and other packages were installed was sadly predictable. If they can get Snaps or Flatpaks working (it may already work!) then this may help.
Chris, thanks for yet another excellent video. Since I am here, I will say that during this last week I was (yet again) looking through your videos to help figure something out. I was ( yet again) reminded of the breadth and depth of the topics covered. Well done and please keep it up! Cheers!
It is pretty impressive how RISC-V has progressed. I was looking to the Horse Trail P550 board, but its looking to be vaporware. SBC's are nice, but I want a proper board with PCI-E, discrete GPU, and hopefully someday soon the death of device tree.
Good to see the software development coming along. For shirts and giggles, tried the lava render on 4790K. Initially using conservative scheduler (my default), sub 5 seconds, then spotted the scheduler as I looked for core usage, ran again with performance and ... sub 4 seconds. However, I'm mostly looking forward to getting one for HTPC usage because of the dramatically reduced power consumption and therefore heat/noise.
Hey here's an idea. Try *MPV.* This plays media very fast and more efficient than complex VLC. I hope it's compiled to RISC V already. Double click to MPV opens the media, and once the media finished playing, it closes automatically! You might like this way. Very great to quickly examine some lots of medias.
Thanks a lot for your video. From my part, I am waiting the tools for coding: vscode (maybe already here), python and all the libraries, Docker, Harbor (not even ok for AMR) and all the stuff like prometheus, loki, cadvisor etc... At the moment pro tools will be here, it will be viable to use this ISA! Yhanks again for sharing your experience across the months, we can have an idea without our time consumed by the techno.
@@tylerdean980 NVidea was actually thinking of doing just that ! Some years ago. Then their were talks about buying ARM and I don't know what came first.
@@Robbie-mw5uu looks like the graphics calculations aren't done on RISC-V, it's more like a management engine ?: "Some GPUs include a GPU System Processor (GSP) which can be used to offload GPU initialization and management tasks. This processor is driven by the firmware file /lib/firmware/nvidia/510.39.01/gsp.bin. A few select products currently use GSP by default, and more products will take advantage of GSP in future driver releases. Offloading tasks which were traditionally performed by the driver on the CPU can improve performance due to lower latency access to GPU hardware internals."
@@tylerdean980 I've worked in a team designing a commercial GPU, with team members who knew nVidia and AMD GPU internals very well. There is no reason at all that you could not use RISC-V as the basic ISA for a GPU, with a handful of added instructions and functional units e.g. one for texture interpolation. In fact Think Silicon have done just that. At a trade show they told me it took them three weeks to take the special GPU instructions from their existing GPUs with fully custom ISA and get them added to a RISC-V core and working in an FPGA.
As soon as some more software gains support, im definitely switching to risc-v on my laptop. Ive gutted an old thinkpad w520, and i was gonna put a pi 4 in there but i just dont wanna do that yet when i can feel a risc-v system being so close to possible! Absolutely excellent video, i hope to see more progress on risc-v in the future and i greatly appreciate the attention your channel brings to the architecture!
An heroic episode of dog-food -eating to test environments. The software's well advanced for development boards. The 2FA failure is probably because the key uses a compiled (for speed) module to do some calculations. That is obviously CPU specific, and the developers probably lack a few tuits they need to recompile for Risc-V. The performance of audio relative to the browsers is interesting. The Chrome sound was likely a phasing problem, with two channels of audio and a video to synchronise, the results likely represent different orders of processing between Firefox and Chrome, possibly Chrome not taking advantage of multiple CPUs?
I edit all my videos now with Kdenlive, and I still have it close on me quite frequently. I am using a Intel based laptop with Linux Mint. The good thing is that it has a recovery mode that works very well. Composite and Transform seems to be the biggest cause of the crashes.
That Super Tux Kart game looked adorable. 🥰 ...Hey, even an alien from Betelgeuse can be a sucker for cute things! Anyway, I'd say this was an experimental video diary well worth the wait. While true, there's still some work to be done with RISC-V, you have truly proved that one can do their usual week's work on a RISC-V computer. Three cheers for Chris! And while I'm thinking about it, it's always a surprise to see flip phones still alive and well in this day and age. I will be praying for your fingers... 😅
I think if computers were slower and internet connections too, it would make people a little more patient. Having grown up in the time of dial-up and loading screens, and buffering; I don't get too antsy when I have a delay while using a computer.
I agree, the web is completely broken and overtaken by evil corporations with their own agendas and too much Javascript and data mining. My first connections to the Internet were, like yourself, on a dial-up connection but from a Commodore Amiga A1200 running at 14 MHz with 8 MB RAM and the "iBrowse" web browser. I have always maintained that there had never been a need to encrypt most of the Internet because most of it was public information that anyone could access without logging in with an identity to get to that page - but that was back in the day when people used to make their own web sites, rather than hosting them on the likes of Faecesbook where both the creator and the viewer have to provide identities (and therefore need encryption to not send authentication data in clear text) because that's how Faecesbook makes it money by hoovering up everyone's personal data and therefore needing to know who everyone is. I'd love to see at least part of the Internet go back to a "hobbyist" level of information exchange - I was hoping to see a higher take up of the Gemini protocol which goes back to the times of Gopher-type protocols where it's focused on mostly text exchange on simple markup type pages.
For people coming from Windows, forcing them to use Linux is a big struggle already - forcing them to use super slow computers with super slow internet connection on top of that would be a tad overkill, don't you think? :) For people already coming from Linux it does not really matter as things oftentimes go crazy in that realm. And going fast is not exactly the thing when it comes to tinkering in Linux.
I already waste a lot of my life waiting on stupid advertisements and filling out captcha. Why should I have to wait for a computer to load too? No thanks. If you actually believe in your words, then stop using a modern system capable of watching RU-vid videos and use your precious slow computers and regain your so-called "patience". The rest of us will continue to be productive.
@@Robbie-mw5uu "Why should I have to wait for a computer to load too?" I don't think you should have to do anything, I've never met you. But I do believe that someone who gets frustrated at a slow-loading web page is probably a bit impatient and overly concerned with a "first world problem". There are lots of reasons for using an old computer and I'd argue that someone like me who builds custom Linux installations on old computers knows full well that he probably won't be using the computer for browsing the web anyway - but he may use it for a bit of retro gaming, a music server, a remote terminal to a server, or lots of other things. And your assumption that your productivity is directly proportional to the speed of your computer is, quite frankly, extremely silly.
This is how I remember how ARM / Raspberry Pi was like a few 5 years ago. If the work continues maybe we can have more successful software support like on ARM / Raspberry Pi.
Chris thank you so much for pursuing the morphing of single board computers into desktop computers. I will be looking forward to your next step in this process. Keep up the good work.
Not directly relevant to me personally, but fills me in on aspects of computing that I wouldn't investigate myself. So top educational stuff, and presented with the customary efficiency and lack of woffle.
Chris, have you tried to use something like qemu-user-static to run VeraCrypt on RISC-V? Could be a workaround while the software is not recompiled RISC-V
At 21:15 htop clearly shows the process is single-threaded, since it uses about "100%" CPU. If it used 4 threads it would be closer to 400%. Looking at the core utilization in the top left you can also see that in total the CPU is running at maybe 40%, again very consistent with an intense single thread process plus some background tasks.
I'd love to see a RISC-V or even just regular ARM based desktop grade machine in an ITX form factor. Yes, I know others like Jeff Geerling showed off boards with that purpose before but these are even more expensive than x86 ITX and that already gets more and more niece since no one seems to be interested in that form factor anymore. If we get a good ecosystem around a specific RISC-V board the size of a RPi but with two NICs and SATA/NVMe I'd be happy too as this could work really well for NAS builds. I still haven't use my Pi 400 ever since I bought it, I'd love to see how that performs for desktop tasks.
I am amazed at how well the RISC-V boards did, especially how kind of underwhelming their performance was earlier this year. It will be very interesting to see how much they will have progressed a year from now!
Hey Chris, very interesting test. And thanks for spend so many time for our pleasure. So, could you give me the references of or your marvelous black fan in the conclusion chapter, I would like to buy one for the next summer season. 😂
Hello, Christopher! Nice video, indeed. But if to talk about these htop pictures you've shown, they really don't speak for the parellelness of that GIMP plugin. So it probably is rather single-threaded, in fact. Anyway, it's a very usefull video, thank you!
To be honest most of us will not be doing video editing or need secure storage in our day to day activity. 1080p play back of video is a must for me , and my day job which is mostly in the cloud but sometimes i to do some heavy sql like dataprocessing but the latter isnt needed by most so Risc-v may become a cost effective computer for many, in the same way that we use the Android TV boxes for things like streaming. BTW I have often played with android Tv boxes for things like retro gaming and as a desktop replacement but have come across the same limitations that you have found with RISC-V.
Hmm will be interesting. By then the Raspberry Pi 5 should be out too!! I wonder how long it will be before we can replace a desktop PC with an SBC? Not as convenient but all about saving energy and never more so important as NOW! Great video loved it!
"I wonder how long it will be before we can replace a desktop PC with an SBC" ... well, ever since the original Raspberry Pi came out, depending on your desktop needs. If a Pentium or maybe even Pentium II would be good enough for you then so would an original Pi. These boards (and Pi 4) can do anything a low end Core 2 Duo can do. The RK3588 boards such as Rock 5 are probably in early Core i7 territory. Thee are still plenty of grandparents out there with Core 2 Duo machines.
Bruce that is not a sensible statement. Those old pcs can take ssds and fast hard drives plus dvd writers etc. They can overclock and run programs the arm sbcs cannot without emulation. We are nowhere near equilibrium as yet!
The main source of slowness of the web browsers is in the lack of JS JIT compilation, it all runs interpreted. Software ecosystem needs few more years to mature
It is interesting and encouraging. One test I would have liked to see is whether it is possible to compile source code down to machine code (not using a VM) on one RISC-V machine and then run the executable natively on a different RISC-V processor, thus proving total op-code compatibility.
Of course you can, if you tell your compiler to stick to the standard RV64GC instruction set. I do it all the time -- make a statically-compiled binary (so it works on machines with different Linux versions and library versions) and run exactly the same ELF file on Vision Five 2, Lichee Pi 4A, and SG2042 (64 core).
Who is going to risk five? Nice to see this racing program. One thing I thought of was the fact you have to deal with only using one display with most new RISC-V boards. One way of dealing with this I thought of was using one computer per display. Is it easy to run them off a network like this? Show is great! Thanx much!!
That's quite a RISC-y experiment you've performed there! 😜 I'll get my coat, Chris! UPDATE: I made that remark PRIOR to watching your video to the end so I will apologise for this After watching it to the finish, I have to say that the security issues that come with a lack of RISC-V support for encryption/hardware-based authentication keys/devices, is a very valid concern that the folks responsible for it need to rectify this as soon as possible
Thoughts, Tommy? Thankyou, Miss Anja. What programs are used to create the software? Not mentioned...why, Tommy? An ISA such as RISC 5...how does a user actually get to use it...wait for someone else to write the instruction set...another, in effect, fixed ISA. Not sure, Tommy. Maybe Chris can enlighten us.
i use one of these as my daily driver, and have been for a couple of years. i bought one for cost reasons, they are a very small fraction of what you would spend on a pc or mac. you should invest in an active heat sync or a small fan, and you should try a bare android 12 install or ubuntu you should get better preformance. they are just as capable as a net book or chrome book.
" you have to wait a bit for it to settle" well as someone who spent four hours waiting for "daly Thompsons decathlon" to load on my speccie back in 1984 im used to waiting
Why would I return my SanDisk Extreme SSD? It has been working flawlessly for nearly 4 years. And I would not lose any data if the drive had an issue -- no drive is a permanent data store, so all drives are always backed-up. :)
@@ExplainingComputers Sorry then, i'm just worried for victims of SanDisk/WD incompetence. I saw the drive and thought "is that the drive that's on the news right now?"
@@hanifarroisimukhlis5989 SanDisk and Western Digital are the most reliable brands in storage. A single malfunction is not a reason to completely ignore a company, otherwise nobody would buy anything.
@@Robbie-mw5uu Single failure?? Are you some sort of apologist? There's literally class-action lawsuit with their failed SSDs. And it's not their first mishap either, see WD SMR shenanigans.
Certainly a nice experiment! Let's hope that this video will motivate more software developers/engineers to start playing / working with this platform so in the future you will be able to edit that video. (Maybe even using DaVinci Resolve) 🙂
It’s going to be interesting to see how RISC-V permeates through the end-user hardware. I wonder if we’ll start seeing RISC-V or ARM socketed motherboards like we do for x86
dont feel like playing videos (but audio) on SBCs .. terminal+browser is enough .. others .. id do on phones .. so maybe yeah the next SBC i should buy is a riscv one .. thanx for these testings ;)
It started to look like RIS-V was giving us a vision of the future there. A future where Chris changes his name to Davros, and his experiments with AI robotics get dangerously out of control. 😂
