The VisionFive 2 is currently the best RISC-V SBC option, at least until TH1520 becomes available (next month?), depending on the price.
I can vouch for the VF2 hardware - works well. Alas PCIe is oddly slow, but I'm hopeful that firmware will improve that.
EDIT: The Pine Star64 is (should be) the exact same SOC, so it should be basically the same as VF2 (small differences like PCIe edge connector instead of an M.2 slot, etc).
People are getting around 250 MB/s from an SSD on the PCIe (M.2) on VisionFive 2. Ok, so you'd ideally like 400 MB/s from 1 lane, but it's still 10x better than SD card.
It's probably being limited because the RAM to RAM copy speed isn't much more than that! I get 475 MB/s memcpy() speed for 64 MB copies on my VisionFive 2. The much slower CPU on the AllWinner D1 manages 1100 MB/s n the same code. Somehow the SiFive-based SoCs have never been good on RAM speed -- the HiFive Unleashed and Unmatched were even worse than this.
Hopefully the Horse Creek SoC has some good Intel DDR IP in it.
I'm getting ~ 180 MB/s on a Samsung SM8?? which hits around 3 GB/s on a desktop. I'm using a 5.1V 3.5A supply so that ought not be the issue (but I'll try another PSU now).
Horse Creek would be nice - should it ever become available for purchase.
EDIT: Well, I'm shocked. With a far more beefy supply (12.3V/0.7A) I now hit 295+ MB/s, not great but so much better than before. Thanks for the hint.
Nobody called me on my nonsense so I will: The 5.1V 3.5A = 17.8W was the PSU _rating_ whereas the 12.1V 0.7A = 8.5 W was actually _meassured_. I’m not a EE and I don’t understand the power section of that board, but something to
look out for.
Thanks. I saw there is a pine64 EU store now, so fingers crossed they will stock it, although a working PCIe would also be very nice! I hadn't heard of TH1520 until now, 2.5GHz is going to give the Pi4 a better run for it's money.
It looks like they're going to be running the bare chip at 1.85 GHz stock. Will probably need to add a heatsink and maybe fan to get to the rated 2.5 GHz.
And, yes, with its OoO CPU cores it should match a Pi 4 at the same MHz, but do more MHz.
The VisionFive 2 is currently the best RISC-V SBC option, at least until TH1520 becomes available (next month?), depending on the price.
I can vouch for the VF2 hardware - works well. Alas PCIe is oddly slow, but I'm hopeful that firmware will improve that.
EDIT: The Pine Star64 is (should be) the exact same SOC, so it should be basically the same as VF2 (small differences like PCIe edge connector instead of an M.2 slot, etc).