| > RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up That's a weird assertion. This machine is basically competitive with a Pi 4 (certainly miles ahead of Pi 3, both in CPU power and in having 8 or 16 GB RAM vs 0.5 or 1 GB). The initial version of the RISC-V spec was ratified in July 2019, and the C910 core in this chip was announced in the same month. The TH1520 SoC hit the market in June 2023 (my board was delivered that month), four years after the CPU core was announced, and also four years after the Pi 4. Note that the Arm A72 cores in the Pi 4 were announced in February 2015, so it was 4 1/2 years from core to Pi 4 using it, slightly longer than the THead C910 core announcement to Lichee Pi 4A shipping. The Arm A53 also took about four years from announcement to the Pi 3 and Odroid C2. And the Arm A76 took four years from announcement to the RK3588 and Rock 5 shipping. This is just the industry. If the SG2380 machine(s) really come out this year then they will be faster than the A76 RK3588 boards and Pi 5 and around 2 to 2.5 years behind. But their P670 cores are equivalent to Arm A78, which is not available on an SBC -- and there are 16 of them, which is also not available in any cheap Arm-based SBC. That's halving the gap. SiFive's fastest core, the P870, is around Arm Cortex-X3 performance, and announced just 16 months later (October 2023 vs June 2022). |