[brucehoult]

An N100 running QEMU will be slower. A machine that is faster running QEMU will cost a lot more.

For example my 6 core Zen2 laptop runs my primes benchmark (small code, long-running, the best possible case for qemu-user) 10% slower than my VisionFive 2. If you want to run a whole emulated OS then qemu-system is a lot slower than qemu-user.

My i9-13900 laptop runs the same benchmark in qemu-user 2.6x faster than the VisionFive 2, but it also costs 30x more -- or about 2x more than the Frame laptop with the JH7110 mainboard. Or 5x more than the original DC Roma laptop with the JH7110 now costs ($299).

If you want a RISC-V laptop then Frame is a very expensive way to get one. It might be higher quality, and it will be upgradable to better specs later.

[ywvcbk]

> will cost a lot more.

Presumably everyone buying this thing would already have (or need) a proper PC/Mac to use alongside it.

[brucehoult]

Maybe. Or they might only have a phone/tablet. Or an older but still totally useful machine such as that Zen 2 laptop I mentioned, which runs qemu slower than the VisionFive 2.

Also, a number of people have come unstuck by writing and testing things ONLY on qemu, and then had them fail on real hardware. For example, qemu was historically much more lenient with PMP settings than real hardware (if you didn't touch the PMU then qemu acted as if you didn't have one at all). Also anything that needs fences on real RISC-V (or Arm) hardware is likely to work even when it's incorrect on a PC that is jitting multiple instructions per RISC-V instruction and is TSO anyway. Qemu being lenient about setting up the UART (e.g. it doesn't care about baurd rate, start/stop bits etc) compared to real hardware is another example.