RISC-V is the new entrant into the SBC/low-end desktop space, and as I'm in possession of a HiFive Premier P550 motherboard, I am running it through my usual gauntlet of benchmarks—partly to see how fast it is, and partly to gauge how far along RISC-V support is in general across a wide swath of Linux software.
From my first tests on the VisionFive 2 back in 2023 to today, RISC-V has seen quite a bit of growth, fueled by economics, geopolitical wrangling, and developer interest.
The P550 uses the ESWIN EIC7700X SoC, and while it doesn't have a fast CPU, by modern standards, it is fast enough—and the system has enough RAM and IO—to run most modern Linux-y things. Including llama.cpp and Ollama!
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04.1 on my P550 board, and when I try running Ollama's simple install script, I get:
Jeff Geerling February 5, 2025When I first heard about Radxa's Orion O6, it was being compared to Apple's M1 silicon, and the product page has extraordinary claims:
Jeff Geerling February 3, 2025OpenAI, which is only really open about consuming all the world's energy and half a trillion of our taxpayer dollars, just got rattled to its core.
Deepseek, a new AI startup run by a Chinese hedge fund, allegedly created a new open weights model called R1 that beats OpenAI's best model in every metric.
Jeff Geerling January 28, 2025