This board looks quite compelling if you’re into RISC-V. The SOC onboard is the UltraRISC UR-DP1000, which (at least on paper, and if my math is correct) look to be on par (at least in integer performance) to a Ryzen 1400 or i5-7600. This would be the first “Desktop Class” RISC-V processor, would it not? RISC-V that’s comparable to a mainstream quad core x86 from 7 years ago? Sign me up (when the price drops). 2x DDR4 Dimm Slots, NVME slot, PCIe Gen 4 x 16 slot (and supposedly 24 total lanes).
I’m hoping @wendell can get his hands on one and give a review, as I don’t have the funds to preorder something like this (especially with tarriffs and high hongkong shipping), but this could take the crown as the “fastest RISC-V” board on the market.
Or, I’m reading everything wrong and it’s just another “meh” offering.
The Milk-V Pioneer technically sort of exists. A handful of people got boards and systems from their run about 2 years ago. mATX board with 64 cores and up to 128GB RAM. Per core performance was unimpressive.
Don’t expect the price to drop, ever, until it’s literal garbage. I bought a VisionFive2 in May 2023. It’s a board with almost no demand and it’s essentially the same price it was then. If you look at something actually popular, like the RPi Zero 2 W, you might be able to get one for a couple bucks more than its 2021 release price of $15, but those might never ship. The $31 ones being scalped on Amazon would probably ship. The Titan might not even hit launch price if they’re still making boards and get hit by DDR price increases.
That said, the form factor is what might make it useful. If you can pop an old AMD GPU in the PCI-e slot and get basic hardware acceleration, 8 2ghz cores can suffice just fine as a daily driver for most tasks. The problem with many SBCs is software support and configuration, not hardware.
A proper HBA in the slot could make it an exceptional NAS as well. It’s too bad they couldn’t find room on the board for a second M.2 slot. Or a third and wire the slot as x8 electrically.
Close, but no cigar.
It doesn’t support RVA-23 instruction set standard, which is minimum that are distros like Debian slated to support.
RVA-23 is newest ISA standard and it is one that includes vector instruction standard support, which this obviously lacks (as it only claims RVA-22 support).
If it had RVA-23 support, it could be interesting for developers at least.
It claims Ubuntu and Debian support out of the box, as well as other distros. I’m not sure about feature sets and standards moving forward, but “works is works” - and if the benchmarks come out where they’d look to on paper, I’m still not going to complain.
The Titan =/= the Pioneer. Different (supposedly MUCH faster) CPU and featureset.
I’ve had a few small R5 ‘toys’ so far (MangoPi was one I enjoyed) but they’ve all been sub $100 offerings. This one is launching at $329 (probably 450+ shipped from HK + Tarriffs), and I’d feel a lot better at ~$200-250
Obviously they’re different. I brought up the Pioneer in response to…
The Pioneer is much closer to modern desktop class than any other RISC-V CPU/board afaik, and it’s been around a couple years now. Its biggest problem has been availability.
As much as I want to upgrade my ticket on the RISC-V hype train, I already have an Orange Pi RV2, which is plenty for playing around for now. If I didn’t have an SBC already, the Titan would be very appealing.
I am keeping my eyes out for something that is cheap enough to justify AND has a large enough performance boost AND an architectural boost to justify a new toy to play with. I’m certainly not an early adopter, more like middle stage tinkerer. I’m not smart enough to do hardware bringup on the bleeding edge, but I know enough copy-pasta linux-fu to compile a kernel.
