[1]

Recently I published some [2]initial SpacemiT K3 benchmarks for that first-to-market RISC-V RVA23 SoC with the K3 Pico-ITX mini computer. In there was a comparison against modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs along with the likes of the Raspberry Pi 5, Loongson 3B6000, and SiFive HiFive Premier. For those curious about the longer-term RISC-V performance, here is a look at how far the RISC-V hardware performance has come compared to the SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V board from five years ago.

[3]

After carrying out [4]the benchmarks looking at the 7x ARM server performance in 8 years when going from the original Ampere eMAG to new NVIDIA Vera CPU, I was curious about doing similar tests on the RISC-V side. For this I compared the new SpacemiT K3 RVA23 SoC to the SiFive HiFive Unmatched.

[5]

The [6]SiFive HiFive Unmatched after being announced in 2020 had [7]begun shipping in May 2021 . It was the best at the time for the available RISC_V hardware with the SiFive FU740 SoC with four U74-MC cores and one S7 core plus 16GB of DDR4 RAM. The HiFive Unmatched came as a mini-ITX board complete with a PCIe x16 slot operating at PCIe Gen3 x8, NVMe port, micro-SD slot, Gigabit Ethernet, and other leading-edge RISC-V capabilities for its time.

[8]

Now with the SpacemiT K3 are eight X100 RISC-V cores and eight ultra-wide A100 cores. With the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX you get 10GbE networking, UFS storage, dual M.2 expansion slots, USB Type-C with power delivery, and 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory.

[9]

I ran some benchmarks of the SpacemIT K3 with its Ubuntu-based Bianbu 4.0 with Linux 6.18 compared to the HiFive Unmatched, which was running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS given its lack of support for newer Ubuntu Linux releases due to the RVA23 requirements.

[10]



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=risc-v-5-year-performance&image=spacemit_k3_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/spacemit-k3-pico-itx

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=risc-v-5-year-performance&image=spacemit_k3_2_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-vera-arm-server

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=risc-v-5-year-performance&image=spacemit_k3_6_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/search/SiFive%20HiFive%20Unmatched

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/news/SiFive-HiFive-Unmatched-Ships

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=risc-v-5-year-performance&image=spacemit_k3_3_lrg

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=risc-v-5-year-performance&image=spacemit_k3_4_lrg

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=risc-v-5-year-performance&image=spacemit_k3_5_lrg