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Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

234 points| BarsMonster | 2 years ago |3.14.by

156 comments

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snvzz|2 years ago

This is TH1520, same SoC as the Lichee Pi 4A.

A chip that's oddly faster than JH7110 (VisionFive2, Milk-V Mars) in microbenchmarks, but slower in practice (e.g. gcc). Presumably due to smaller cache.

It is also less power efficient, and lacks the upstream support JH7110 enjoys[0]. I would look at Pinetab-V, a tablet-laptop based on that SoC, today.

Better yet, wait for Milk-V Oasis[1] tba this June, as well as other boards based on SG2380, the first announced RISC-V SoC with serious performance: 16x SiFive P670 and 8x X280, all RVA22 compliant, plus vector 1.0 (standard) extension.

0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan

1. https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-wi...

rwmj|2 years ago

I did a comparison of a few RISC-V single board computers and the Lichee Pi 4A is definitely very slow on real world tasks, even though in theory it ought to be the fastest. I never got to the bottom of exactly why - it might be software issues or non-upstream drivers. At the moment I'd recommend the VF2 for general use.

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/07/25/heads-up-lichee-pi-4a-...

Findecanor|2 years ago

The SG2380 is a bit weird though. Four of the P670 cores are clocked lower than the others.

The X280 cores are not RVA22 compliant. They are only RV64GCV, so they can't run the same code as the P670 cores. SophGo's datasheet lists these cores under "AI accelerator", paired with a "TPU", so they were never intended to run general purpose code.

sylware|2 years ago

Well, I don't like the SGxxxx SOC as they contain an ARM core (= royalties), I would prefer a CVxxxx SOC without an ARM core, and if they could get in the future displayport instead of hdmi and AV1 instead of h26[45] (hdmi and mpeg are not worldwide royalty free).

I am trying to buy some milk-v duo boards with the CV1800 SOC in EU (without a credit card to use online, and which I can contact with a self-hosted email), anyone can help?

EDIT: the next SGxxxx SOC is actually a full desktop SOC, not an "embedded" one (I was talking about the those). No ARM cores, but still a mpeg and hdmi block, and it seems the GPU hardware programing manual is not public.

BarsMonster|2 years ago

Damn, best products are always in the future :-) Oasis looks very capable and juicy, looking forward to get my hands on it.

evanjrowley|2 years ago

My question is, will the future Milk-V Oasis laptop have a TrackPoint like the Lichee Console 4A has, or will greater market demand for a more powerful RISC-V laptop lead to nixing TrackPoint for cost optimization?

windowsrookie|2 years ago

The author mentions if you want a small laptop today, you need to go to eBay and buy an old UMPC. This is not correct, there are some modern mini laptops. I purchased a new 8" mini laptop with folding touchscreen and an intel N100 CPU from AliExpress.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805658668421.html

Specs: Intel N100 12GB RAM NVME SSD Slot 1280x800 Touchscreen (with pen support) USB-C port (supports charging and DisplayPort) HDMI Ethernet (1 gigabit) WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2

It's actually a pretty decent computer for being a no-name Chinese device. It has a backlit keyboard and my Microsoft Surface pen works perfectly on it. The 1280x800 LCD is low-res by todays standards, but at 8" is just fine. The 800 vertical resolution does mean that some modern apps get pushed behind the taskbar (on Windows 10). The cursor touchpad is difficult to be precise with, but you have the touchscreen with pen support if you need to select smaller items.

Around Black Friday it was $245 + tax (Without an SSD, I preferred to install my own name-brand SSD) so keep an eye out for sales.

The UEFI appears to be fully unlocked and has pages and pages of options. There are options to adjust CPU boost and voltage settings but I haven't been able to get the CPU to pull more than 6.5w.

A downside of not buying from a real company: The drivers for the device are emailed to you in a .zip file from the seller. So that is pretty sketchy, but it's the same for any of these Aliexpress devices.

calgarymicro|2 years ago

There are also all of the various GPD devices[0] as well if you're looking for something a bit more expensive that theoretically has more of a reputation.

[0]https://www.gpd.hk/

cjdell|2 years ago

Seriously want. Few questions if I may:

- Have tried a Linux distro on it?

- What is battery life like (especially under Linux)?

- How is the keyboard generally? (Not expecting miracles but is it usable)

sottol|2 years ago

A maybe, maybe not, less sketchy alternative could be a Nanote P8 from Japan. They were released in 2021 and can be bought for $200-$230 new and shipped from Japan on ebay.

The downsides are the much slower Intel 4200 CPU and less, slower RAM, slightly smaller 7" screen. I would not be surprised if the manufacturer of the Ali laptop is the same as that of the Nanote.

ramesh31|2 years ago

>A downside of not buying from a real company: The drivers for the device are emailed to you in a .zip file from the seller. So that is pretty sketchy, but it's the same for any of these Aliexpress devices.

Have fun hosting a CCP exit node

cjs_ac|2 years ago

Is anyone making RISC-V SoCs outside of China?

Trade restrictions have given China serious incentives to make RISC-V CPUs domesticly, unlike every other country that can just buy AMD64 and ARM chips. Given the geopolitics of the situation, while RISC-V is gaining marketshare in the microcontroller space, it looks like RISC-V will be the Chinese-bloc CPU ISA while the west sticks with what we already have.

sylware|2 years ago

RISC-V is becoming a worldwide interop standard, and a real one, namely royalty free and which will be stable in time once we get all the "now we know" features, and all that at the ISA level (x86_64 and ARM are _NOT_ worldwide royalty free).

And don't be mistaken, there is no perfect ISA (it is said "average"), it does not exist, only a set of trade-offs and compromises which will not fit all use-cases perfectly.

RISC-V is a US Berkley initiative. Have a look at wikipedia where you'll find most of the answers to your questions.

That said, to be a success, RISC-V will need _extremely_ performant implementations all across the board ("embedded", desktop, server), micro-archs and silicium process. It will have to survive its mistakes: for instance critical bugs in its major micro-archs or design flaws (you have to presume it will happen).

And without access to the best silicium process, it _WON'T_ have performant implementations. Because there is no "enough" in the silicium industry, it wants always more transistors and less power consumption, and each new silicium process brings significant improvements on those metrics.

This is where chinese chip designers are in trouble: Taiwan has the foundries with the best silicium process, and now you get US restrictions on EU EUV tools.

Even though I wish intel and amd to switch to risc-v in the not to far away future, I would give attention at the people over there who would try to torpedo RISC-V. The other one, ARM, well, they will try everything to sabotage it, RISC-V is a death sentence for them... unless they clearly move to RISC-V ultra performant micro-arch design.

ThinkBeat|2 years ago

Nvidea is now producing specific models of their products specced in a way that is currently legal to sell them to China.

The US doesn't like it, so they may change the rules again. which becomes a bit of a whackamole.

Sanctions like these gives China a lot more incentive for a reunification with Taiwan. Some say the fabs are rigged to blow if this was to occur. If so, it would have massive negative consequences for the world. Where as new management would have far less of an impact, though some countries might find themselves under sanctions on what type of chips they could buy.

ecef9-8c0f-4374|2 years ago

Would not be the first time the cheaper technology becomes the market leader instead of the "better" one. Time will tell.

jsheard|2 years ago

I've seen a few companies adopting RISC-V for embedded applications outside of China, like the management processor on Nvidia GPUs or Western Digitals SSD controllers, but those are places you'd probably use a small Cortex-M core rather than a big Cortex-A SoC if you were using ARM. Nvidia is still all-in on ARM for big processors.

adgjlsfhk1|2 years ago

Western digital and Nvidia are both shipping riscv (just not as standalone processors)

bpye|2 years ago

I could get over the perf but the power consumption is rough.

It seems strange that the USB hub is using so much power. From a (leaked?) data sheet I don’t see any way to disable it - but it does have firmware which can be updated? There is also a 5V-3.3V LDO built in so I wonder if that may be what is dissipating so much power.

The AMS1153 looks like a similar story…

__michaelg|2 years ago

Yup, something is strange there. There are 14in x86 laptops that consume 7W or 8W in idle (with the screen turned on but on minimal brightness).

BarsMonster|2 years ago

USB 3.0 can eat alot of power due to high speed, if it's always active...

happycube|2 years ago

IIRC pi4 also had VIA USB hub power issues early on.

aappleby|2 years ago

I have one of these as well - the distro I installed has a broken Chrome that crashes shortly after startup, hopefully that's fixed now.

The case is prototype-quality but fine (the fact that it's metal helps a lot), the screen is nice, the keyboard is even more awkward than it needs to be for the size.

I've been a bit disappointed by the performance in my tests (compiling various projects of mine with GCC), it seems closer to a Raspberry Pi 3 than a 4 or 5.

BarsMonster|2 years ago

My tests show it's slightly slower than Pi 4 and significantly faster than Pi 3 on CPU performance.

1T Coremark: Pi 3: 3504 Lichee: 6900 Pi 4: 7938

badgersnake|2 years ago

Is JIT for JavaScript supported on RISC-V? This was an issue in PPC for a long time.

DeathArrow|2 years ago

>it seems closer to a Raspberry Pi 3 than a 4 or 5.

SOC is fabbed on a 12nm process and the CPU is under clocked from 2Ghz to 1.5 GHz. Probably the CPU is not intended for laptops and the manufacturer just got a generic board, slapped another 2 boards on top for I/O and built a laptop.

m00x|2 years ago

I think it's mostly a case of software not being optimized for RISC-V. The sipeed website indicates that it's much faster if the benchmarks are built with optimized toolchains.

I imagine it has x64 or arm7 emulator for most builds.

dkjaudyeqooe|2 years ago

Is there a reason for a dearth of PCIe connectivity on these small SoCs? Is it difficult to implement? Perhaps a pincount issue?

The big problem with these small and cheap systems is that you can't connect NVMe drives to them and you pay a huge performance penalty.

bradfa|2 years ago

Generally high speed serdes IO blocks, which are needed for PCIe, in ASIC design are rather high power consumers. Even on Intel and AMD laptop spec CPUs there's generally many fewer PCIe lanes than on their desktop counterparts. The silicon space needed is also not small and sometimes the silicon process for making good low power but high performance serdes transceivers is not the best process for making the other things needed on the SOC, which can be solved with chiplet style designs but then you have another problem.

Most inexpensive and small SOC just can't justify adding such costs and complexities given that it's very likely their target volume buyer doesn't need such features.

I suspect this RISC-V SOC is priced in the $10-20 range, but I have no true understanding of the cost of this part. In that price range for SOCs almost no one has 4 PCIe lanes on offer, but some do have 1 or 2.

brucehoult|2 years ago

The rival JH7110 SoC (it's like A55 to this chip's A72 -- slightly slower but cheaper and much lower power consumption) has PCIe. The VisionFive 2 brings one lane out to M.2 NVMe. The Star64 brings it out to a standard PCIe connector.

dijit|2 years ago

most SOC CPUs don't really have a huge PCIe capability to begin with- possibly 1 or 2 lanes total; and you probably want USB, Ethernet etc;

You wouldn't get very much performance anyway, as you only want many PCIe links in order to get bandwidth through them which you're unlikely to do on an anaemic CPU.

to-wit: you wouldn't get good NVMe performance even if you had the pinouts and the CPU had 4x Lanes of PCIe anyway.

schemescape|2 years ago

> apt update fetches packages from Chinese server

So is it not official Debian? If so, that’s concerning!

rwmj|2 years ago

There's a group as ISCAS who are rebuilding everything in Fedora for unclear reasons (Fedora has a perfectly good effort to build RISC-V packages at http://fedora.riscv.rocks). Not sure if they're also rebuilding Debian too.

planede|2 years ago

The thing to be checked are the installed GPG keys that are trusted for package signing.

BarsMonster|2 years ago

First tests of RISC-V laptop reveal a number of software and hardware issues, but show a path to freedom.

LeonM|2 years ago

> a path to freedom

Free how? Just because RISC-V is an open ISA doesn't mean that the silicon is open. None of the manufacturers release the full design of the SoC. Many RISC-V SoCs are still relying on blobs.

Most (all?) current available RISC-V SoCs are designed and produced in China. So I wouldn't be so sure about a SoC designed by Alibaba to be free of blobs, license violations, patent infringement or even hardware backdoors.

dijit|2 years ago

this is my take-away too.

RISC-V in a laptop was unthinkable just a few years ago, now it's a reality (at least a prototype) and performance is underwhelming, just like it has been for ARM before.

For a true "freedom machine" I would be perfectly fine with a performance trade-off but it's also not a given that the gap will be so wide forever.

This is an excellent step and to show that it's functioning is huge.

pat64|2 years ago

Couple of observations here;

- RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. - The assertion you can’t buy UMPCs in 2024 is patently false. GPD and a whole host of manufacturers make em. - A non mobile optimised blog in this day and age? That was a chore to read on the go.

brucehoult|2 years ago

> 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).

G3rn0ti|2 years ago

> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up.

Only assuming development progress happens linearly. In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. It took years to even get to the point to have RISC-V SoCs and now we are seeing the first laptop products. The pace will accelerate, especially with the promise of RISC-V being a cheaper platform to build hardware on than ARM and X86.

999900000999|2 years ago

I'd suggest anyone who wants to play with RISC-V to buy a MangoPi instead.

The software still isn't really in a working state. But I'd rather pay 30$ to figure that out over 800$.

brucehoult|2 years ago

Of course a laptop with case, screen, battery etc costs more than a bare SBC.

The Milk-V Mars, with very similar performance to this (see other comments for JH7110 vs TH1520), starts from $39 with 2 GB RAM (and 4 GB or 8 GB options) and of course quad core 1.5 GHz dual-issue CPU. That's around 8x the compute performance of the 1 GB MangoPi MQ-pro, for $10 more. Or, for more bare-bones, the Mars CM is $34.

shrubble|2 years ago

My question: is it bootable into Linux without the use of any binary blobs? That is, can it be booted essentially equivalent to a librebooted system?

aappleby|2 years ago

Proooobably? I've written bare-metal bootloaders for RISC-V chips (though running seL4 and not Linux) and there's a _lot_ less stuff in the startup process than on x86/x64.

nottorp|2 years ago

eMMc again :(

Is it so expensive to add 1 lane of pciexpress or at least sata? Not via usb, that doesn't count.

Havoc|2 years ago

How difficult is working with risc v currently?

I’m guessing back Linux works but most precompiled stuff not?

BarsMonster|2 years ago

Nearly all Linux packages you might want to install - work with nothing special required. Migration to ARM earlier this century made vast majority of open source software portable. Precompiled x86-only surely will not work.

saxonww|2 years ago

Not an expert, but I think anything compiled for the ISA implementation you have should work.

If there's an issue with RISC-V it's that it's not one ISA with additional instructions accumulating across generations (which I think describes x86), it's a core ISA with a variety of extension blocks that might or might not be present in your implementation. I think this means that any random RISC-V binary stands a greater chance of not working on a chip you've bought than e.g. any random x86 binary with an x86 chip.

f7alw8vc7lb58ih|2 years ago

How does the Lichee Console 4A compare to a PinePhone (Pro) with attached Keyboard?

michalf6|2 years ago

Why a trackpoint without the middle click? How do you scroll?

BarsMonster|2 years ago

Page-up/down keys... There are likely other ways )

sn9|2 years ago

At a certain size, I'd rather just have a detachable split keyboard.

DeathArrow|2 years ago

Does it use U-Boot or EFI?

rwmj|2 years ago

It can be both - uboot can emulate enough of EFI to start Linux.

snvzz|2 years ago

AIUI Linux boot flow with this SoC goes

internal rom -> u-boot SPL --> opensbi --> u-boot --> Linux

BarsMonster|2 years ago

In kernel config I see: CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y CONFIG_EFI=y

If that's what identifies it

stainablesteel|2 years ago

why is the battery life is so bad?

BarsMonster|2 years ago

USB hub chip, USB<>SATA adapter - eating power for sure... SoC voltage scaling - need to be checked.

tw1984|2 years ago

[deleted]

BarsMonster|2 years ago

Do you imply that chip is fake and does not work? :-)

Do you imply that there are no fake products on Amazon, which is also making chips (AWS Graviton)? Exactly the same issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y83BS_mK9GE

There is a reason why Aliexpress and Amazon suffer form the same curse.

rchaud|2 years ago

I wouldn't hold my breath for this to be available at Walmart anytime soon. Cutting-edge stuff goes on AliExpress first, like it or not.

ulfbert_inc|2 years ago

In Belarus where the author is from people don't have many options.