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How to build Ollama to run LLMs on RISC-V Linux
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.
…Orion O6 ITX Arm V9 board - temper your expectations
When I first heard about Radxa's Orion O6, it was being compared to Apple's M1 silicon, and the product page has extraordinary claims:
- World's First Open Source Arm V9 Motherboard
- Higher Performance, Lower Power Consumption, Better Security
- The following performance graph:
As always, when I see a graph like that without any axis labels, alarm bells start going off. It's a marketing tactic used by Apple, Nvidia, and well, most players who want to make hardware seem even more impressive than it is, and generate early buzz.
…How is Deepseek R1 on a Raspberry Pi?
OpenAI, 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.
And they did it for $6 million, with GPUs that run at half the memory bandwidth of OpenAI's.
…Don't pay $800 for Apple's 2TB SSD upgrade
Apple charges $800 to upgrade from the base model M4 Mac mini's 256 GB of internal storage to a more capacious 2 TB.
Pictured above is a photo of a standard 2230-size M.2 NVMe SSD (one made by Raspberry Pi, in this case), and Apple's proprietary not-M.2 drive, which has NAND flash chips on it, but no NVM Express controller, the 'brains' in a little chip that lets NVMe SSDs work universally across any computer with a standard M.2 PCIe slot.
…CaribouLite SDR HAT for SDR on a Raspberry Pi
A couple years ago, after I heard about the CaribouLite on CrowdSupply, I pre-ordered one.
I've dabbled in SDR with an RTL-SDR v3 for a few years, even using one with nrsc5 to listen to baseball games OTA because of silly MLB blackout restrictions.
But low-cost SDRs like the RTL-SDR v3 are receive-only, and have a limited frequency range, and lower quality RF filtering, so it can be frustrating if you're trying to work with lower-power RF... or trying to transmit at all!
…Project Mini Rack - compact and portable homelabs
Today I'm announcing Project MINI RACK, an open source project to help those building homelabs, RF/wireless rigs, and other electronics projects into mini 10" racks.
Not everyone can afford (either due to budget or space constraints) to have a full 19" rack in their home. Besides that, people may want to deploy small, easily-composable equipment racks to remote sites, or have one in the car that they can take anywhere! And with the flood of Mini PCs in the market (in addition to SBCs and small PoE-powered network devices), and the move to solid state storage, a mini rack can hold a formidable amount of resources.
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