It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:
The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!
The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.
This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:
I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little under-desk studio rack.
So after working with them last year on a similar build (but with a prototype case), I got in touch with MyElectronics and they sent over their new production Mini ITX short-depth 2U PC case.
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.)
It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building Emacs.
Well, here's my quick story.
I've been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pis lately—more specifically, work which often requires recompiling the Pi OS Linux kernel for the aarch64 architecture. I recompile the kernel enough I made my own shirt for it!
January 1, 2021 Update: My 1.34 Gbps benchmark was flawed. See this GitHub issue and this updated blog post to learn more: WiFi 6 is not faster than Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi.
After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi, installing Intel's WiFi firmware, and patching Intel's wireless driver to make it work on the Raspberry Pi, I benchmarked the EDUP Intel AX200 WiFi 6 PCIe card and got 1.34 Gbps of bandwidth between the Raspberry Pi and a new ASUS WiFi 6 router.
This is my story.
tl;dr: I successfully got the Intel I340-T4 4x Gigabit NIC working on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and combining all the interfaces (including the internal Pi interface), I could get up to 3.06 Gbps maximum sustained throughput.
Update: I was able to boost things a bit to get 4.15 Gbps! Check out my video here: 4+ Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
After my failure to light up a monitor with my first attempt at getting a GPU working with the Pi, I figured I'd try something a little more down-to-earth this time.
And to that end, I present to you this four-interface gigabit network card from Intel, the venerable I340-T4:
Note: There's a video version of this blog post available here: What does Apple Silicon mean for the Raspberry Pi and ARM64?
A couple weeks ago I tried using the latest Raspberry Pi 4 8 gig model as my main computer for a day, and I posted a video about my experience.
Besides many diehard Linux fans complaining in the comments about my apparent idiocy caused by being a Mac user, the experience taught me one thing: A lot of software still isn't built for 64-bit ARM processors, or even for Linux in general.
But there's one trend that I'm seeing: most of the open source software I use already works great on a Pi 4 running on its 64-bit ARM processor.