Sipeed Teases a RISC-V System-on-Module That "Beats the Raspberry Pi 4" in Performance
With four RISC-V cores running at 2.5GHz and up to 16GB of RAM, the compact Lichee Module 4 A aims to outperform Raspberry Pi's best board.
Embedded computing specialist Sipeed has teased a high-performance system-on-module (SOM) built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) — and claims it can out-perform the Raspberry Pi 4's Arm Cortex-A72 cores.
"We are glad to public[ly announce] the high performance RISC-V SOM, LM4A," Sipeed posted to Twitter this week, coinciding with the RISC-V Summit in San Jose this week. "It beat[s] RPi4B [the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B] in Dhrystone and CoreMarks [benchmarks], prov[ing] RISC-V is qualified in HPC [High-Performance Computing] field."
The heart of the Lichee Module 4 A (LM4A) is a T-Head 1520 (TH1520) system-on-chip, which packs in four XuanTie C910 64-bit RISC-V cores running at an impressive 2.5GHz — a considerable uplift over the 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 cores in the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to which Sipeed is comparing its creation.
Elsewhere, the chip includes two gigabit PHYs, a C906 RISC-V core running at 800MHz and acting as a digital signal processor (DSP), and a neural network accelerator for machine learning workloads offering a claimed 4 trillion operations per second (TOPS) compute performance — with a further 50 gigaFLOPS of floating-point available on the Imagination Technologies GPU.
At the time of writing Sipeed had yet to test the device at its full 2.5GHz clock speed — instead benchmarking the chip at a lower 1.8GHz for reasons not yet specified. Even at this lower speed, though, it manages to slightly outperform the Raspberry Pi 4 in the Dhrystone benchmark while pulling up just a little short in the CoreMarks benchmark — but jumping ahead when compiled with "an optimized toolchain," Sipeed notes. "[If we] try to predict the CoreMarks in 2.5GHz, it will be far more [high-performance than the] RPi4B."
The LM4A will launch, Sipeed has announced, in the first quarter of 2023 in 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB variants; pricing for a "dock board" has been set at $100 to "[take] the war to high-end Arm SBC [single-board computers]." Interested parties should watch Sipeed's Twitter account for future updates.