Orange Pi RV2 Benchmarks: The Most Performant RISC-V Board For Less Than $100 With 8 Cores + 8GB RAM
While not nearly as fast as the ARM-based Raspberry Pi boards, I was immediately surprised to see how well the Orange Pi RV2 was performing... Much faster than the once-interesting HiFive Unmatched from a few years ago that retailed for $600+. This 8-core $65 board was performing not too far behind the new SiFive HiFive Premier P550. The HiFive Premier P550 retails for $399 USD and has 16GB of RAM and uses a quad-core SiFive P550 SoC as well as being mini-ITX form factor and other feature differences.
For the very low price point of the Orange Pi RV2 and being readily available on Amazon, I was impressed with the performance of this 8-core RISC-V processor even though it still shows RISC-V hardware performance still tending to be significantly slower than the Raspberry Pi boards that aren't even leading-edge ARM SoCs.
For compiling RISC-V software or as a RISC-V-based CI/CD test setup, the Orange Pi RV2 8GB at less than $100 is interesting and can allow for microSD, eMMC, or PCIe NVMe storage.