Orange Pi RV2 Benchmarks: The Most Performant RISC-V Board For Less Than $100 With 8 Cores + 8GB RAM
When taking the geometric mean of the dozens of benchmarks ran successfully on all of the ARM and RISC-V boards, the Orange Pi RV2 had a decent showing for the RISC-V space. The Orange Pi RV2 performance was in the middle between the old HiFive Unmatched and that of the newer HiFive Premier P550. The Premier P550 offers more performance potential while being just a quad-core RISC-V design and more features on the board itself, but it also retails for $399 USD. With the Orange Pi RV2 9GB you can get it off Amazon for just $65.
The Orange Pi RV2 was impressive with the ability to easily purchase an 8-core RISC-V board with 8GB of RAM, dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI out, PCIe NVMe / eMMC / microSD storage, and other capabilities for just ~$65 USD on Amazon (affiliate link). The performance isn't up to the ARM-based Raspberry Pi levels but it's better than running a RISC-V emulator or the 4~5 year old HiFive Unmatched that was much more expensive and now much slower. I would also recommend spending a few dollars and getting at least a passive aluminum heatsink for the SoC, which is what I did as well during this testing.
For those wondering how the Orange Pi RV2 compares to the StarFive VisionFive 2 that can also be found on Amazon for less than $100, here are some side-by-side benchmarks below. Unfortunately I misplaced my StarFive VisionFive 2 board (the problems of having so much hardware around...) so wasn't able to repeat the same tests 1:1 with the earlier benchmarks shown. But I ran the Orange Pi RV2 up against some of the StarFive VisionFive 2 benchmarks I previously conducted.
The Orange Pi RV2 delivered better performance than the StarFive VisionFive 2 while costing ~$30 less. The Orange Pi RV2 with its Ky X1 SoC has eight RISC-V cores at 1.6GHz compared to four cores at 1.5GHz with the StarFive VisionFive 2.
The Orange Pi RV2 provided better value and performance. The StarFive VisionFive 2 to its advantage though has upstream Linux kernel support and better supported by more (non-Ubuntu) Linux distributions at this time.
In any event those wanting to check out this 8-core RISC-V single board computer for around $65 USD can find it on Amazon (affiliate link) and I'll be running some more benchmarks on it as hopefully more interesting and more performant RISC-V boards come to market.
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