Initial Benchmarks Of The SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V CPU With The K3 Pico-ITX
The SpacemiT K3 Pico ITX solution is far better than the SiFive P550 Premier board.
Across these different general purpose workloads, the SpacemiT K3 comes out significantly faster -- often multiple times faster -- than the SiFive P550 Premier that was previously one of the few reliable RISC-V boards out there. Depending upon the workload it was at times meeting or outperforming the Raspberry Pi 500+ as it should be with the SpacemiT X100 core promoted as offering similar performance to the Arm Cortex-A76 at least as far as SPEC CPU is concerned. But while the RISC-V performance is much faster now with the SpacemiT K3 than the SiFive P550 Premier or even older, less-capable RISC-V offerings, its performance still has a ways to go in catching up to the modern capabilities of Intel and AMD x86_64 CPUs.
👁 SpacemiT K3 Pico ITX mini computer
Due to the lack of PowerCap/RAPL or HWMON drivers or other interfaces for reliably capturing the SoC/core power consumption, this initial preview also lacked any performance-per-Watt comparison but in follow-up testing will work on AC wall power even though is less reliable given the very different platforms being tested.
In any event for those after a native RISC-V environment, the SpacemiT K3 is now hitting the market as one of the first RVA23 profile compliant devices that makes it capable to run Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and as shown by these benchmarks much faster than prior RISC-V solutions. Thanks to SpacemiT for providing this K3 Pico ITX mini computer and more testing is on the way.
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