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Benchmarking a new architecture
Risky Business
As I do at least twice every year, I changed my plans for this column at the very last minute. This time, some interesting hardware came into the lab rightfully deserving of analysis – a new single-board-computer (SBC) that is part of the first production run of the BeagleV-Ahead [1], the latest addition to the BeagleBone family [2] (Figure 1). This new entry is built around a CPU based on the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture [3] (Figure 2). RISC-V is a relatively recent open source CPU instruction set available royalty-free and has successfully drawn interest from more than a dozen chip suppliers so far. It cannot yet compete with x86 chips from Intel and AMD, or even the best many-core ARM offerings, but it shows great promise and is therefore worth tinkering with.
Figure 1: The BeagleV-Ahead board, seen installed in a Seeed Studio re_computer standard SBC case.
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