SiFive recently sent over their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board and as part of that fresh RISC-V CPU testing I've also been re-testing the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board from 2020~2021 for reference. Out of curiosity, I've carried out some tests using the HiFive Unmatched to look at how the Ubuntu Linus RISC-V performance has evolved from Ubuntu 21.04 when I first tested that RISC-V quad-core developer board, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages.
In advance of the HiFive Premier P550 review in the coming days, this article today is looking at that historical RISC-V Linux performance perspective across Ubuntu 21.04 / 22.04 LTS / 24.04 LTS on that mature HiFive Unmatched RISC-V developer board. As a reminder the HiFive Unmatched features four RISC-V 64-bit cores, 16GB of RAM, and was running with a Samsung 980 NVMe SSD and a Radeon HD 6770 graphics card.
The SiFive Freedom U740 SoC is what powers the HiFive Unmatched developer board.
Ubuntu 21.04 as a reminder was on Linux 5.11 and using GCC 10.3, Ubuntu 22.04 moved to Linux 5.15 and GCC 11.2 and other software updates, and now Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is on Linux 6.8 with GCC 13.3 and other updated software packages. The same hardware platform was used for all testing with simply looking at how the Ubuntu Linux performance has evolved for this SiFive RISC-V platform going back to Ubuntu 21.04 from early 2021.
Following those comparison points, at the end of the article are the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS benchmarks on the HiFive Unmatched up against the Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi 500 ARM systems for putting it into perspective how that mature RISC-V platform now compares. Again, in the next week or so will be our review and benchmarks of their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board.
The SiFive RISC-V performance on the HiFive Unmatched developer board has continued evolving with newer versions of Ubuntu Linux thanks to the updated kernel, GCC compiler, and other software featuring better RISC-V architecture support.
For some workloads the bulk of the software optimization uplift came from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with little gain in some areas on Ubuntu 24.04.
There have been a number of RISC-V Linux kernel optimizations to land over the past four years.
The newer GCC (and LLVM/Clang) compiler releases can also help in producing more efficient RISC-V binaries.
In only a few areas was Ubuntu 24.04 LTS running slower than Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on this SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V developer board.
There tended to be some nice performance improvements across a variety of workloads with succeeding Ubuntu Linux releases on this SiFive RISC-V developer board.
Going from Ubuntu 21.04 to 22.04 LTS was around 19% better performance while with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS it's up to 23% faster than where the SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V with Freedom U740 SoC started out four years ago. All the benchmarks conducted can be found here.
While the HiFive Unleashed is nearly a quarter faster with the newest Ubuntu Linux LTS release than where it started out when the RISC-V developer board was first shipping, software optimizations alone aren't enough. The HiFive Unmatched with its aging RISC-V SoC still significantly trails ARM performance as measured with the Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi 500 ARM keyboard computers... It will be interesting to see where the HiFive Premier P550 fits into the picture in the days ahead.
Even on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, the HiFive Unmatched aging RISC-V board is much slower than the ARM Cortex performance found with recent Raspberry Pi single board computers.
Those wanting to see more of these fresh HiFive Unmatched vs. Raspberry Pi benchmarks can find them here.
It will be interesting to show where the HiFive Premier P550 fits into the equation on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the upcoming review and benchmarks, stay tuned.
