Critical, but quite fair review of the VF 2

Found this on Twitter:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/risc-v-business-testing-starfives-visionfive-2-sbc

Enjoy!

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You mean the one written by that @geerlingguy ? :slight_smile:

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And there’s a video! RISC-V Business: Testing "the world's leading RISC-V SBC" - YouTube

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Try the Gentoo image as well. See Experimental Gentoo Image

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About ultra slow SD speed, reason here:Question about sd-card speed - #16 by Stat_headcrabed
Seems this is caused by lack of power supply rail from PMIC.

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There are some inacuracy in that review, but it is probably because the reviewer is from the PC market.

For example the GPU itself have nothing to do with Video Encoding/Decoding nor the display through HDMI itself. The GPU on SBC only do the 3D part, it is really only on the PC Market that the GPU card do all of the 3D, framebuffer and HDMI output.

In the case of SBCs, you have an HDMI output block (or some other format like MIPI’s Display Serial Interface, and there is another block that do the framebuffer and related timings. This are most of the time not part of the GPU itself, and that’s what is happening there.
Same for video encoding/decoding, the block in the VF2 that do that are not part of Imagination’s GPU.
So the lack of 4K is not the GPU, but the part of the the chip that handle the framebuffer.

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