I spent some time to benchmark my super-early-bird VisionFive 2, looking both at CPU performance and power consumption.
The results are really good, it’s much faster than the VisionFive 1 while also consuming much less power!
Here is the full article: https://bitsofnetworks.org/benchmarking-risc-v-visionfive-2-vs-the-world.html
And here is a copy of the conclusion (the performance results are about a xz
decompression benchmark):
When looking at single-core CPU performance, the VisionFive 2 is roughly 75% faster than the original VisionFive. Since it has twice the core count, that means a +150% total performance increase. And taking into account power consumption, it is 4 to 6 times more energy-efficient! So that’s definitely a very big improvement.
Compared to the HiFive Unmatched (which is not even technically a SBC), the VisionFive 2 still outperforms it by 50%, and is 15 to 18 times more energy-efficient. So, as far as I can tell, the claim about it being a “high-performance RISC-V SBC” is true.
When comparing with Raspberry Pis, the VisionFive 2 is much better than a Raspberry Pi 3B+, but still 46% slower than a Raspberry Pi 4, and 40% to 70% less energy-efficient.
Compared to low-power x86_64 systems, the VisionFive 2 is of course slower when looking at raw performance, but at the same time it is 2.75 to 3.4 times more energy-efficient. This is a general advantage that SBCs have over more complete systems: they have much less peripherals, are less extensible and have generally lower performance, but they are much more energy-efficient.
Overall, the VisionFive 2 is a big step in the right direction, and this kind of RISC-V hardware can definitely compete with modern ARM boards since they have very similar performance-energy tradeoffs.