SiFive HiFive Unmatched Hands-On, Initial RISC-V Performance Benchmarks

Ubuntu 21.04 on the HiFive Unmatched was running well, but I was curious too to see the direction it's headed with next month's Ubuntu 21.10 release given all the RISC-V software work in flux... There has been a lot of RISC-V work upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel recently, Ubuntu 21.10 switches to the newer GCC 11 compiler, and a lot of other updated software likely to benefit from the maturing RISC-V software ecosystem.

Running the Ubuntu 21.10 development build on the HiFive Unmatched yielded a much faster experience than Ubuntu 21.04. Here is a look on the HiFive Unmatched between Ubuntu 21.04 with updates against the Ubuntu 21.10 daily state as of a few days ago:

Ubuntu 21.10 on the HiFive Unmatched is a big upgrade with seeing across the board better performance. This wasn't just due to the newer compiler toolchain as even with Python and PHP workloads, among others, were nice gains with this upcoming Ubuntu release. Long story short, those going for the HiFive Unmatched will definitely want to upgrade if using Ubuntu. Benchmarks on other RISC-V Linux distributions and monitoring how Ubuntu's RISC-V performance evolves ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will come over the weeks/months ahead on Phoronix.

See all of the individual Ubuntu benchmarks on the HiFive Unmatched via this result file.