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Recently I've been testing a SiFive HiFive Premier P550, and as part of that testing, I of course plugged in some AMD GPUs I had laying around.

I'll get to that testing at a later date, but one thing I enjoy in my testing is finding what 3D accelerated games and other applications can be run on alternative architectures. With the great work from Wine and Proton over the years, a great many games run out of the box on Linux—and they can be made to run on Arm and RISC-V architectures with almost as much ease as Linux on X86/AMD64!

RISC-V is the new entrant into the SBC/low-end desktop space, and as I'm in possession of a HiFive Premier P550 motherboard, I am running it through my usual gauntlet of benchmarks—partly to see how fast it is, and partly to gauge how far along RISC-V support is in general across a wide swath of Linux software.

From my first tests on the VisionFive 2 back in 2023 to today, RISC-V has seen quite a bit of growth, fueled by economics, geopolitical wrangling, and developer interest.

The P550 uses the ESWIN EIC7700X SoC, and while it doesn't have a fast CPU, by modern standards, it is fast enough—and the system has enough RAM and IO—to run most modern Linux-y things. Including llama.cpp and Ollama!

Compiling Ollama for RISC-V Linux

I'm running Ubuntu 24.04.1 on my P550 board, and when I try running Ollama's simple install script, I get:

When I first heard about Radxa's Orion O6, it was being compared to Apple's M1 silicon, and the product page has extraordinary claims:

OpenAI, which is only really open about consuming all the world's energy and half a trillion of our taxpayer dollars, just got rattled to its core.

Deepseek, a new AI startup run by a Chinese hedge fund, allegedly created a new open weights model called R1 that beats OpenAI's best model in every metric.

Apple charges $800 to upgrade from the base model M4 Mac mini's 256 GB of internal storage to a more capacious 2 TB.

Pictured above is a photo of a standard 2230-size M.2 NVMe SSD (one made by Raspberry Pi, in this case), and Apple's proprietary not-M.2 drive, which has NAND flash chips on it, but no NVM Express controller, the 'brains' in a little chip that lets NVMe SSDs work universally across any computer with a standard M.2 PCIe slot.

A couple years ago, after I heard about the CaribouLite on CrowdSupply, I pre-ordered one.

I've dabbled in SDR with an RTL-SDR v3 for a few years, even using one with nrsc5 to listen to baseball games OTA because of silly MLB blackout restrictions.

But low-cost SDRs like the RTL-SDR v3 are receive-only, and have a limited frequency range, and lower quality RF filtering, so it can be frustrating if you're trying to work with lower-power RF... or trying to transmit at all!