Sipeed Lichee Console 4A

[geerlingguy]

FYI, I've run sbc-bench on a Lichee Console 4A, Sipeed's RISC-V 'cyberdeck'-style mini notebook running a TH1520 SoC, 4 cores at 1.5 GHz.

Results: https://sprunge.us/fUCnrY

Testing as part of https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/39

[ThomasKaiser]

Thanks! But is there a reason the SoC only clocking in at 1.5 GHz?

They advertised the TH1520 being capable of 2.5 GHz but all I've seen so far is 2.0 GHz: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/results/4xYE.txt

Edit: got it (from your review issue): 'For the sake of Console battery life and heat generation, the current upper limit of the CPU frequency of the default image is limited to 1.5GHz.'

[ThomasKaiser]

It seems they did only limit CPU core clockspeeds but not memory controller:

Clockspeed	7-zip multi	7-zip single	AES	memcpy	memset
1500 MHz	3880	1129	33260	3290	11160
2000 MHz	5260	1592	43820	4350	14760

[geerlingguy]

@ThomasKaiser - Indeed, this little thing gets toasty, even at the lower clocks. I think thermals aren't great on the current design, it's definitely a bit of a 'ragtag' developer machine. Decently put together, still (in comparison to some devices I've used at the early revisions), but there's just a heat pipe hanging out in the open space, and fan kinda blowing air at one end of it :D