I can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K.

That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.

>Ascalon tape out

Supposedly happened earlier this year. Tenstorrent says devboards in Q3.

Now we just wait.

TBH I still don't really get how it's different from MIPS. As far as I can tell... Loongson seems to be really just MIPS, while LoongArch is MIPS with some extra instructions.

(purely on vibes) loongson feels to me like an intermediate step/backup strategy rather than a longterm target (though they'll probably power govt equipment for decades of legacy either way :p)

A P550 based board is the best you can get for now (~2-3x faster than the Banana Pi). In 2-3 months there should be a number of SpaceMIT k3 chips that are ~4-6x faster than the banana pi and somewhat reasonably priced (~200-300). By the end of the year, however, you should be able to get an ascalon chip which should be way way faster than that (roughly apple m1/zen3 speed)

What is the current fastest ppc64le implementation that isn’t exorbitantly expensive? How about the s390x?

What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.

The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.

Probably because that's just the infrastructure they have.

i686 builds even faster

> Which risc-v implementation is considered fast?

SpacemiT K3 is 2010 Macbook performance single-core, 2019 Macbook Air multi-core, and better than M4 Apple Silicon for AI.

So I guess it depends on what you are going to do with it.

Nothing shipping today is really competitive with modern ARM or x86. The SiFive P870 and Tenstorrent Ascalon (Jim Keller's team) are the most anticipated high-performance designs, but neither is widely available. What you can actually buy today tops out around Cortex-A76 class single-thread performance at best, which is roughly where ARM was five or six years ago.

DC-ROMA 2 is on the Rasperry 4 level of performance last I heard