RISCV Lichee Console 4A mini laptop discovery

For my experimentation, I’ve access to a Lichee Console 4A minilaptop which, to my knowledge is the first laptop based on RISC-V technology. It’s not exactly a usual laptop, the denomination is “Portable RISC-V Development Terminal”. It’s build by Sipeed https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a and sell on aliexpress https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005006174268912.html

Since it’s based on RISC-V architecture we can have many documentations:

• Technical, on the chip itself: https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/th1520/lp4a.html

• With a scientific description https://ftp.libre-soc.org/466100a052.pdf

• On the mother board : https://dl.sipeed.com/shareURL/LICHEE/licheepi4a

The machine come with a preinstalled linux installation :

lpi4a14b4:~/tmp/>lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Debian
Description:	Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
Release:	12
Codename:	bookworm
lpi4a14b4:~/tmp/>uname -a
Linux lpi4a14b4 5.10.113+ #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Dec 15 09:57:23 CST 2023 riscv64 GNU/Linux

The graphical system is based on xfce4, and is quite responsive.

The core processor is a RISC-V 64 bits, 4 cores, with many extensions :

processor	: 3
hart		: 3
isa		: rv64imafdcvsu
mmu		: sv39
cpu-freq	: 1.848Ghz
cpu-icache	: 64KB
cpu-dcache	: 64KB
cpu-l2cache	: 1MB
cpu-tlb		: 1024 4-ways
cpu-cacheline	: 64Bytes
cpu-vector	: 0.7.1

The rv64imafdcvsu should be interpreded as (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V)

• RV64I Base Integer Instruction Set, 64-bit

• M : Standard Extension for Integer Multiplication and Division

• A : Standard Extension for Atomic Instructions

• F & D : Standard Extension for Single & Double -Precision Floating-Point

• C : Standard Extension for Compressed Instructions (16 bits for common instructions)

• V : Standard Extension for Vector Operations

• S : Standard Extension for Supervisor-level Instructions

I’ll certainly publish more testing on this machine in a near future.