ETH Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

Warning, very geeky hardware topic ahead
About [two years ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ewn8dw/daily_general_discussion_august_20_2024/lj2anr4/) I started playing with RISC-V boards with the goal to run an Ethereum full node on them. RISC-V is a CPU architecture which is different from the usual Intel/AMD or ARM CPUs found in moden computers and smartphones. The biggest difference is that the standard is free. Anyone with enough money can develop a CPU using this architecture and profit from the ever growing software support around it.
After playing around with the boards in summer 2024 and triaging all the clients for how easy it will be to get them to run on RISC-V, a colleague and I applied for a Devcon talk in Bangkok. [And we got it](https://app.devcon.org/schedule/J3SWYT). We were able to run a validator on a testnet, but mainnet was out of reach because of the high CPU demand from the many validators on Ethereum mainnet. We could kind of sync to the head block on mainnet in certain combinations, but running everything on one board was impossible. Not surprising as the boards back then were on the level of a Raspberry Pi 3, at least CPU wise. We guessed back then that it may take another 1-2 years until a full node can be run on a single RISC-V board.
About half a year after devcon, Robert Mordzon from Web3Pi, who attended our talk, managed to get a newer faster board and [ran a split full node on two separate boards](https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1j5uqrs/ethereum_node_on_riscv_yes_its_possible/), one board for the execution client and one for the consensus client. The amazing thing he did is that he also helped to improve the Lighthouse client, so it can now be compiled on RISC-V boards out of the box.
At Devcon I talked to many core devs and asked about issues I saw with their clients. Potuz, the core dev was [very interested in improving his crypto library](https://xcancel.com/haurog1/status/1858150270217454001). About a year ago he started implementing specific RISC-V optimizations for this library, which is used by Prysm and Nimbus. He even implemented certain optimizations which might take a few more years until they can be used in actual hardware.
Last autumn I got my hands on another iteration of RISC-V boards, the 'DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC'. This one has the power of about a Raspberry Pi 4. Thanks to the work on the Lighthouse and Nimbus clients I could directly compile and run it on the board. After fiddling a bit with the settings I managed to get a synced full node running. I was always about 5-10 seconds behind the head block, and at epoch boundaries it even fell behind a few slots, but consensus client is always synced. CPU is 80-90% used, so not a lot of headroom left. The biggest limitation is the single core speed though.
I then ran an Ethereum mainnet validator through the board. I used geth and lighthouse. Surprisingly it worked and the additional workload for the validator did not really impact anything. Not surprisingly the validator missed all the head votes. In these votes your validator votes on what the newest block is that he has seen. Closely after epoch boundaries it also missed the target votes. These votes are for the first block in the current epoch. Nevertheless, I actually earned a bit of rewards with my risc-v validator.
All this long text to say, that a few months ago I managed to run the first Ethereum full node with an attached validator on a single RISC-V board. To the best of my knowledge no one managed to do that until then.
Nowadays, the RISC-V node sits on my desk, running geth/nimbus and doing it pretty reliably. Nimbus is a bit more resource efficient, but relies more on the single CPU speed, which this board lacks. So it is always about 10-20s behind the head block. As I do not like to earn less ETH than possible I normally do not run any validators through it.
I also tried running the zk attester version of lighthouse, where you only need the consensus client, as the execution side is proven with a ZK proof. Unfortunately, the single core performance was not good enough. I guess there are a lot of optimizations that are still possible for making this possible once Ethereum officially supports zk proofs.
I played with Ethrex, a newer execution client. It compiled fine, but failed consistently during sync. I guess it is because of only having 16GB of RAM available, but I have not tried to debug it properly.
Now, a new iteration of boards is coming out. They have a Spacemit-K3 CPU and official sale started yesterday. This board is on the level of a Raspberry Pi 5 and some even say it should be on the level of a RK3588 CPU. Due to the increased RAM prices, the prices for the board are eye-wateringly high. But it is great to see that the RISC-V CPU speed is increasing faster than in the overall CPU market. Many of the large CPU producers now have a RISC-V team and many smaller startups from people which left Intel and AMD are working on RISC-V CPUs. I expect the pace to continue like this until RISC-V CPU speeds come closer to current consumer CPU speeds and only then they will hit more fundamental speed increase limits which all the established players have.
Despite the fast speed increases I guess the future of devices with RISC-V CPUs mostly lies in running very low power nodes which, thanks to the usage of ZK proofs, only have to validate a proof and can then request or follow only state changes they are interested in.

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