Five months of paper trading left Stalker's recorded $1,000 portfolio at $855.23. An audit of its decisions, orders, risk controls, and shadow portfolio explains the trading freeze and why the original backtests gave us too much confidence.
In September I costed a RISC-V rental business on hardware I did not own. Then I bought one board for 1,175 dollars and spent three weeks measuring it. The board turned out better than I expected and the ecosystem around it worse, which sounds like a wash until you notice those are answers to two different questions. One of them says do not buy the ten-node chassis. The other says there is a business here, and the reason it exists is the same reason the chassis is a bad idea.
I promised a follow-up on whether official Ubuntu turns the SpacemiT K3 into the virtualization host its spec sheet advertises. It does: modprobe kvm loads on mainline 7.3.0 and a Debian RISC-V guest runs with hardware acceleration. But mainline sees only 8 of the 16 cores, the internal UFS storage does not work at all, and a single line of firmware configuration means FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD cannot boot on this board, virtualized or not.
The SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX is the first RISC-V board on my bench that competes with ARM instead of apologising to it. It compiles Rust in 161.8 seconds, beats a Cortex-A76 on AES-GCM and SHA-256, and does 2.37 GB/s of hardware-accelerated crypto where the Pine64 Star64 manages 21.7 MB/s. It also cost $1,175.09 delivered, partitions its 16 cores into two clusters of 8 that no single process can span, and cannot run KVM at all because the vendor kernel oopses when you load the module.
The MangoPi MQ Pro compiles the pinned benchmark in 7,824 seconds, two hours and ten minutes, which is 149x the fleet leader and dead last of twelve boards. But the interesting numbers are elsewhere: per core it is only 4.2x behind a SiFive U74, its 486 MB of RAM never became the bottleneck because being single-core kept peak memory to one rustc, and getting Rust onto it at all required a Debian chroot because OpenWrt is musl and rustup ships no musl-hosted compiler.
The Pine64 Star64 runs StarFive's JH7110 - four SiFive U74 cores and an ISA string of rv64imafdc, which is RV64GC baseline and nothing more. It compiles Rust in 461 seconds, tenth of eleven on my bench, beating the Orange Pi RV2 with half the cores, matching its own JH7110 twin the Milk-V Mars to within 0.02%, and losing to a quad Cortex-A53 from 2012. On SHA-512, where nobody has hardware, it is only 5.9x behind a Cortex-A76. On AES-128-GCM it is 100x behind. That difference is the whole story - plus a hardware crypto engine sitting stranded behind missing userspace plumbing.
