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RISC-V is coming along quite speedily: Milk-V Titan Mini-ITX 8-core board
At the pace every PC component is becoming quite expensive it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that my next CPU will be RISC-V based. /s (kind of)

PS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.

As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.

The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.

The SpacemiT K3 with 8 SpacemiT X100 RVA23 cores, which are faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5, should be available in a couple of months:

geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076

rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/...

There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator for number crunshing.

The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.

  • api
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  • 49 minutes ago
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I’d also like an updated RISC-V Framework laptop board. There is one but it’s too limited. If they came out with that I’d try it as a laptop.

I mean a board with decent storage and better performance.

As things are now, I can only afford boards that take the RAM modules I inherited from my grandfather.
Luckily this board runs with old DDR4 sticks. If you still have some lying around good for you.
The board itself looks pretty spartan, at least compared to any other x86 ITX board I’ve seen in the last ten years. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is audio jacks.

Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board?

https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-o...

Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588159
Oh, no vector extension. Probably a dealbreaker for me.
why?
Well Linux distros are consolidating around RVA23 target, for one thing (I'm not OP).
  • tw1984
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  • 46 minutes ago
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Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling.

For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive.

Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.

>> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different".

How is that feeling "false"? People running RISC-V systems are different, or at least they have different motivations than you.

  • kriro
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  • 40 minutes ago
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Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.

I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.

ISA being open matters very little if chip design isn't and RISC-V isn't going to change much here
I have increasingly negative things to say about this.

There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V. and I wonder if there really ever was any desire for it, at this point.

This whole "Open ISA" crap appears to be a thin veneer to funnel quite large sums of investment into an otherwise completely proprietary and locked-down environment that could never harm the incumbents in any meaningful way - while still maintaining just enough of a pretense of open source, that the (regrettably myself included) shallow nerds and geeks could get smitten by it.

Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.

I want my SoC to have a special register that has the git SHA ID of the exact snapshot of the repository that was used to cook the masks. that, now that - is Open Source. that is Open Computing. And nothing less!

I dont care about the piece of paper with instruction encodings - the least interesting part of any computer!

Wasn't that the whole point? We're more than a quarter of a century in and we're still begging SoC vendors for datasheets. Really incredibly embarassing and disappointing.