First RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI and 8-core chip | Hacker News Reader

First RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI and 8-core chip

theregister.com

27 pointsLorenDB6 comments

It's nt mentioned in the linked article, but included in the descriptions of the laptop on the company site they show an "8 pin developer interface" that includes I2C, Rx/Tx, 3.3V, and GPIO pins. That looks super cool for hardware hacking!

https://deepcomputing.io/product/dc-roma-risc-v-laptop-ii/

This is super neat, but it serves to remind me of the difficult (as in decision-making) position I'm in. I recently refreshed so have a few years to go until it's time again, but I would love to go RISC-V, but I want high performance that is going to last me several years.

For comparison sake, right now my desktop has an AMD 5950x 16-core (32v) in it, and my Framework 16 laptop has a Ryzen 7 7840HS (8-core (16v)). The reason this matters is that I expect to spend around $2k for a machine, but if I'm going to spend that kind of money, it's going to be my only workstation. I suspect it will take some time for RISC-V chips to get anywhere near competitive. But if I assume everybody is like me, that presents a real chicken-and-egg problem for high performance RISC-V laptops.

I've got a similar spec laptop with 24 core (8P + 16E) i9-13900HX that is probably quite comparable or maybe a bit better especially on burst workloads e.g. building software as the max turbo is 500 MHz higher and both similar all-cores boost (3.8-3.9 or so) but I have more cores.

It's going to be a long time before we see RISC-V at this level, at least on a per-core basis. I think we'll see around 2020 x86/Apple M1 performance in 2026/27.

Late this year we'll see a 16 core RISC-V with around Nehalem or Sandy Bridge performance. But 16 core, so something like a Xeon of that generation -- I had one in a Mac Pro back in 2009.

That's a pretty respectable computer.

Milk-V says they'll have a board with one for $120 -- I suspect that's with zero or very low RAM, no storage. SiPeed says $300 and that's probably with a good chunk of RAM and eMMC.

That will be RISC-V's RK3588 (Rock 5, Orange Pi 5) or Raspberry Pi 5 moment, though it actually leapfrogs those by quite a bit, in both per core speed and number of cores.

Thanks, I think your timeline makes a lot of sense. Considering that, my gut tells me it may be 15 to 20 years before RISC-V catches up (since Intel and AMD and ARM won't be laying down). What do you think the timeline looks like? Do you think RISC-V will catch up anytime within the next 15 to 20 years? Is it more optimistic than that?

If a company like AMD spun up a RISC-V division (oh god that would be so amazing), that would obviously greatly accelerate the timetable. I lack a whole lot of strategic info for decision making, but my instinct is to think that could be very good for AMD. There would be some cannabilization, but I don't think nearly as much as you would think, but the big payoff is that if RISC-V is going to be big (which I think it is), they become the de-facto leaders and can own it, much the way Nvidia did with GPUs.

Since you own a Framework in particular, I think a more likely scenario is that 2-4 years from now you have the option to upgrade your mainboard to the latest Intel/AMD x86 silicon, or to the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon/Oryon ARM platform. I can imagine the next upgrade 2-4 years after that maybe having a RISC-V option.

Indeed, that's a really great point, and the timeline seems pretty reasonable as well.

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