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.
> 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.
This is basically what I've been waiting on. Besides the mentioned Milk-V Titan, what are some other good boards people here tried out and could vouch for being good? Ideally European, but happy to receive any recommendations as long as you've actually tried it yourself :)
You may know this already, but here's the obligatory clarification. The open/free part is the RISC-V ISA. The actual implementation, the microarchitecture IP, may not be. Most of the higher end RISC-V IPs are proprietary.
It may still have a slight price advantage compared to proprietary ISAs like ARM, due to the latter's ISA licensing costs. But it remains to be seen how much of this advantage will be passed to us, the end users.
I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
> I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance
No one with any true knowledge of RISC-V would ever make such a claim. Know-nothing marketers might, I suppose, but why would you listen to them rather than to actual insiders?
The current newest RISC-V boards (Megrez and Titan and whatever the upcoming SpacemiT K3 ones are called) are solidly in mid-range Core 2 territory, especially K3 which has SMID/vectors which the other fast chips currently don't.
Older boards using JH7110, TH1520, K1 are closer to Pentium III or PowerPC G4 though with 4 or 8 cores instead of 1, but without an equivalent to the SSE or Altivec SIMD those old, or if they have it with near zero software using it.
Late this year is expected to see RISC-V products with performance in Skylake to Zen 2 performance levels, verging on M1 (M1 IPC but lower MHz).
> they are much slower than similar priced arm systems
Irrelevant to the technology. They are competitive with similar µarch (five years older) Arm systems.
Price can never be competitive (assuming no deliberate loss-making) until production and sales volumes are similar. Which can't happen until performance matches current Arm and X86 performance -- which RISC-V is converging with quite quickly, certainly by 2030.
While your points are fair, whoever told you those system were “nearly desktop performance” was lying.
That said, this is the year.
The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 (according to the guy who created that Architecture at AMD). It is aimed at servers initially but they say they will release their own silicon sometime in the first half of this year. Even if that is optimistic, sometime this year seems likely. They released the licensable IP last year.
> The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5
Don't set your self up for dissapointment.
Ascalon is supposed to match Zen5 performance per clock, but at 2.5GHz, so will still be at a minimum 2x slower.
Additionally, the announces Ascalon devboard is supposed to be on an older node and have an ever lower frequency due to that. (the 2.5GHz were on SF4X, the devboard may be on something like 12nm)
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.
Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.
The benchmark is well tuned for ARM64 but not so well adapted to RISC-V, especially the vector extensions.
You may still be right of course. The SpaceMIT K3 is exciting because it may still be the first RVA23 hardware but it is not exectly going to launch a RISC-V laptop industry.
I'm not even sure it's just instruction support that's the problem with the RV2. I bought one since I thought it would be cool to write a bare metal os for it (especially after I found the AI results to be so bad.) But the lack of documentation has been making it very hard to get anything actually up and running. The best I've got is compiling their custom u-boot and linux repos, and even those come with some problems.
I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.
Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.
Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.
RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward.
High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.
Indeed. With Ascalon, we will exit this year with RISC-V chips as fast as anything available from ARM themselves (eg. not Qualcomm or Apple Silicon).
The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano.
That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance.
As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.
i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?
The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
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?
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.
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.
Open standards don't mean a thing; you can't execute code on a standard. There are past open ISAs like OpenSPARC, MIPS, and OpenPOWER that never gained any traction.
High performance implementations, i.e. actual chips you can buy, are going to be proprietary and that's not going to change. Engineering hardware is expensive.
I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things
If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.
For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.
And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).
It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.
> Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.
you need to be totally autistic to believe that Chinese vendors are going to share anything meaningful with you. they don't hate you, they want their paying customers to be happy, but the brutal competitions in China doesn't allow them to be open in any sense. For products like RISC-V processors and MCUs, the moat is extremely low, being open leads to quick death. It is not about how much stuff they share with you as paying customer, it is about how much they are willing to share with their competitors when there are hundreds of companies trying everything to survive.
as a developer, you just need to ask yourself a dead simple question - how such risc-v platforms are going to be more open than raspberry pi.
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.
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage
Not sure about the exact percentage but your basic point is valid. Adding "at this stage" makes it hard to argue with you.
> ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases
It may be 100% of use cases today. Facts are facts. You probably need to add "at this stage" again though.
> ARM ... has far more choices on the market
Very much so. Again, today...
That said, it is worth noting that almost all ARM "choices" are licensing the same small number of core designs from ARM. Already there are beginning to be enough RISC-V suppliers that some users may like the RISC-V options better in some niches (see automotive and some edge AI for example).
> ARM ... has ... much better performance
Absolutely. But that may not stay true for long. RISC-V CPUs will appear this year that equal or exceed CPU designs from ARM themselves in performance (eg. Ascalon). And we will see where things go from there. It will be a while before RISC-V beats Apple Silicon of course. And even once RISC-V gets there on performance, ARM may lead on price/performance for a while. That is, until RISC-V volumes start to equal or exceed other ISAs...
> greater software ecosystem and tooling
On the Open Source side at least, this is already a weak point. You can get multiple Linux distributions for RISC-V today, including from critical players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. The Linux kernel has a tonne of dedicated RISC-V support. Even though there are hardly any RISC-V chips with vector extensions in the wild, you already see Open Source packages adding support for these extensions. Both Clang and GCC have great RISC-V support. There are already x86-64 emulation layers for RISC-V. Ecosystems like QEMU support RISC-V. Even niche projects like Haiku OS support RISC-V. And on the hardware side, RISC-V players like Tenstorrent are advancing Open Source tooling and toolkits like crazy. The ecosystem is great now and getting better every day which, given the complete lack of real RISC-V hardware on desktops and servers, shows you how excited the industry is for RISC-V and how much support it is going to get.
Remaining gaps in ecosystem and tooling will close quickly. Starting with the board that we are discussing here, Titan, RISC-V is entering an era of being good enough to actually use. Linux and the universe of software associated with it are going to support RISC-V rather robustly. And while some RISC-V suppliers will follow the ARM path, many RISC-V suppliers are being good about getting support into the Linux mainline.
I expect ecosystem and tooling to be better for RISC-V than for ARM in general (though both will be great).
> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different"
> _false_
False.
Here we disagree. But again, it may mostly be about the percentage. Because most users just want something that runs their software at the highest speed for the lowest price. And see above for how we agree that it will be a few years yet before people that do not otherwise care about RISC-V will find it the best option based on simple price/performance (though I do think that day will come).
But there are many "real" benefits to RISC-V.
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is an ecosystem that cannot be truly dominated by a single player or even by a small few. I wish RISC-V suppliers great success, and many will find niches that make them rich. But the amount of market power they can ever wield is limited by competition. I for one want this to be my future and I cannot wait to get on the train.
This is just my opinion but I think RISC-V is very well designed. I want to build software for the platform. I want to use assembly language on it. It seems much more pleasant than x86-64 and even ARM. This is a big benefit to me.
Similarly, RISC-V as an ISA and an ecosystem will be uniquely scalable. The same basic ISA can be used on the smallest micro-controllers or the most complex AI supercomputers. And it can be used in the support chips every step of the way. The expertise that I acquire using RISC-V will be broadly applicable over space and time.
And, while this is a prediction, RISC-V will have longevity. Suppliers can go out of business. RISC-V is not a supplier. Once it takes hold, it is not going anywhere. Many an ISA has dominated the computing landscape only to be abandoned and forgotten. RISC-V was inspired by MIPS (the ISA) and MIPS workstations used to cost as much as a small house. But now MIPS (the company) is a RISC-V supplier. x86-64 may seem unassailable but ARM has certainly kept it out of many niches and now ARM is starting to be credible on desktops and servers. x86-64 could go away (especially if Intel failed--not impossible). And ARM is very vulnerable to RISC-V (if you ask me). But for RISC-V to go away, there would have to be yet another totally open ISA that the entire world rallied behind. That is not how things generally work. Like Linux, RISC-V is destined to become a natural monopoly in my view and to be with us a very, very, very long time.
And, for now at least, RISC-V is just more interesting. Companies like Tenstorrent are doing really interesting things. Universities are doing interesting work and sharing it with the world. Those two things came together just the other day when RISC-V vector extensions were added to BOOM. It is a fun space to watch and it will be a fun space to be a part of.
And just like every school teaches software in Java, every school is going to teach programming and electronics with RISC-V. It is going to be the default technology in the future. And that means that it will be the go-to for start-ups as well. RISC-V will be the go-to technology for innovation.
Finally, what I will end with is that the real inevitability of RISC-V has nothing to do with users. Companies will choose RISC-V. But not to save a few bucks on ISA licensing like everybody imagines. That may be a benefit but it does that amount of cost is not going to drive most decisions. But the more critical issue with licensing is control.
Take the situation with ARM and Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants to release its own high-performance silicon to compete with the likes of Intel and Apple. They licensed the ARM ISA to do this. And then ARM tried to stop them from releasing this technology over a license dispute. Yes, it was over money (which matters) but the much bigger deal is that ARM (a supplier to Qualcomm) tried to dictate how Qualcomm can run its business. Qualcomm recently bought a prominent high-performance RISC-V designer. I think these facts are related.
If you bet your business on ARM, you better hope that ARM likes your strategy. If they do not, they may try to stop you. Why would Qualcomm want to create a business around ARM if ARM is going to represent a strategic risk like this? Why would Amazon or NVIDIA? Building the same business around RISC-V eliminates that risk. You do not have to ask permission for whatever you do with RISC-V. Nobody can file an injunction on a RISC-V supplier for using RISC-V.
This is why China is so into RISC-V. Even for them, it is not really to save on license costs. It is about reducing legal and geopolitical exposure. US sanctions led to ARM refusing to work with Chinese suppliers like Huawei. The US cannot sanction RISC-V as a technology. Fast forward to today and there are now many, many companies around the world rethinking their exposure to US based technology companies. There is a reason that RISC-V International is based in Switzerland even though RISC-V was invented in California. Europe is investing in home-grown RISC-V solutions. So is India. Tenstorrent came from Canada. Andes is out of Taiwan. It is not just China.
So, no need to downvote. But if you really think RISC-V has no benefits, the next 5 years are really going to confuse you.
Like no UEFI, no PC architecture (every board is different), got to x86 complexity (a miriad of instruction sets and extensions) in just a couple of years, needs a special linux kernel to boot with support for newer versions not planed.
[EDIT: I may be the one with the reading comprehension problem. I think they are saying that ARM having better tooling is a wrong. I agree. I leave my comment to own my shame.]
Did you even bother to click the link that this story was about?
The Milk-V Titan supports UEFI, ACPI, CPPC, and SMBIOS. The board is otherwise bog standard PC architecture from the PCIe to the form factor (ITX). You can boot multiple Linux distros on it out-of-the-box. They are pushing support into the Linux kernel mainline.
The Titan supports RVA22 + virtualization (the H extension) which you could also frame as RVA23 minus the vector extension. Another way of saying RVA23 is to say that it is RISC-V with the same feature set as X86-64 v4. Why did I have to say "v4" when talking about x86? Because of the myriad of extensions offered on x86-64 that differ between v1, v2, v3, and v4.
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.
> 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.
This is basically what I've been waiting on. Besides the mentioned Milk-V Titan, what are some other good boards people here tried out and could vouch for being good? Ideally European, but happy to receive any recommendations as long as you've actually tried it yourself :)
My tinkerings https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115332958192905605 so SpacemiT K1 8 core on BananaPi https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
A number of distros have support for RISC-V: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, QEMU
conda-forge/conda-forge > "RISC-V Support?" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V
Maybe the open/free part will help with slightly better prices.
What a sad world to live in, stochastic bullshit machines and exploding drones get more computers than I
You may know this already, but here's the obligatory clarification. The open/free part is the RISC-V ISA. The actual implementation, the microarchitecture IP, may not be. Most of the higher end RISC-V IPs are proprietary.
It may still have a slight price advantage compared to proprietary ISAs like ARM, due to the latter's ISA licensing costs. But it remains to be seen how much of this advantage will be passed to us, the end users.
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I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
> I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance
No one with any true knowledge of RISC-V would ever make such a claim. Know-nothing marketers might, I suppose, but why would you listen to them rather than to actual insiders?
The current newest RISC-V boards (Megrez and Titan and whatever the upcoming SpacemiT K3 ones are called) are solidly in mid-range Core 2 territory, especially K3 which has SMID/vectors which the other fast chips currently don't.
Older boards using JH7110, TH1520, K1 are closer to Pentium III or PowerPC G4 though with 4 or 8 cores instead of 1, but without an equivalent to the SSE or Altivec SIMD those old, or if they have it with near zero software using it.
Late this year is expected to see RISC-V products with performance in Skylake to Zen 2 performance levels, verging on M1 (M1 IPC but lower MHz).
> they are much slower than similar priced arm systems
Irrelevant to the technology. They are competitive with similar µarch (five years older) Arm systems.
Price can never be competitive (assuming no deliberate loss-making) until production and sales volumes are similar. Which can't happen until performance matches current Arm and X86 performance -- which RISC-V is converging with quite quickly, certainly by 2030.
While your points are fair, whoever told you those system were “nearly desktop performance” was lying.
That said, this is the year.
The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 (according to the guy who created that Architecture at AMD). It is aimed at servers initially but they say they will release their own silicon sometime in the first half of this year. Even if that is optimistic, sometime this year seems likely. They released the licensable IP last year.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rtN8TTGf4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
> The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5
Don't set your self up for dissapointment. Ascalon is supposed to match Zen5 performance per clock, but at 2.5GHz, so will still be at a minimum 2x slower.
Additionally, the announces Ascalon devboard is supposed to be on an older node and have an ever lower frequency due to that. (the 2.5GHz were on SF4X, the devboard may be on something like 12nm)
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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.
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.
> it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support
There are zero SoCs currently available to buy with RVA23 support, so that's not a mark against the RV2 if you want to buy a machine today.
Initial RVA23 machines available later this year are also likely to cost at least 5x to 10x more.
> meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it
There is currently no other hardware you could buy instead that will run that distro.
Check back in April or so, when Ubuntu 26.04 is actually officially released.
NB I'm currently using Ubuntu 26.04 on RVA23 hardware, but it is remote ssh access to a test board at the manufacturer.
Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.
What is the difference in performance?
Titan hw docs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967
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.
> faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5
It may actually be faster than a Pi5.
The benchmark is well tuned for ARM64 but not so well adapted to RISC-V, especially the vector extensions.
You may still be right of course. The SpaceMIT K3 is exciting because it may still be the first RVA23 hardware but it is not exectly going to launch a RISC-V laptop industry.
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> The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
So the main difference between this Milk-V Titan and the upcoming SpacemiT K3 is that the latter has better vector performance?
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> As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi
The SpaceMIT K3 is rumored to be announced at FOSDEM (January 31, 2026)
https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1qdvw4l/k3_x100_a100...
Also at FOSDEM, mainline support for Orange Pi RV2 https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VF9CHG-mainline-suppo...
DeepComputing has announced a SpacemiT K3 based Framework laptop mainboard.
https://deepcomputing.io/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-unveil...
And so it was...
https://milkv.io/jupiter2
I'm not even sure it's just instruction support that's the problem with the RV2. I bought one since I thought it would be cool to write a bare metal os for it (especially after I found the AI results to be so bad.) But the lack of documentation has been making it very hard to get anything actually up and running. The best I've got is compiling their custom u-boot and linux repos, and even those come with some problems.
I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.
Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.
Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.
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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.
RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward. High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.
Indeed. With Ascalon, we will exit this year with RISC-V chips as fast as anything available from ARM themselves (eg. not Qualcomm or Apple Silicon).
The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano.
That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance.
As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.
i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?
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).
The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
RISC-V Vector is roughly equivalent to MMX, SSE, and AVX. A lot of tasks without those instructions are flat out slower without.
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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
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.
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
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Open standards don't mean a thing; you can't execute code on a standard. There are past open ISAs like OpenSPARC, MIPS, and OpenPOWER that never gained any traction.
High performance implementations, i.e. actual chips you can buy, are going to be proprietary and that's not going to change. Engineering hardware is expensive.
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I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things
If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.
For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.
And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).
It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.
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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.
you need to be totally autistic to believe that Chinese vendors are going to share anything meaningful with you. they don't hate you, they want their paying customers to be happy, but the brutal competitions in China doesn't allow them to be open in any sense. For products like RISC-V processors and MCUs, the moat is extremely low, being open leads to quick death. It is not about how much stuff they share with you as paying customer, it is about how much they are willing to share with their competitors when there are hundreds of companies trying everything to survive.
as a developer, you just need to ask yourself a dead simple question - how such risc-v platforms are going to be more open than raspberry pi.
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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.
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“People who care about these things” enough that they’re buying Mini ITX RV motherboards? Definitely well under 1% of the market.
>> 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.
> How is that feeling "false"? People running RISC-V systems are different, or at least they have different motivations than you.
this is like saying being homeless is a lifestyle choice. some people argue that with a passion, I just choose to be kind to those people.
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage.
Agreed. Boards like this are helpful for getting RISC-V to the next stage, where it could make sense for more users.
> please feel free to downvote
Not sure why anybody would downvote your comment
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage
Not sure about the exact percentage but your basic point is valid. Adding "at this stage" makes it hard to argue with you.
> ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases
It may be 100% of use cases today. Facts are facts. You probably need to add "at this stage" again though.
> ARM ... has far more choices on the market
Very much so. Again, today...
That said, it is worth noting that almost all ARM "choices" are licensing the same small number of core designs from ARM. Already there are beginning to be enough RISC-V suppliers that some users may like the RISC-V options better in some niches (see automotive and some edge AI for example).
> ARM ... has ... much better performance
Absolutely. But that may not stay true for long. RISC-V CPUs will appear this year that equal or exceed CPU designs from ARM themselves in performance (eg. Ascalon). And we will see where things go from there. It will be a while before RISC-V beats Apple Silicon of course. And even once RISC-V gets there on performance, ARM may lead on price/performance for a while. That is, until RISC-V volumes start to equal or exceed other ISAs...
> greater software ecosystem and tooling
On the Open Source side at least, this is already a weak point. You can get multiple Linux distributions for RISC-V today, including from critical players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. The Linux kernel has a tonne of dedicated RISC-V support. Even though there are hardly any RISC-V chips with vector extensions in the wild, you already see Open Source packages adding support for these extensions. Both Clang and GCC have great RISC-V support. There are already x86-64 emulation layers for RISC-V. Ecosystems like QEMU support RISC-V. Even niche projects like Haiku OS support RISC-V. And on the hardware side, RISC-V players like Tenstorrent are advancing Open Source tooling and toolkits like crazy. The ecosystem is great now and getting better every day which, given the complete lack of real RISC-V hardware on desktops and servers, shows you how excited the industry is for RISC-V and how much support it is going to get.
Remaining gaps in ecosystem and tooling will close quickly. Starting with the board that we are discussing here, Titan, RISC-V is entering an era of being good enough to actually use. Linux and the universe of software associated with it are going to support RISC-V rather robustly. And while some RISC-V suppliers will follow the ARM path, many RISC-V suppliers are being good about getting support into the Linux mainline.
I expect ecosystem and tooling to be better for RISC-V than for ARM in general (though both will be great).
> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different"
> _false_
False.
Here we disagree. But again, it may mostly be about the percentage. Because most users just want something that runs their software at the highest speed for the lowest price. And see above for how we agree that it will be a few years yet before people that do not otherwise care about RISC-V will find it the best option based on simple price/performance (though I do think that day will come).
But there are many "real" benefits to RISC-V.
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is an ecosystem that cannot be truly dominated by a single player or even by a small few. I wish RISC-V suppliers great success, and many will find niches that make them rich. But the amount of market power they can ever wield is limited by competition. I for one want this to be my future and I cannot wait to get on the train.
This is just my opinion but I think RISC-V is very well designed. I want to build software for the platform. I want to use assembly language on it. It seems much more pleasant than x86-64 and even ARM. This is a big benefit to me.
Similarly, RISC-V as an ISA and an ecosystem will be uniquely scalable. The same basic ISA can be used on the smallest micro-controllers or the most complex AI supercomputers. And it can be used in the support chips every step of the way. The expertise that I acquire using RISC-V will be broadly applicable over space and time.
And, while this is a prediction, RISC-V will have longevity. Suppliers can go out of business. RISC-V is not a supplier. Once it takes hold, it is not going anywhere. Many an ISA has dominated the computing landscape only to be abandoned and forgotten. RISC-V was inspired by MIPS (the ISA) and MIPS workstations used to cost as much as a small house. But now MIPS (the company) is a RISC-V supplier. x86-64 may seem unassailable but ARM has certainly kept it out of many niches and now ARM is starting to be credible on desktops and servers. x86-64 could go away (especially if Intel failed--not impossible). And ARM is very vulnerable to RISC-V (if you ask me). But for RISC-V to go away, there would have to be yet another totally open ISA that the entire world rallied behind. That is not how things generally work. Like Linux, RISC-V is destined to become a natural monopoly in my view and to be with us a very, very, very long time.
And, for now at least, RISC-V is just more interesting. Companies like Tenstorrent are doing really interesting things. Universities are doing interesting work and sharing it with the world. Those two things came together just the other day when RISC-V vector extensions were added to BOOM. It is a fun space to watch and it will be a fun space to be a part of.
And just like every school teaches software in Java, every school is going to teach programming and electronics with RISC-V. It is going to be the default technology in the future. And that means that it will be the go-to for start-ups as well. RISC-V will be the go-to technology for innovation.
Finally, what I will end with is that the real inevitability of RISC-V has nothing to do with users. Companies will choose RISC-V. But not to save a few bucks on ISA licensing like everybody imagines. That may be a benefit but it does that amount of cost is not going to drive most decisions. But the more critical issue with licensing is control.
Take the situation with ARM and Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants to release its own high-performance silicon to compete with the likes of Intel and Apple. They licensed the ARM ISA to do this. And then ARM tried to stop them from releasing this technology over a license dispute. Yes, it was over money (which matters) but the much bigger deal is that ARM (a supplier to Qualcomm) tried to dictate how Qualcomm can run its business. Qualcomm recently bought a prominent high-performance RISC-V designer. I think these facts are related.
If you bet your business on ARM, you better hope that ARM likes your strategy. If they do not, they may try to stop you. Why would Qualcomm want to create a business around ARM if ARM is going to represent a strategic risk like this? Why would Amazon or NVIDIA? Building the same business around RISC-V eliminates that risk. You do not have to ask permission for whatever you do with RISC-V. Nobody can file an injunction on a RISC-V supplier for using RISC-V.
This is why China is so into RISC-V. Even for them, it is not really to save on license costs. It is about reducing legal and geopolitical exposure. US sanctions led to ARM refusing to work with Chinese suppliers like Huawei. The US cannot sanction RISC-V as a technology. Fast forward to today and there are now many, many companies around the world rethinking their exposure to US based technology companies. There is a reason that RISC-V International is based in Switzerland even though RISC-V was invented in California. Europe is investing in home-grown RISC-V solutions. So is India. Tenstorrent came from Canada. Andes is out of Taiwan. It is not just China.
So, no need to downvote. But if you really think RISC-V has no benefits, the next 5 years are really going to confuse you.
> ARM > greater software ecosystem and tooling.
Like no UEFI, no PC architecture (every board is different), got to x86 complexity (a miriad of instruction sets and extensions) in just a couple of years, needs a special linux kernel to boot with support for newer versions not planed.
Yeah, great software, great tooling. /s
[EDIT: I may be the one with the reading comprehension problem. I think they are saying that ARM having better tooling is a wrong. I agree. I leave my comment to own my shame.]
Did you even bother to click the link that this story was about?
The Milk-V Titan supports UEFI, ACPI, CPPC, and SMBIOS. The board is otherwise bog standard PC architecture from the PCIe to the form factor (ITX). You can boot multiple Linux distros on it out-of-the-box. They are pushing support into the Linux kernel mainline.
The Titan supports RVA22 + virtualization (the H extension) which you could also frame as RVA23 minus the vector extension. Another way of saying RVA23 is to say that it is RISC-V with the same feature set as X86-64 v4. Why did I have to say "v4" when talking about x86? Because of the myriad of extensions offered on x86-64 that differ between v1, v2, v3, and v4.
Honestly, what the hell are you talking about?
Another chip without V extension.
Sadly yes. This should all be behind us soon.
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