Comment by fresh_broccoli

20 days ago

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The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it.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.

17 comments

fresh_broccoli

Reply
brucehoult  14 days ago

> it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support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.

camel-cdr  20 days ago

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.

  • LeFantome  17 days ago

    > 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.

    • camel-cdr  17 days ago

      There isn't much to tune in some, e.g. the clang benchmark. We know that many of the benchmarks already have RVV support (compare BPI-F3 results between versions) and three are still missing RVV support. I think the optimized score would be in the 500s, but that's still a lot lower than Pi5.

  • kombine  20 days ago

    > 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?

    • snvzz  19 days ago

      The K3 is able to run RVA23 code, the Titan is not; it lacks V.

      It matters, as the ecosystem settled on RVA23 as the baseline for application processors.

      1 reply →

LeFantome  17 days ago

> 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...

Cieric  20 days ago

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.

api  20 days ago

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.