This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn’t meant for laptop use.
Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn’t need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.
Pine64 also has the Star64 as will, in 4GB and 8GB for $70 and $90 respectively. They’re not exactly hard to find.
If I was developing for RISC-V, I’d buy one of those SBCs, not a Framework laptop. But it’s cool that it exists, I suppose.
You don’t need a laptop to use a framework mainboard, they run without battery and display and everything. So if you have a Framework 13 or are in the market for one this might actually be a very nice thing, especially if the price is comparable to other boards.
Love this. I don’t know much about risc-v but I’d love to see it disrupt the market a bit.
Sadly this is just a dev kit. It has soldered memory and only works with emmc storage
RISC-V still has a ways to go before it usable for much.
Its usable for much now… Just not as a daily driver laptop. It is good for embedded applications now, but not quire there for phone or laptop use. Maybe one day.
Google is certainly planning on it being viable.
They’ve been merging RISC-V support in Android and have documented the minimum extensions over the base ISA that must be implemented for Android certification
I was hoping to use it for a NAS (just storage and retrieval), but board selection was limited and I wasn’t ready to gamble on something like a USB-C enclosure. It would theoretically be a great fit, hopefully it gets there soon.
Now imagine we only had Windows and no one would create such thing because Windows and it’s programs does not have support.
When the first person opens their new laptop:
“RISC architecture is going to change everything”
This board also has soldered memory and uses MicroSD cards and eMMC for storage, both of which are limitations of the processor.
Ah, yeah, hard no from me dog. Can we get one of the new Snapdragons tho? Please?
Qualcomm and Broadcom are the two biggest reasons you don’t own your devices any more. That is the last option anyone that cares about ownership should care about. You should expect an orphaned kernel just like all their other mobile garbage. Qualcomm is like the Satan of hardware manufacturers. The world would be a much better place if Qualcomm and Broadcom were not in it at all.
What did they do ? I thought all processor are following standards hence I am running Linux on my Intel or AMD CPU.
All their hardware documentation is locked under NDA nothing is publicly available about the hardware at the hardware registers level.
For instance, the base Android system AOSP is designed to use Linux kernels that are prepackaged by Google. These kernels are well documented specifically for manufacturers to add their hardware support binary modules at the last possible moment in binary form. These modules are what makes the specific hardware work. No one can update the kernel on the device without the source code for these modules. As the software ecosystem evolves, the ancient orphaned kernel creates more and more problems. This is the only reason you must buy new devices constantly. If the hardware remained undocumented publicly while just the source code for modules present on the device was merged with the kernel, the device would be supported for decades. If the hardware was documented publicly, we would write our own driver modules and have a device that is supported for decades.
This system is about like selling you a car that can only use gas that was refined prior to your purchase of the vehicle. That would be the same level of hardware theft.
The primary reason governments won’t care or make effective laws against orphaned kernels is because the bleeding edge chip foundries are the primary driver of the present economy. This is the most expensive commercial endeavor in all of human history. It is largely funded by these devices and the depreciation scheme.
That is both sides of the coin, but it is done by stealing ownership from you. Individual autonomy is our most expensive resource. It can only be bought with blood and revolutions. This is the primary driver of the dystopian neofeudalism of the present world. It is the catalyst that fed the sharks that have privateered (legal piracy) healthcare, home ownership, work-life balance, and democracy. It is the spark of a new wave of authoritarianism.
Before the Google “free” internet (ownership over your digital person to exploit and manipulate), all x86 systems were fully documented publicly. The primary reason AMD exists is because we (the people) were so distrusting over these corporations stealing and manipulating that governments, militaries, and large corporations required second sourcing of chips before purchasing with public funds. We knew that products as a service - is a criminal extortion scam, way back then. AMD was the second source for Intel and produced the x86 chips under license. It was only after that when they recreated an instructions compatible alternative from scratch. There was a big legal case where Intel tried to claim copyright over their instruction set, but they lost. This created AMD. Since 2012, both Intel and AMD have proprietary code. This is primarily because the original 8086 patents expired. Most of the hardware could be produced anywhere after that. In practice there are only Intel, TSMC, and Samsung on bleeding edge fab nodes. Bleeding edge is all that matters. The price is extraordinary to bring one online. The tech it requires is only made once for a short while. The cutting edge devices are what pays for the enormous investment, but once the fab is paid for, the cost to continue running one is relatively low. The number of fabs within a node is carefully decided to try and accommodate trailing edge node demand. No new trailing edge nodes are viable to reproduce. There is no store to buy fab node hardware. As soon as all of a node’s hardware is built by ASML, they start building the next node.
But if x86 has proprietary, why is it different than Qualcomm/Broadcom - no one asked. The proprietary parts are of some concern. There is an entire undocumented operating system running in the background of your hardware. That’s the most concerning. The primary thing that is proprietary is the microcode. This is basically the power cycling phase of the chip, like the order that things are given power, and the instruction set that is available. Like how there are not actual chips designed for most consumer hardware. The dies are classed by quality and functionality and sorted to create the various products we see. Your slower speed laptop chip might be the same as a desktop variant that didn’t perform at the required speed, power is connected differently, and it becomes a laptop chip.
When it comes to trending hardware, never fall for the Apple trap. They design nice stuff, but on the back end, Apple always uses junky hardware, and excellent in house software to make up the performance gap. They are a hype machine. The only architecture that Apple has used and hasn’t abandoned because it went defunct is x86. They used MOS in the beginning. The 6502 was absolute trash compared to the other available processors. It used a pipeline trick to hack twice the actual clock speed because they couldn’t fab competitive quality chips. They were just dirt cheap compared to the competition. Then it was Motorola. Then Power PC. All of these are now irrelevant. The British group that started Acorn sold the company right after RISC-V passed the major hurtle of getting past Berkeley’s ownership grasp. It is a slow moving train, like all hardware, but ARM’s days are numbered. RISC-V does the same fundamental thing without the royalty. There is a ton of hype because ARM is cheap and everyone is trying to grab the last treasure chests they can off the slow sinking ship. In 10 years it will be dead in all but old legacy device applications. RISC-V is not a guarantee of a less proprietary hardware future, but ARM is one of the primary cornerstones blocking end user ownership. They are enablers for thieves; the ones opening your front door to let the others inside. Even the beloved raspberry pi is a proprietary market manipulation and control scheme. It is not actually open source at the registers level and it is priced to prevent the scale viability of a truly open source and documented alternative. The chips are from a failed cable TV tuner box, and they are only made in a trailing edge fab when the fab has no other paid work. They are barely above cost and a tax write off, thus the “foundation” and dot org despite selling commercial products.
This is not written by ChatGPT right?
Edit: ok don’t kill me, it was so long :/
Doubt it, after reading it myself it is nowhere as calculated and artificial as ChatGPT output
It is a pretty good read though.
At the point you want to upgrade this chip swapping out the entire SOC including the RAM is likely a better option.
Could someone eli5 risc-v and why the fuss?
Edit: thanks for the replies. Searchingnfurther, this 15 min video is quite well made and told me more than I need to know (for now) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps0JFsyX2fU
Not an eli5 because I’m still not caught up on it but if my memory serves, RISC-V is an open source architecture for processors, basically like amd64 or arm64, actually I’m pretty sure ARM’s chips are RISC derivatives.
Edit: correcting my comment, ARM makes RISC chips, not RISC-V
ARM = Advanced RISC Machine
However, RISC-V is specific type of RISC and ARM is not a derivative of RISC-V but of RISC.
ARM and RISC-V are entirely different in that neither one is based on the other, but what they have in common is that they’re both RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architectures. RISC is what makes ARM CPUs (in your phone, etc) so efficient and hopefully RISC-V will get there too.
x86 by comparison is Complex Instruction Set Computing, which allows for more performance in some cases, but isn’t as efficient.
Arm’s chips are not RISC-V derivatives.
Yup, they’re RISC chips (few instructions), but RISC-V is a separate product line.
It’s not just a separate product line. It’s a different architecture. Not made by the same companies either, so ARM aren’t involved at all. It’s actually a competitor to ARM64.
Exactly. That’s what I meant by “different product line,” like how Honda makes both cars and motorcycles, they may share similar underlying concepts (e.g. combustion engines), but they’re separate things entirely.
And since RISC-V is open source, the discussion about companies is irrelevant. AMD could make RISC-V chips if it wants, and they do make ARM chips. Same company, three different product lines. Intel also makes ARM chips, so the same is true for them.
Since when did AMD make ARM chips? Also they aren’t as different as a motorcycle and a car. It’s more like compression ignition vs spark ignition. They are largely used in the same applications (or might be in the future), although some specific use cases work better with one or the other. Much like how cars can use either petrol or diesel, but say a large ship is better to use compression ignition and a motorcycle to use spark ignition.
At least 10 years now, and they’re preparing to make ARM PC chips.
Also they aren’t as different as a motorcycle and a car. It’s more like compression ignition vs spark ignition.
I tried to keep it relatively simple. They have different use cases like cars vs motorcycles, and those use cases tend to lead to different focuses. We can compare in multiple ways:
X86 like motorcycle:
- more torque (higher clock speeds, better IPC)
- single or dual rider - fewer, faster cores
- less complicated (less stuff on the SOC), but more intricate (more pipelining)
ARM like motorcycle:
- simpler engine - less pipelining, smaller area, less complex cooling
- simpler accessories - the engine is a SOC, but you can attach a sidecar (coprocessor) or trailer, but your options are pretty limited (unlike x86 where a lot of stuff is still outside the CPU, but that’s changing)
The engines (microarch) aren’t that different, but they target different types of customers. You could throw a big motorcycle engine into a car, and maybe put a small car engine into a motorcycle, but it’s not going to work as well. So the form factor (ISA) is the main difference here.
But yeah, diesel vs gasoline is also a descent example, but that kind of begs the question as to where RISC-V fits in (in my example, it would be a diy engine kit, where it can scale from motorcycles to cars to trucks to ships, if you pick the right pieces).
RISC-V (pronounced risk five), is a Free open-source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Other well established ISA like x86, amd64 (Intel and AMD) and ARM, are proprietary and therefore, one must pay every expensive licenses to design and build a processor using these architectures. You don’t need to pay a license to build a RISC-V processor, you only need to follow the specifications. That doesn’t mean the CPU design is also free, no, they stay very much the closed property of the designer, but RISC-V represents non the less, a very big step towards more transparency and technology freedom.
Isn’t it possible to add custom instructions and locking others from them, leading back to the current ARM situation?
The instruction set is a tiny part of the overall CPU architecture. You don’t need to lock it as everything else is proprietary: manufacturing, cores, electric design, etc. Most RISC-V processors today use ARM cores and are subject to ARM licensing.
arm first stood for acorn RISC machine
one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops
RISC-V
Any information on the GPU they are pairing with it?
Does anyone know if it’s possible to use a regular AMD or Nvidia GPU with it?
This is not for someone to daily drive. You’ll probably get better performance duct taping and raspberry pi to Bluetooth keyboard and 7 inch pi display.
haha, that doesn’t answer the question at all. But I appreciate you.
It does actually.
Edit: It’s an article about how a company is going to assist in providing RISC 5 dev boards to framework. It’s not about a consumer ready product with a dedicated GPU.
