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RISC-V Laptop now available
- tromp 4y ago> weighing 1.7 kg (3.7 pounds), it’s definitely at the thinner and lighter end of the market, Seems more like medium weight to me; hoping that's due to a large battery. > Battery life is rated at 10 hours. Oops, apparently not. Still, cool to see RISC-V in a laptop.
- viraptor 4y agoBattery weight depends on capacity, not rated life. Kind of nitpicky, but this really depends on how the power management works on this platform. It could just be really inefficient right now. (especially since we don't have systems really optimised for it yet)
- downrightmike 4y ago$1,499 base, $4,999 Premium. The point of RISC is cheap. and the specs don't warrant $500.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoNo, the point of RISC (and RISC-V) has nothing to do with cheap. The _point_ of RISC-V is freedom [to use, implement, etc] and a rallying point (no need for everyone to re-implement the whole SW eco-system if that's not the main point of the implementation).
- aliqot 4y agoRISC is good
- brucehoult 4y agoThe specs are better than the first 15" Core 2 Duo MacBookPro for $1999 in 2006 (when a dollar was worth a lot more). CPU probably similar (but four cores not two) and everything else ... RAM, disk, GPU ... far better.
- indemnity 4y agoOk, but it's 2022, and you can get a pretty much best in class laptop (M2 MacBook Air) for $1199, and it likely wipes the floor with this effort. "Freedom" at any price though, I guess.
- theflyingelvis 4y agoSeems like a risk to me
- thebetatester 4y agoBa dum tss
- f1shy 4y agoOh the name of that linux distro: "Anolis". Does not say if based on debian. I wonder if the user will be able to change the distro, or the drivers will be somehow fix with the distro.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoCentos based.
- thom_ 4y agoNeat to see a RISC V laptop but they must be smoking crack if they think I’m paying $1500 for the privilege of recompiling my operating system really, really slowly. And the 5k option is outright predatory. Someone needs to protect the vulnerable enthusiast market (you know who I’m referring to) from this kind of pricing. Ask a fair price. It’s an $800 laptop, maxed out.
- smoldesu 4y agoIt's a small-batch release of extremely-enthusiast hardware for a very niche segment of customers. They could charge $10,000 a pop and probably have no problem selling out. There are cheap RISC-V dev boards if you want to use them, but this is mostly evidently not that. These people wanted to see if they could build a fairly decent 'all-in' RISC-V machine, and it looks like they did.
- melony 4y agoWait till you hear about the Talos POWER-architecture computers https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/
- selfhoster11 4y agoTALOS at least has a reason to exist, as eye-wateringly expensive as it is.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoHow is Talos any different? Just POWER vs RISC-V
- selfhoster11 4y agoTalos makes it harder to backdoor the machine, because it’s radically open. An average RISC-V or ARM machine still contains various blobs and design compromises that make it harder to know that your code (or at least, code reviewed by you/the community at large) is the only thing running on the machine. I wouldn’t recommend Talos to anyone who doesn’t have the need for it (and vast pockets to match), but I wish every ARM and RISC-V machine could be as open and trustable.
- KeyBoardG 4y agoWas this article written by a bot fed input from the marketing team? Such short, choppy, and malformed sentences reads as fake.
- sitzkrieg 4y agolikely machine translated from a release spec
- MisterTea 4y ago> It can support up to 16GB LPDDR4 or 4X RAM 4X RAM? And is the RAM socketed or soldered? > 4 TOPS NPU and an Imagination Technologies GPU Drivers are open source for both or are we stuck with vendor kernel images or some other garbage? How easy will it be to port Open/Net/FreeBSD or another OS? > The Roma is available from Alibaba (opens in new tab) as a basic package for $1,499 I have a better idea: Buy a mnt reform.
- rjsw 4y agoThe StarFive JH7110 that is going into the Star64 board [1] also has an Imagination Technologies GPU, there have been statements that there is going to be an open source driver for it. [1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/STAR64 https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/STAR64
- sudosysgen 4y agoI think they mean either lpddr4 or lpddr4x.
- Kukumber 4y agoI was interested in buying one until i saw the price.. "The Roma as a basic package for $1,499" Overpriced, or better, why is the price so high?
- boricj 4y agoThe small production run coupled with the price suggests that it's basically an evaluation board in a laptop form factor. As-is, it's probably mostly of use for people that want to hack on RISC-V (operating systems, ports, application development...) with a hardware target that can also act as a standalone host computer for said hacking on the go.
- rjsw 4y agoThe Pinebook Pro is basically an evaluation board in a laptop form factor.
- smoldesu 4y agoThe Pinebook Pro uses off-the-shelf A53 cores that have existed for over a decade.
- snvzz 4y ago... which are significantly slower than the U74 present in the JH7110 SoC. As Star64 is a thing, I am hopeful a Pinebook refresh will be RISC-V.
- rjsw 4y agoIt also has two A72 cores. My point was that you can get a board built into a nice laptop in Shenzhen for a lot less than the cost of the one in the linked article.
- foobarian 4y agoAnd that, in a nutshell, is why we can't have nice things.
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- snvzz 4y ago$1500... hell no. VisionFive2[0] w/JH7110, U74x4 @ 1.5GHz, 8GB, 2x GbE, M.2 slot, pi-like gpio header, is less than $100, and thus a much more cost efficient way to get started with RISC-V. 0. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2
- leke 4y agoSweet. Imagine if you could put that in a laptop, like you would change motherboards in a PC. Then when the specs get dated, you can switch it out for the next best thing while reusing the original hardware.
- heywire 4y agoLike the Framework laptop?
- snvzz 4y agoNot that one. The relevant specs aren't open / prevent third party motherboards, cases, etc. What the world needs is something like ATX or ITX specs, but for laptops. Then anyone can make laptops/cases/boards/psus/otherparts.
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- go_elmo 4y agoPaired with linux, an ode to joy
- snvzz 4y agoThat'd be nice, but having a standard form factor for swappable motherboards in laptops is a very separate problem than having cheap boards with RISC-V at all.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
- sylware 4y agoGoing forward... don't forget the road will be long and harsh for risc-v.
- marssaxman 4y agoSounds like progress. I don't need a RISC-V laptop badly enough to spend $1500 on this one, but I'm glad to see a shrinking delta between my desires and the market's offerings.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoOkay, honestly for all that I wouldn't go for it myself, $1500 doesn't seem super bad for what it is. It's got 4 cores with a decent clock speed and 16GB of RAM, and it's a completely novel system that's not mass-market. The first RISC-V laptop isn't going to benefit from economies of scale; dev boards are barely starting to get there.
- lvass 4y ago>There's a dedicated security chip onboard And thus, the newest laptop without an Intel ME equivalent is still around 14 years old.
- opan 4y agoWhat about the Pinebook Pro or MNT Reform or new MacBooks? I know TrustZone is a thing, but heard it's not really the same and also not used in every SoC. Also, The Asus C201 Chromebook has Libreboot support, it's not just old ThinkPads.
- snvzz 4y ago>There's a dedicated security chip onboard That isn't bad per-se. It's about what runs in that chip. It might simply be available to you to run whatever code you want, or just leave permanently off.
- ha-ckernews 4y agoWhy would someone buy this? Honest question, not asking it to make a point or be snarky.
- viraptor 4y agoIf you're really bullish on RISC-V as a developer, it may be a valid investment. Or if you already develop for RISC-V machines and it would be convenient to test binaries locally, instead of doing some kind of remote/emulated dev.
- IYasha 4y agoDoen't have detachable battery, DRM PU onboard, no mouse keys... But still with Windows(r)(tm)(fu) logo on the meta-key? :D
- mobiclick 4y agoMy problem with this laptop isn't with it's pricing but with who's selling it. If it was Asus or some other reputable OEM, I think I would have bought it. I've had extremely poor experiences with some Chinese OEMs in the past and I'm not risking 1500 with unproven OEMs unless I have to.
- bartimus 4y agoBut this is of course less about trying to create a competitive laptop and more about China attempting to become technologically independent. Having the ability to mass produce something entirely within their own soil. Pardon the politics.
- poulpy123 4y agoInteresting to see china develop its own processors. I don't know much about RISC-V or other processor, beside the openness what are the drawbacks and advantages ?
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