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A new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing
- prettyStandard 2y agosomeday, frame.work is going to break my heart.
- COGlory 2y agoWhat is awesome is that I can pick up one of these and put it in my existing Framework 13.
- jballanc 2y agoYes! I don't currently have a Framework 13, but this is making it reeeallly hard to hold out any longer. Yes, upgrading parts instead of buying a whole new laptop is more economical, and more environmentally friendly, but I think the real killer feature is that it has the potential to democratize new ideas around computer architecture. It sort of reminds me when you actually had a choice of whether you would set up a Token Ring or Ethernet network, before the option was taken away by the overwhelming ossification of existing hardware.
- freedomben 2y agoI've had three FW 13s (a first-gen for myself, a second-gen for my wife, and a third-gen for myself) and I suspect you will be pretty happy with it. What OS do you plan to run?
- jballanc 2y agoWe're getting a factory seconds one for my son (he loves to tinker, so the fact that it'll need various upgrades is a feature, not a bug). If I were to get one for work, I'd likely start with Ubuntu, but I've really been looking for an excuse to run Nix for my main dev machine.
- jarbus 2y ago> We’re excited to share a preview of a Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard with a new CPU architecture today, and it’s probably not the one you think it is. Hahaha. Really curious if they’ll announce a snapdragon x elite board. I love the idea of RISC-V long term, but would love an X Elite board for the near future.
- freedomben 2y agoI think that would be cool too, and I would guess is in the oven currently, though personally I'm much more excited about RISC-V. Not for what it is today, but for what it can be tomorrow.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI do wonder about the future of RISC-V, I mean it has been coming for almost 10 years now and still has a long way to go. But you could say the same thing about ARM in the 90's/early 2000's. Looks like nothing much and then suddenly it is everywhere.
- snvzz 2y ago>Looks like nothing much and then suddenly it is everywhere Already happened. 10+ billion cores already shipped as of RISC-V Summit in December 2022. Assume a much higher number by now. What's new is the general developer/enthusiast visibility we're starting to see. For ARM that was Raspberry Pi. For RISC-V, the "Raspberry Pi" moment was the release of VisionFive 2, in January 2023, using this same JH7110 SoC. There are better SoCs now, and SBCs using them e.g. spacemiT K1, in Banana Pi BPi-F3. That chip has 8 cores that implement RVA22 with Vector extension. In contrast, JH7110 has only 4 cores, they are slower, and they only implement RVA20, which is essentially RISC-V as of the original user and supervisor specs ratified in late 2019. It makes little sense today, as RISC-V and its ecosystem have advanced considerably.
- DaoVeles 2y agoSorry just caught up with this.. 10 billion cores! That is astounding. I remember when Intel passed the 1 billion processor mark in early 2000's and that took them about 25 years to do. It will only be a matter of time until the performance starts to catch up. I have seen many argue that "it will never catch up" but I have heard that before for many ISA's over the years.
- marius_k 2y agoI did not expect RISC-V to be ahead of ARM for framework. Is this is because of freedoms RISC-V brings for manufacturers?
- CarVac 2y agoOr because it's basically a way for a board maker to have a laptop form factor available for their device. It's a way for other companies to piggyback off of Framework rather than the other way around, while strengthening the Framework ecosystem.
- freedomben 2y agoThat's my perception as well. TFA is clear this is a partner-driven thing, so I suspect DeepComputing drove most of this (obviously with some collaboration from FW though). Win/win for all involved! It's great to see partner ecosystem developing! Framework is such an exciting company.
- rjsw 2y agoMaybe just the availability and maturity of that particular SoC, the PineTab-V tablet uses the same one. An obvious ARM SoC to use in a laptop is the RK3588.
- ryukafalz 2y ago> An obvious ARM SoC to use in a laptop is the RK3588. Yup, I've got the RK3588 module preordered for my Reform and I'm looking forward to it. Would be neat to see an RK3588 board for the Framework too.
- binary132 2y agoNothing wrong with a little hype-chasing.
- bangaladore 2y agoAn end goal of targeting RISC-V is better for everyone than targeting ARM or x86. No licensing fees, manufacturers could design their own silicon and be completely royalty free, etc... Right now we are nowhere near that. RISC-V software and hardware is not very mature at all. But much of this can change very quickly once products launch.
- loughnane 2y agoPractically speaking, what am I going to be able to do w/ a risc v board? I imagine a ton of software will have problems with it, at least for now.
- antonly 2y agoI think part of the point is to find that problematic software, and contribute patches to make it work (or whatever you do for closed source software). In my mind this is a board to legitimise early adopters' requests, so that they can say "hey, this doesn't run on this very real laptop from a brand that you may have heard of". I think this is a crucial step on the way to getting an actually good experience on RISC-V based platforms.
- chrisldgk 2y agoIt’s not super practical yet, a lot of software won’t run on it and they even write in the article that processing power wise it will probably be worse than their x86 counterparts. As they write in the article, the point is to make developing for RISC-V more accessible so that it can find wider adoption and get over those hurdles at some point to become more mainstream.
- nrp 2y agoWe’re being deliberate on positioning this as a Mainboard for enabling developers and tinkerers, not a consumer-ready product. As other commenters noted, the idea is to help accelerate the maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem to prepare it for consumer access in the future.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoHow much involvement did framework have in this becoming a thing? I'm asking because I want to get a feel for how long a decent (probably third-party) ARM mainboard might take.
- freedomben 2y agoTFA does say they've been working with Red Hat and Canonical to ensure a good base experience. I'm planning to buy one to run Fedora, knowing that a lot of packages may not be available, but hopefully enough so that I can build my own software on it and ship RISC-V binaries/packages. Currently I'm using qemu for that, but for someone who doesn't live and breath qemu it's an uphill battle.
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- SushiHippie 2y agoThis sounds really great, I hope that some day we will get an alternative to x86 that is not ARM. The new ARM processors like Snapdragon X elite and the M processors from apple sound promising, but I don't know what I should think about the company "ARM". Though what I find a bit weird is that this board only has 4 cores, as this is intended for developers which probably need to compile many things which could benefit from more cores.
- MobiusHorizons 2y agoI think performance of that chip is maybe raspberry pi 3 levels. I expect it will be painfully slow. Still cool as a technology demonstrator though Edit: looks like Jeff Geerling tested this same SOC in the vision 5, TLDR; slightly slower than a pi 3B+ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/risc-v-business-testing-starfives-visionfive-2-sbc https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/risc-v-business-testi...
- SushiHippie 2y ago> Still cool as a technology demonstrator though Yes that's for sure, and it's amazing that Framework created this, so people which already have a Framework 13 could easily swap their mainboard. But slower than a pi 3b+ is a bummer, I'm not the target audience for it, but I think this may be a show stopper for developers who want to port software to risc-v and use it for testing. Or at least it would not be a great experience (apart from all the other problems you'll have with a relatively "new" ISA like risc-v)
- gregwtmtno 2y agoI have a Framework 13, and I'm excited about this. I've been looking forward to moving to RISC-V for years now. I'm one of those weirdos who is willing to pay more for less performance. I guess they know their customers.
- kibwen 2y agoThere are dozens of us! As far as I'm concerned, CPUs were Fast Enough as of 20 years ago, it's time to start shifting our priorities.
- vaylian 2y agoI'm curious how battery life is. Please report back once you have done some field testing!
- roughly 2y agoHey, y’all weirdos are the ones who pave the way for the rest of us. I’m not going to buy this - I’ve got a large enough hobby project graveyard to know where I sit on the customer/nerd spectrum, but I’m stoked it exists. I like the idea of RISC-V, and the easier it is for people to develop on it, the closer it comes to being useable by upright apes like me.
- justin_kempton 2y agoI also have a Framework 13! About a year ago or more I put out a request to get an ARM based processor. My reasons being the battery life on x86 are so weak, it almost defeats the mobility aspect of a laptop. I was using linux, and spent far too much time tweaking settings to get the longest battery life possible. When I compared this to a MBPro with the M1, which I use for work, it became nearly impossible to get my mind off of it. Arm processors are way better with battery. There are these new Snapdragon X Elite Laptops, which verify the better battery life. I think to be competitive with Apple, the battery life must improve. Also, the speakers are weak, likely due to none glued construction. I can live with that. Love how easy it is to swap stuff out. Screen is awesome, would love OLED if possible. Also, the bigger size 16, would better fit my needs. Currently that computer is sitting on a shelf. Very cool technology. Love Framework!
- bogwog 2y agoThis is interesting, but it'll have a JH7110 and microsd for storage, so it's basically just a RISC-V SBC but in a Framework mainboard form-factor. SBCs with that specific processor seem to be pretty cheap, like the Milk-V Mars which is selling for around $40 currently. The idea of a RISC-V laptop sounds cool, but this feels like just grabbing a raspberry pi and sticking it in a laptop chasis. It doesn't seem like this is going to really offer anything new in this space other than maybe some increased visibility for RISC-V (esp. if Linus Tech Tips covers it), and a neat project/option for people with existing Framework parts. As far as development purposes, I don't see what this offers over an existing SBC or even just a VM. From what I've seen of people running Linux on these things, it is definitely not something you'd want to develop on... plus, it seems like DeepCompute sells their own RISC-V laptops which are (probably) more powerful than this thing: https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-riscv-laptop-ii-with-octa-core-cpu https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-riscv-laptop...
- pikminguy 2y agoI think visibility is probably the primary goal which is not a bad thing. As for actual use the potential lies in the modularity. You could work primarily from an x86 laptop but swap the RISK-V board in for testing. And whichever board isn't currently in the laptop can be even be loaded into the small desktop shell Framework makes. If the price is right an existing Framework user could possibly get a RISC-V machine for less money than one of the dedicated laptops from DeepCompute without needing to buy another screen, keyboard, battery, etc and end up with a better build quality to boot.
- rbanffy 2y agoWhat if, with the space you have for the motherboard, you add not one SoC but, say, seven, all connected through an in-PCB network. One has the external ports while all others are headless. A small cluster in the shape of a laptop.
- bee_rider 2y agoThis would be super cool. I don’t know if it would have any actual use in industry. But it would be really neat for people learning MPI/cluster computing. He said, while waiting for a run to go through SLURM.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoWonder if the price will be hundreds or thousands?
- nrp 2y agoThe Mainboard itself is going to be a lot more accessible than you (apparently) think! We'll have more to share on pricing as we progress with DeepComputing on the program.
- rbanffy 2y agoIs it too late to suggest a cluster of JH7110's on a single board? Each SoC has 2 GbE interfaces, so it could even be two networks to make everything speedier.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago> it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkerers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating on RISC-V. The peripheral set and performance aren’t yet competitive with our Intel and AMD-powered Framework Laptop Mainboards. This board also has soldered memory and uses MicroSD cards and eMMC for storage Not for me, but I will absolutely switch over to the first board that is consumer-focused, assuming it is competitive on performance and battery life.
- Arcuru 2y agoThe "first ever partner-developed Mainboard" is a huge win for Framework! Congrats!
- nrp 2y agoThis is definite validation of our product philosophy, and we're using this partnership to help develop documentation and processes to make it easier to support more partners in the future.
- llm_trw 2y agoI've bought three framework laptops. Please make more weird partnerships. I'd love to have a pen tablet color E-Ink screen with a mechanical keyboard on a 13 inch laptop.
- DaSHacka 2y agoA laptop with an e-ink screen option would be totally neat for those of us that consume primarily text-based content
- skyyler 2y agoIt's pretty rad to see! I think my next laptop is going to have to be a Framework, once I can afford it ahaha This 2015 Macbook Pro is getting rather dated.
- camel-cdr 2y agoHonestly, I'm not sure another JH7110 device is a good thing for RISC-V publicity. Couldn't they have waited another year? Since it's framework, there will be a decent bunch of people buying this, that will be very disappointed. > This Mainboard is extremely compelling, but we want to be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkerers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating on RISC-V. The peripheral set and performance aren’t yet competitive with our Intel and AMD-powered Framework Laptop Mainboards Good that they acknowledge it, but that is putting the performance difference very very lightly. > DeepComputing is demoing an early prototype of this Mainboard in a Framework Laptop 13 at the RISC-V Summit Europe next week, and we’ll be sharing more as this program progresses. I'll definitely check it out.
- snvzz 2y ago>Honestly, I'm not sure another JH7110 device is a good thing for RISC-V publicity. Hard agree. Not with spacemiT K1 (8 core, faster, RVA22 + Vector) already in devices on-sale. I have had a JH7110 board (VisionFive 2) since January 2023. It was nice at the time. Now it's aging, with only RVA20 and no Vector extension. RISC-V is moving really fast.
- minetest2048 2y agoThis makes me wonder, if I want to design my own Framework mainboard, where can I get the specs? What's the minimum viable connectors and peripherals?
- nrp 2y agoWe have a set of documentation on GitHub: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13 https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13 We're using this program with DeepComputing to help develop our Mainboard documentation further as well.
- repelsteeltje 2y agoI think you'll find it here: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tre...
- ravetcofx 2y agoDo you have any experience in this? I've been wanting to work on an open board with someone that would use a pi or Nvidia Jetson compute module
- 0x7cfe 2y agoSpeaking about Jetson, Turing Pi developed an RK1 board that is pin compatible with Jetson, and is based on a Rockchip 3588. Recently its 6TOPS NPU got a first class Linux support. Unfortunately, no Vulkan atm. It would be a really interesting option as a Framework mainboard. Unfortunately, Framework 13" has rather tight constraints on mainboard geometry. Relevant links: https://turingpi.com/product/turing-rk1/?attribute_ram=16+GB https://turingpi.com/product/turing-rk1/?attribute_ram=16+GB https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240612-6-10-rocket-v1-0-060e48eea250@tomeuvizoso.net/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240612-6-10-rocket-v1-0-060e4... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocket-Rockchip-NPU-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocket-Rockchip-NPU-Driver
- autoexecbat 2y agoI find it really surprising that SiFive doesn't come out with their own edition of this but with the latest cores, rather than a 3rd party with an old u74
- brucehoult 2y agoJust like Arm, SiFive licenses CPU cores to chip designers, they don't make chips or products using them themselves. Except expensive eval boards in very low volume, aimed at letting people who are licensing their cores to build a chip get a head start on software development while their own chip is under development -- much like Arm's $10,000 dev boards: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/arm/V2M-JUNO-0317D/7400345 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/arm/V2M-JUNO-0317...
- tsuru 2y agoI'm not finding this in the tech specs so far... Does it support RVV? If so is its version post-1.0 or pre-1.0?
- camel-cdr 2y agoIt doesn't, it's the same SOC as in the VisionFive 2.
- cge 2y agoWhile Framework's blog post and their marketplace don't have a photo of the mainboard, Deep Computing's press release [1] does. Given the "DC-ROMA" name for the mainboard from DC, and their DC-ROMA laptop (not DC-ROMA II) which seems to have similar specs, I would guess that this is essentially the mainboard of that laptop, in Framework form. For context on price, DC is selling the full laptop for $300. While it's a niche product, it is great to see other companies actually developing components for the Framework platform, and more, more diverse options for components starting to appear. Yes, as people point out, this product doesn't make much sense for many people, but it doesn't have to: part of the advantage of this platform is that components don't need to appeal to a wide customer base. We are also starting to see this now with the two screen options, the speakers (choice between louder or more accurate), etc. If, as it seems, this is going to be quite low cost, I might buy one just to play around with it. It would be easy to swap with my normal mainboard, and when not in laptop form, could go in a printed enclosure. Looking at the photo, it of course has no M.2 for storage, as mentioned in the blog post (nrp explains that choice on Framework's forum [3]), but does look like it has one for the wifi card; the microSD slot is also visible. It also seems to have quite a large fan and cooling arrangement for a JH7110, compared to other boards with it? Battery on the DC-ROMA appears to have been 48 Wh [2], so not enormously smaller than Framework's 61 Wh and 55 Wh options, and battery life may be comparable plus 15% - 25%. [1]: https://deepcomputing.io/a-risc-v-world-first-independently-developed-risc-v-mainboard-for-a-framework-laptop-from-deepcomputing/ https://deepcomputing.io/a-risc-v-world-first-independently-... [2]: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1496701-world%E2%80%99s-first-risc-v-laptop-roma-deepcomputing-chromeos/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/1496701-world%E2%80%99s-firs... [3]: https://community.frame.work/t/introducing-a-new-risc-v-mainboard-from-deepcomputing/53144/29?u=cge https://community.frame.work/t/introducing-a-new-risc-v-main...
- roughly 2y ago> Yes, as people point out, this product doesn't make much sense for many people, but it doesn't have to: part of the advantage of this platform is that components don't need to appeal to a wide customer base. I feel like this has been the promise of the modern manufacturing era for so long, but it’s felt like all the momentum’s gone in the opposite direction - everyone chasing the most beige thing they can to try to get the largest market share. I’m excited to see more products and companies pushing against that trend, and it’s part of what I really appreciate about Framework - their product is absolutely a niche product and will always be, and they’re doing the hell out of it.
- craftkiller 2y agoYes! This is absolutely the right move for SBC makers. It has always bothered me that SBCs are sold as entire laptops, which were often subpar because its hard to justify an expensive screen/keyboard/shell for a single cheap underpowered SBC. Then, when you move onto the next SBC, you end up with an entire laptop of e-waste instead of just a single motherboard. Framework has already done an excellent job creating the physical/human interface, so lets just replace the brains inside of it so I can keep using the same excellent matte screen, keyboard, and touchpad and have essentially the same user experience (but with different performance). Hopefully this board can also operate in stand-alone mode outside of the framework shell just like the official framework motherboards because then we'd get the best of both worlds while also being able to benefit from the coolermaster case. Regardless, I'm going to order one when it becomes available. Also stoked to see the open source CAD files for the shell.
- mikenew 2y agoThey mentioned that it will work in the little Cooler Master standalone enclosure, so we're good on that front. And I totally agree; this is the perfect way to try out something like this.
- bee_rider 2y agoFor a while, it didn’t make sense to replace a CPU. Screens and hard drives were advancing around the same speed as CPUs (if not faster, the biggest advances in laptops until pretty recently were OLED screens and NVME drives). CPU competition picked up a while ago when AMD got their stuff together, but it takes time to turn the boat around, if it is actually turning. On the other hand we didn’t see laptop CPU replacement as a really mainstream thing during the 90’s/early 2000’s era when things were really going crazy. On the other other hand, everybody knew desktop PCs were the way to go for performance back then, so tinkering with laptop performance would have been a somewhat odd thing to do. Hard to speculate about or even measure, because people who tinker with hardware are in a pretty small niche already.
- Neywiny 2y agoI don't understand what you mean that SBCs are sold as entire laptops. SBC is Single Board Computer. Like a raspberry pi. A raspberry pi is not a laptop. If you just look up "RISC-V SBC" none of them are laptops. Is the intent that you want the SoC to be socketed and easily replaceable like AM4 Ryzen?
- ein0p 2y agoI have a VisionFive2 board with the same SoC, and this is going to really disappoint if you expect laptop grade performance from it. Don't get me wrong, it's impressive for what it is (the fist such SoC that can comfortably and inexpensively run Linux), but in a laptop it will feel glacial, and there are quite a few bugs still in its Linux support. I guess they could clock it a bit higher, but there's only so much you can do to hide performance shortcomings here.
- bobim 2y agoAny way to cram the 64 cores sku from the DeepComputing developer box into a laptop?
- ramenbytes 2y agoWill schematics be available to repair shops for this mainboard too? I wonder if it being developed by a partner changes anything.
- luyu_wu 2y agoI know there's quite a big community that buys almost purely old ThinkPads for their Coreboot support and lack of Intel ME/MSFT Pluton. Considering the processors in those chips are almost 20 years old now, this RISC-V chip may actually offer comparable performance! Would be interesting to see if that groups gravitates towards this product.
- aseipp 2y agoThe JH7110 is a superscalar quad-core dual-issue design at 1.2GHz and has 2MB of L2 cache. The Core 2 Duo P8600 from late 2008 (around the same era you can buy Coreboot-able Thinkpads like my old X200) has dual 2.4GHz processors with 3MB of L2 on an OoO-superscalar design. It will probably lose handily, if I had to guess (strictly speaking, perf/watt may be better on the JH7110 due to newer manufacturing processes, but you're not using +15yo thinkpads if you care about that.)
- topspin 2y agoThat's pretty cool. Kudos DeepComputing, Framework, et al. Tenstorrent is supposed to be delivering a "high-end" RISC-V CPU soon/this year... Don't know what it will look like, but one can dream: It's Jim Keller, after all. If RISC-V is going to blow up general purpose computing he'll probably be making the explosives. And then one can imagine a Framework mainboard running it. The DeepComputing launch page[1] reads: WORLD'S FIRST RISC‑V LAPTOP GATS A MASSIVE UPGRADE AND EQUIPS WITH UBUNTU Am I suffering a lingo mishap or is that a rather obvious typo? [1] https://deepcomputing.io/ https://deepcomputing.io/
- transpute 2y agoCould a future variant of this motherboard include Xilinx or Lattice FPGAs? That would enable new board functions based on LiteX OSS FPGA toolchain. Similar to the AMD/Xilinx Zynq family of boards ($150 to $3K), https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-family/nav-zynq-7000.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-famil... Or Bunnie Huang's Precursor dev kit for RISC-V with handheld kb/display ($600), https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor > Precursor draws less power than most other FPGAs thanks to the "-1L" variant Xilinx Spartan 7-Series at its heart. (The "L" stands for "low leakage.") That efficiency — combined with a super-low-power Lattice iCE40 UP5K FPGA for deep-sleep system management and a Silicon Labs WF200 with integrated network co-processor for Wi-Fi connectivity — allows Precursor to achieve a standby time measured in days and an active screen time of about five to six hours.
- crote 2y agoDon't count on it. FPGAs are stupidly expensive, and those vendor-provided devboards are often sold below market price. Anything worth your time is stuck behind a proprietary toolchain. Besides, there just isn't all that much you can realistically do with it. FPGAs shine at realtime processing of huge volumes of data, but you lack the necessary IO in a mobile form factor to do anything meaningful you couldn't already do with a CPU or GPU. The Precursor is a neat device, but in the end it's essentially a toy. The entire concept hinges on emulating a SoC with the FPGA, but a real SoC can offer an order of magnitude more performance at a tenth the price. It only makes sense if your risk model is a chip vendor putting backdoors in the SoC - but at that point why would you trust the FPGA? It's just moving the goalposts, really.
- johndoe0815 2y agoThis seems to be a better alternative: a complete 8-core RISC-V laptop with an M1 core by SpacemiT – similar performance to a Cortex A55 – starting at about $300 (8 GB RAM/64 GB eMMC, versions with 16 GB RAM and PCIe SSD are also available): https://arace.tech/products/muse-book-risc-v-laptop https://arace.tech/products/muse-book-risc-v-laptop
- snvzz 2y agoPerformance aside (K1 has double the cores and they're faster), it implements RVA22 with Vector Extension 1.0 (the ratified one). JH7110 is RVA20 w/o vector.
- agentultra 2y agoIs the boot loader going to be in ROM or will we be able to write our own code for this board? Might be pretty neat if we can.
- snvzz 2y agoJH7110 boot process is well-documented. There's a tiny ROM inside, which just downloads the next stage into SRAM (cpu cache as RAM) from eMMC, SD card or SPI flash, or receives it via UART (XMODEM), according to the state of two GPIOs. This tiny ROM remains accessable, can be dumped and examined. The next stage is typically u-boot SPL, which then loads a payload of opensbi + u-boot, which in turn loads the device tree and kernel. This is all open source. There are already alternative boot flows implemented, such as oreboot and tianocore.
- shirro 2y agoThe important thing is the Framework laptop is getting a third party board even if it is under-powered and unusable for most people. Raspberry Pi could take some of their IPO money and do an ARM board or Qualcomm and not have to worry about the keyboard, case, display and the logistics of moving laptops. Seems like a great way to get your platform in front of developers in a very usable and sustainable package.
- retrocryptid 2y agoDid they mention how much this board will cost when it's released? The BeagleBone guys have a board based on the Micro-Semi / Micro-Chip PolarFire FPGA+U54x4 hard core for about $150, so I wouldn't think this one was too much more expensive than that. SiFive's U74 cores aren't as inefficient as their earlier cores, but ops per megahertz still isn't on par with high end Intel or ARM cpus. But if you're going for RISC-V, you're likely interested in it for something other than peak performance. When I did my time in the RISC-V ecosystem, I thought we would never see catalog parts, so its good to see yet another RV64GC board using a catalog part.
- Netcob 2y ago> We’re excited to share a preview of a Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard with a new CPU architecture today, and it’s probably not the one you think it is. RISC-V support in a laptop is cool and the future and all, but I still feel the need to say that I'm getting a Snapdragon X based Framework 13 (maybe 16) the minute it's available.
- darthrupert 2y agoStarFive JH7110. Isn't this just Chinese hardware essentially? Why should anyone outside of anti-western countries be excited about this?
- JonChesterfield 2y agoA brief and non-reliable search puts the CPU at around 5W. Unless I'm missing something, it's a 61Wh battery in the chassis, as they all use the same battery. Therefore... battery specified as reasonable with an intel or amd cpu, but now using a minimal wattage processor, very long battery life? My use case is basically showing emacs in a terminal with all the compute running on some other server and it seems plausible this would be rather good at that. (also Lenovo are presently insisting I install windows on a laptop in order to replace a broken keyboard under warranty which makes me especially receptive to framework's messaging) edit: there's a vesa mount case for these things at https://frame.work/gb/en/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case https://frame.work/gb/en/products/cooler-master-mainboard-ca...