The ROMA RISC-V laptop was announced this summer with an unnamed RISC-V processor with GPU and NPU. We now know it will be the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core Xuantie C910 processor clocked at up to 2.5GHz with a 4 TOPS NPU, and support for 64-bit DDR at up 4266 MT.
The TH1520 is born out of the Wujian 600 platform unveiled by Alibaba in August 2022, and is capable of running desktop-level applications such as Firefox browser and LibreOffice office suite on OpenAnolis open-source Linux-based operating system launched by Alibaba in 2020.
This is a very important first step into ‘normal’ computing for RISC-V, but availability and pricing are, for now, major barriers here. I’d love to get my hands on one of these, but at these prices, that’s a massive ask.
And with eMMC? Fabulous…
Yes with E-waste MMC. How anyone could call anything made with eMMC anything other than landfill is beyond me. for those that may not know DO NOT EVER buy anything with eMMC storage as unlike with SSD there is zero wear leveling so the cells die very VERY fast and since its soldered to the board with no way to replace it once it goes? Its into the dumpster.
I used to work with a company that refurbed computers for the poor and needy and if I could Thanos snap one thing out of existence it would be eMMC as the amount of really nice Intel and AMD budget laptops that could have been saved we had to throw because of eMMC would turn your stomach, it is just E-waste straight from the factory.
bassbeast,
I would agree with you if the storage is soldered, that’s got planned obsolescence written all over it. But the eMMC SBCs I use have replaceable eMMC modules and these work great. Not only is it a cinch to replace/upgrade, but you don’t have to worry about bricking your device since you can easily reflash it with a cheap usb adapter.
https://magazine.odroid.com/article/emmc-memory-modules-a-simple-guide/
My understanding is that at least some eMMC chips include ware leveling.
https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=6150
Yeah but with the same issues as ARM. No standardization for the platform for booting or discovering devices. I wish they’d standardize a platform before releasing devices, would reduce e-waste and improve the usability of these things.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
+1
IMHO the FOSS community needs and deserves a platform that’s purpose built for our needs. There’s already an uphill battle against wealthy incumbents with huge scales of economy. Honestly I’m looking forward to RISC-V and what it can offer in the SBC space. Still, to the extend that RISC-V might have a chance at viability, it would be such a wasted opportunity if they don’t address universal booting that have resulted in ARM being such a pain to support by portable operating systems in a universal way due to of extreme fragmentation and inconsistencies. Please please please let’s get this right before it’s too late!
Nobody here has complained about the lack of expandable main memory yet? I am disappoint.
Also, in my opinion, RISC-V fits more into something like a Raspberry Pi, since there are no backwards compatibility requirements like Windows has x86 and Android has ARM, and there is no limit to how cheap the chips can be made for, at least theoretically, since RISC-V is royalty-free.
The Alibaba page does say that the laptop (even the basic one) has 16GB. Not bad for a laptop – and it doesn’t say that it *isn’t* upgradable. (But then it doesn’t say that it does, either. There’s nothing *stopping* them from making it do it)
My bigger worry is that the graphics chip is an Imagination chip. In a long run of open source intel graphics drivers, the one non-open source driver was the Imagination tech one. They were supposedly trying to hire people to work on open source drivers in 2020 – it does also seem like they’ve been trying to do open source drivers for a while. Then again, they apparently released a driver for their PowerVR Series 1 devices in March…?)
The main problem I have with using RISC-V for laptops (and perhaps desktops) is that it was never meant to be a device that’s good for such tasks. You can crank up the GHzs, but RISC-V is in itself a very simple, very inefficient CPU (compared to modern ones like x86-64 and ARM), based on RISC designs of the early 90s (mostly MIPS). That’s fine for low-energy, simple task chips for embedded use, but not so much for consumer grade devices.
jalnl,
RISC-V, as an instruction set, doesn’t imply that you can’t improve speculative performance. However I would also add that superscalar designs can have cons, in addition to mere complexity the long pipelines contain a significant amount of state that can end up leaking sensitive information through clever statistical analysis. Think of the spectre/meltdown debacle affecting Intel/AMD/ARM/etc. In some applications there is precedent for using simpler cores and having many more of them. To an extent current generations of ARM and x86 are evolving this way with e-cores that are more efficient rather than maximizing core performance. I think there’s a balancing point for all these factors.
While you are probably right that current generation RISC-V CPUs are not ideal for laptops, not that long ago this was true for ARM processors too. The main point I wanted to make is that RISC-V can evolve. I anticipate scales of economy to be the biggest challenge, high prices are going to put off normal consumers.