Milk-V Reveals Technical Specs of Milk-V Jupiter RISC-V Mini-ITX PC (opens in new tab)

> The Milk-V Jupiter supports Ubuntu and CASA OS, which are specifically tailored for RISC-V NAS applications.

Not everything runs on risc-v, but plenty does and you can look at Ubuntu's repos to see for yourself.

> I have a feeling if you sprung for this you would be buying an expensive project with lots of driver work left to do.

I think that is exactly the stage in the life-cycle that the ecosystem is currently in. This is for those people to start working. The previous level of getting the Linux kernel working is done, now it's onto the drivers.

After this will be ironing out power management and Wayland issues.

Only after that will it be ready for the end consumer. Thousand miles, first steps sort of thing, but yeah, it's not ready for Linus to drop and then benchmark CS2 on.

Many other other machines already shipping (Banana Pi BPI-F3) or announced (SpacemiT Muse Book, Muse Box, Muse Pi; Sipeed Lichee Pi 3A) are using the same SoC. The BPI-F3 with 4 GB RAM costs $74, models with 8 GB and 16 GB are on the way.

By virtue of having 8 cores it's the fastest cheap RISC-V SoC currently available (only the 64 core SG2042 in Milk-V's own $2500 "Pioneer" workstation is faster).

It's also one of only two currently shipping SoCs supporting the latest RVA22+Vector ISA specification. The other one, which shipped in November, is single core with 0.5 GB RAM, so this is far more practical as a PC.

So you can be pretty sure there is going to be a LOT of attention and work on this SoC.

At least until it is overtaken by something faster.

Two generations of faster, but still inexpensive, SoCs are expected this year: 1) SiFive P550-based quad core with about 2x the per-core performance, 1.5x from IPC and 1.5x from MHz, also RVA22 but lacking vector; 2) SiFive P670-based 16 core SG2380 with about 3x the per-core performance, 2x from IPC and similar MHz to P550, full RVA22+Vector. This SoC will leapfrog currently shipping (or known) Arm SBCs such as the Pi 5 and RK3588 boards (Rock 5, Orange Pi 5).

There is also the 64 core SG2044, an SG2042 updated to RVA22+Vector specifications. It will still have about the same per-core performance as this SpacemiT SoC (but a LOT of cores), and I don't expect it to be cheap.

The biggest problem with RISC-V at the moment is that we're seeing -- and will continue to see for some years -- a 2x or more per year improvement in performance of inexpensive mass-produced hardware, so ANYTHING you buy is sure to be quickly eclipsed.

Similar to the 1990s in x86 land, which started with everyone using the 33 MHz 80386 and ended with 1.2 GHz Pentium III and the announcement of Pentium 4 and Amd64/x86_64.

Except current RISC-V hardware (e.g. this machine) is already at late Pentium III performance per core (but 8 cores and 64 bit and better than AVX vector/SIMD), with early Core-i7 performance (but more cores) coming THIS YEAR.

Everyone is quickly converging on the RVA22 instruction set spec (with or without the optional Vector), a big step up from the previous RV64GC (now renamed RVA20) common base ISA. The RVA23 spec (which among other things makes Vector compulsory) will be ratified soon, with hardware in maybe 12-24 months.

The graphics chips in these are completely proprietary and will likely never see kernel updates. It's e-waste on arrival.

> If the selling point of RISC-V is openness, then every RISC-V OEM so far has received an F for bundling in completely closed source graphics,

The openness is at the __ISA__ level. So you don't get a duopoly like being forced to choose between Intel & AMD. It means that anyone can start up a company and produce a replacement with proprietary graphics.

Yes, open source graphics would be nice, but that will have to follow a more open-standard CPU. So let's not put the cart before the horse, nor let the best be the enemy of the good. This is the next step.

As has been said elsewhere, the purpose of this board is not to be a Debian-friendly end-user product, but a developer tool. The focus is purely on the RISC-V side, not on having a fancy GPU available. I assume that adding the IMG GPU was cheaper and quicker than going for something more open, which is definitively a plus for the board at this time

ALso it has a PCIe connector where you can (presumably) add your own GPU if you really want/need to develop next-gen 3D applications for RISC-V

CPUs and GPUs are in very different situations.

We've got 60 years of experience with RISC ISAs showing that they are as good as any other approach, since Seymour Cray's CDC6600 in 1964 (and of course his later Cray 1 in 1975 would also be called RISC today). By the late 70s researchers at IBM were also converging on the same ideas, as were academics at Berkeley via experience with the DEC VAX. Multiple RISC ISAs, with mostly only cosmetic differences between them, hit the market commercially in 1985 and 1986 -- almost 40 years ago.

It's pretty clear what works, and for example Aarch64 and RISC-V were developed in parallel with each other [1], without either being aware of the other, but came up with very similar designs, both taking lessons of what to do and what not to do from MIPS, SPARC, Power, Arm32, Alpha and others.

In contrast, the first modern programmable GPU was the NVIDIA GeForce 3 in 2001, just 23 years ago. Even today leading GPU vendors have not settled down on how a GPU should be designed. Every NVIDIA generation is radically different from the previous one and NVIDIA, AMD (ATI), Intel, Imagination GPUs are very different to each other -- and the exact details are still often closely kept secrets. NVIDIA doesn't let anyone program their CPUs directly, they provide a pseudo machine code (PTX) and different closed source compilers from PTX to each generation's real architecture.

The chances of anyone coming up with the "forever" GPU design in the near future, let alone making it open, seem pretty slim. The whole field is still too new, changing too much.

[1] Aarch64 clearly started earlier, and unexpectedly published the ARMv8-A spec in October 2011, 1 1/2 years after the RISC-V effort started, by which time the fundamentals of the RISC-V design were firmly established, though details continued to change for the next 7 years. The first Android phones with Arm64 CPUs (e.g. Galaxy S6) hit in early 2015, with SBCs (Raspberry Pi 3, Odroid C2) following in early 2016. The first commercial RISC-V board, the Arduino-style HiFive1 shipped in late 2016. Note that Apple's iPhone 5s launched with an Apple-designed ARMv8 CPU almost 1.5 years before Arm's own designs.

I agree it's not ideal, but let's not let perfect be the enemy of good. Eventually (hopefully) there will be an open GPU that can grow and gain adoption, but it will take time.

The openness is working exactly as intended: companies left and right are designing their own RISC-V chips without having to pay exorbitant license fees to some IP holder for the rights.

> every RISC-V OEM so far has received an F for bundling in completely closed source graphics,

What's the alternative? I'm not aware of performant, open and cheap graphics options.

Sorry, but what more action would you like to reasonable see right? Sure, we'd all like the currently in stock on store shelves, but these things take time. There have been various RISC-V CPUs shipped. There is a cyberdeck mentioned yesterday shipping [1], there is a tablet [2]. Pi-level-ish boards have been shipped. These things time and progress has been steady. This seems more like a chirp than a substantive criticism.

[1] https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01

[2] https://pine64.com/product/pinetab-v-10-1-8gb-128gb-risc-v-b...