Those of you who own a Framework Laptop 13 —consider me jealous, btw— or are considering buying one in the near future, you may be interested to know that a RISC-V motherboard option is in the works.
DeepComputing, the company behind the recently-announced Ubuntu RISC-V laptop, is working with Framework Computer Inc, the company behind the popular, modular, and Linux-friendly Framework laptops, on a RISC-V mainboard.
This is a new announcement; the component itself is in early development, and there’s no tentative price tag or pre-order date pencilled in.
But we do know the board will be based around the StarFive JH7110, which uses the RV64GC Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), i.e., it’s a 64-bit processor. It has a quad-core U74 processor running at up to 1.5 GHz, plus an integrated GPU running uptown 600 MHz.
If the name sounds familiar it’s because this is the same SoC used in Pine64’s PineTab-V tablet, and in its Star64 single-board computer.
Fans of Framework laptops have come to expect performant chips from the likes of Intel and AMD, but the StarFive JH7110 is far from that — it’s a fairly slow, unpowered chip for driving a full-fledged desktop computing or running any particularly intensive workloads.
And unlike the octa-core SpacemiT K1 being used in the new Ubuntu RISC-V laptop, it lacks an onboard NPU for AI/ML uses which.
The performance (or lack thereof) in the StarFive JH7110 chip is something Framework mention in their blog announcement, explaining:
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
Nirav Patel, Framework Computer Inc
Additionally, the Framework RISC-V mainboard will use soldered memory and non-upgradeable eMMC storage (though it can boot from microSD cards). It will ‘drop into’ any Framework Laptop 13 chassis (or Cooler Master Mainboard Case), per Framework’s modular ethos.
But hardware is only half the equation — what’s the software side like?
Well, Framework mention DeepComputing is “working closely with the teams at Canonical and Red Hat to ensure Linux support is solid through Ubuntu and Fedora”, which is great news, and cements Canonical’s seriousness to supporting Ubuntu on RISC-V.
Framework owners curious about trying out this new alternative to Intel, AMD, and ARM chips, and who have the resources to invest both time and money, will likely find the Framework RISC-V motherboard an attractive option.