Can we all take a minute to appreciate how hard Chris works, not just to produce such professional and informative videos, but to react and reply to so many comments! 👏
yeah but at the moment i would recommend an intel only or amd only laptop. It has open source drivers and in the case of amd its more efficient in case of performance...but yeah i like the ideo of the true open source in hardware
just got a thin client as server cause i don't want an ARM (raspberry pi) or whatever-new-fancy-architecture anymore - too often there is a cool software on Linux that says: but we only support x86
It's too bad you have to give this laptop back. It would be nice to see if the performance improves with a few software updates and some optimization. I am enjoying these RISC V videos!👍
I subscribed years ago after just one video about a raspberry pi. I love the informative nature of the channel. No fluff, just facts. I've shared the channel with teachers where I work and some use it in class and others said it was too corny and dry. Whatever, their loss. I love these videos.
This is great that there is a complete system. Really liking the current standard of 8 cores, 8 -16gb ram and NVME. and so i agree about the so say "couple of generations away" because of graphics processing. This is a great start for sbc risc-v computing to launch mainstream.
Definitely an exciting piece of hardware. I appreciate your exploration of this RISC-V laptop! RISC-V development has progressed quicker than I expected. Looking forward to your next video!
Christopher always gives me vibe of a small-town computer store owner of the late 1980's. The kind that is a computer enthusiast first and a retail operator second, and is always happy to discuss the latest tech with anyone irrespective of if they are a serious customer or (like myself in that era) a schoolkid who doesn't have enough pocket money to actually buy anything.
This is great! There needs to be another choice for the consumer apart from the big three. I hope RISC-V soon becomes competitive in the processor market. Also, would love to see some budget Android devices on RISC-V very soon.
Now we need a linux DE made exclusively for portable devices like tablets and cellphones, a special session with a branch repository of Flathub and applications made specifically for devices like these and android app emulation, maybe finally we will have a completely spyware free OS portable device, with risc-v processor without any minix running inside with any backdoor, and maybe completely free and open source modules installed without backdoors as well.
@@DavidCoutinhoCG there are plenty of linux mobile UI frameworks (ubuntu mobile, plasma mobile, gnome mobile, posh, sailfish...) but there are no fully functional devices (from the practical standpoint). Half of the few available phones are morally a decade old and the other half is half broken.
@@ginger_toggaf I know, thats why, i think its a shame, what the hell, why the zuck we have to abide by the iOS and android monopoly with bloated spyware inside, linux phones were an amazing idea, but its lacking as hell.
Good Morning Mr. Barnatt! Dealing with a hot water heater that had catastrophic failure. Was out of the house for over 2 hours and it put 2 inches (5cm) of water through our entire home. I'll have to try to find time to watch.. but we are looking at a near total loss here. I'll try to keep watching as much as I have time.
I sure agree with you on how far RISC-V has come in the past few years! I just watched a laptop with RISC-V run two operating systems, two word processors, and Aisleriot Solitaire, record video from a webcam(!!!!! REALLY big deal too!), play video back, and even compile and run a C program featuring a friendly greeting from our favorite pair of scissors. Computing is always full of surprises, ain't it? :)
An exciting alternative to all the proprietary stuff we are stuck with these days(even on Linux). With Intel and AMD pushing 'updates' to their microarchitecture,this looks promising.
I love how this laptop looks, it's so clean and simple. Just as many bells and whistles as you could expect from a development platform and still looks very slick.
Although it's a laptop, the price is still quite high - you can preorder e.g. a Milk-V Jupiter board for ~60$ (4GB RAM)/ ~115$ (16GB RAM) with the same processor..
I was wondering about the price of a home built Risc-V system vs this laptop. For someone who needs to travel, this would be Ideal. However, most pioneers in this field already have homebuilt systems. I do wish the best for this company though.
@@tomnesler2089 The point was that you can put a Milk-V , a $100 screen, and a $20 keyboard into a $20 brief case/school case , and have the same thing.
@@isilder the same computing capability, yes, but not the same level of slick. Try using you set-up on an airline tray table! Or even in the gate lounge. Personally I'm still going for the lashed-up SBC experience myself, but it's good to have choices, no?
@@Chris-onyt No one's saying it's a price-to-performance powerhouse, but as far as laptops go, $500~600 is in fact quite affordable and this product should hopefully help open up development more broadly and expand the architecture.
@@Chris-onyt it IS catching up, and rapidly. Two years ago the best that would have been possible would be a single core 1.0 GHz with 1 or 2 GB RAM, and here we are today with multiple 8 core 16 GB RAM laptops with CPUs pushing 2.0 GHz. This time next year we'll have certainly SBCs and maybe already updated laptops with 16 core 2.4 GHz CPU with each core in early Intel Core-i7 territory. One or two years after that they will be in Apple M1 territory -- which is what my main desktop computer actually is right now, and I expect will still be in 2-3 years. All of this stuff is not speculation, it is real products that are currently in the development pipeline, developed by serious experienced people who are fresh from e.g. Apple and AMD and Qualcomm CPU development experience.
@@BruceHoult it's good to see improvements they will need to get a lot more software working on risc v and Apple as much as I dislike them they know how to make a amazing soc
Fantastic works as always Chris. As a fan of all things open-source, I'd love to see AMD, and Intel produce RISC-V CPUs. Or a new manufacturer making something that can not only compete, but put the willies up the legacy manufacturers. Open-source is the way forward. I just hope that more people use and see the benefits of open-source software and hardware.
Hey! Haven't been here in a while. Glad to see you on Jeff Geerling's RISC-V video, and commenting on a RISC-V video. Just RISC-V everywhere! Haha... I would definitely want to help contribute to the maturity of this platform, so I will get one of these hardware soon! Great job on this video!
Finally? What about PowerPC? HP PA-RISC from the 1990s? The defining thing about RISC-V is that it's non-proprietary. Unfortunately, I think that with a weaker profit motive, it may never catch up to competing architectures. Also, for a development setup, only 8 GPIO connections is a little disappointing.
Great video and information as expected. Really enjoyed your c code demonstration. Running the 'Greetings from Mr. Scissors' program was really fun for me!
Having a Linux laptop between 4 and 600 dollars. Is for me already good news. There is the German company "tuxedo", but they are way more expensive. I have some feeling that this will become the new "thinkpad".
Tuxedo does target more high-end devices for developers; the RISC-V CPU right here is waaaay too slow for that kind of use. I think the main issue with RISC-V adoption will actually not be the software support on linux desktops, but rather the lack of high-end CPUs. I think it'll take at least 4-5 more years before RISC-V becomes a viable desktop platform for more than casual usage.
there are a few other manufacturers as well. But they all suffer from the same problem -they are only found online. They aren't available in local stores so you can't try them and check the build quality before you buy.
Hi Chris! Completely unrelated, but I just realized how awesome your video setup is. When you zoomed in on the keyboard, the micro-texture on the aluminum/plastic showed up really well even crushed by RU-vid. Would be cool for doing photogrammetry or ripping textures for product modeling in Blender!
@@IceAce1 I've seen it! Today was just the first time I really saw the potential outside of Chris' top-notch hardware videos. I've been doing a lot of texturing in Blender lately, I think that's why it especially caught my eye.
Greetings. This is a surprisingly fantastic video. Witnessing a RISC - V laptop is certainly raising our expectation for the future in terms of alternative personal computing.
I'm very impressed with the presentation and build quality of the laptop, honestly I'd love one myself, once the platform matures a little more (and maybe install KDE) I could see myself using one as a daily driver.
I am loving all of the content you've been producing about RISC-V, Chris. Obviously there is a hype cycle to most technology, but you're providing real numbers, honest reviews, and setting reasonable expectations for current gen RISC-V based systems. The more attention it gets, the faster the technology matures, and hopefully the better we'll all be for it. Cheers from one of those ungrateful colonists on the other side of the Atlantic!
It's impressive to see the progress of RISC-V. I'm quite happy with that. Pleasant presentation and I do like what I just watched. I believe it's a little bit behind other RISC-V SOB, but it seems just a matter of software improvement. Have you analyzed the temperature of CPU and GPU/NPU, Chris? Have you guys noticed the quality of the webcam? It's great! Just to put in perspective, Lenovo and Asus have in the market a plenty of laptops with camera bellow this quality.
Amazing video. I was surprised to see batocera Linux to be highly compatible with visionfive2 risc-v board. Seems support for risc-v is getting more and more mature with age. Just hoping more people adopt these solutions as more and more software improvements get released
Despite its performance, the significant advantages of this CPU is that it does not have the Management Engine (ME) backdoor that is present in all Intel processors.
@@danielpicassomunoz2752 Yeah, I think it's naive to think only Intel does that. CPU manufacturers can have access to way too much data for governments not to try to use that for their own benefit. These early RISC-V chips might be safe but the moment one of these becomes mainstream I fully expect some kind of backdoor to be found.
I can't believe they're advertising an EOL OS (just checked their site) and won't' commit to updates. Bookmarked but skipping for now. Vendor abandonment is my top concern for novel hardware. Everything else about it looks great. A second nvme slot for a mirror drive could make this my daily driver.
@@BruceHoult When i was using kubuntu, i always preferred the LTS version. I would not use this as a daily desktop machine but for a server, NAS or tinkering machine and LTS is better for this.
@@autohmae Why wouldn't it? When you just need some kind of general-purpose core for your product, you can either go through the restrictive licensing dance with something like ARM (or ARC, rather famously, in Intel's case), or you can use something that is unencumbered and then deploy a core that you might develop yourself or adapt from someone else's work. There have been Allwinner ARM-based SoCs that actually used OpenRISC cores - these being quite close in heritage to MIPS and RISC-V - presumably because of the power consumption characteristics. They could have conceivably used some smaller ARM cores, but it is entirely possible that such ARM cores either they weren't up to the job, or maybe using them would have cut into their wafer thin margins.
While it would still be some time till we get a CPU that could match up the performance from the likes of Intel or AMD. This is an exciting update to the RISC-V platform.
would love to see a lighter Desktp environment (DE) or widow manager (WM) instead of heavy gnome. Would also love to see it perform when compiled specifcally for it's hardware using gentoo. Also check if hardware acceleration is enabled for the DE/WM and video playback both in native players (VLC,MPV) and browser
A very interesting RISC-V development laptop, I won't be buying one any time soon. Hopefully by 2026 the future will be looking more RISC-y, come on x86 move over you've had your day!! The laptop came with plenty of ports including GPIO & the supplied development pack, overall the colour used was very nice. Thanks Chris for another interesting video I hope that things are OK with you?Something towards the tea & biccy fund :)
@@alanthornton3530 Things are going as normally as they should! I admittedly was just a little bit late to the party this morning. I was up late talking to a good friend. :)
This is very exciting! As you said, RISC-V has come a long way in the last years. I remember the first SBCs running limited and slightly unstable specialty Linux distros, and now here is ubuntu running on a modern RISC-V laptop!
Surprised it is as slow as it is with an 8 core processor, still kind of early days so probably better optimization will come as more people start working with it. This laptop will be a big step to getting more hands on this architecture.
Sunday greetings all! Another impressive movement forward for RISC-V. One thing that I will never understand, what possesses laptop keyboard makers to put the power button where the Delete key has always been?
I wish laptop makers would just put the power button on the side, and not require me to open the lid - for when I use it with an external screen, keyboard and mouse.
What a great review, good to see Risc-V is getting there. That said would have liked to get information on the BIOS as to if it's some proprietary or free version.
Interesting video! I didn't know anybody was making a laptop yet, and apparently this is the second one.... I realize the laptop is probably already mailed back, but I'd like to mention two tests I would have liked to have seen....just for the smiles and giggles. Linux kernel compile, for the Risk V architecture, and a Chromium compile for the Risk V architecture. If you are adopting this architecture, there is a good chance that you're going to have to compile a lot of stuff. Some of it may just need recompiled for the new architecture, but most of it will probably need at least a few lines of code added or deleted or changed. I know you can compile on one architecture for another, but sometimes that is not available. I look forward to your next video!!
This is the second version from that company. There is also the MuseBook, with the same CPU. Also a RISC-V main board for the high end FrameWork laptop has been announced and will be available shortly. And Sipeed have two RISC-V laptops in different sizes.
Something that struck me on the opening, as a 'loaner test' device, when one gets one, I'd suggest always booting it up stand alone, on the rare case that one may happen to get one infected, and always make sure to wipe storage before returning. (So one doesn't give "industry secrets" to the next person.
Very good, indeed. Was asking around, last year if anyone is fiddling with RISC-V hardware, already - and here we have a laptop for the price of a mid tier smartphone.
every step closer to my current level of performance is another step closer to me using it, i don't expect it to be better or even mostly there when i adopt it, but a good fraction and i'm there. Learning Rust for Risc-V development now, i might be good enough by the time i want to do it
I'm always happy to see a non-x86 laptop. There's been PowerPC and even Moto68K laptops and of course tons of ARM laptops, but this might be the first normal looking RISC-V laptop I've seen, though I definitely appreciate the small handheld laptops I've been seeing. I'd love to see more laptops with a debug interface on the side like that.
Your videos are fantastic! Also this Risc V laptop opens a whole new category. I hope you will consider getting one for future videos and tinker with it further more as improvements and updates are applied for it.
@@RafaCoringaProducoes OK then some other CPU benchmark. This is all about the CPU after all. Not the disk or the GPU. And the CPU seems a bit sluggish so it's worth quantifying the performance.
I've reverse engineered the DRAM training code for the K1x SoC. Rewritten in Rust as usual. A volunteer has run it on their MuseBook (same as ROMA II with different label), works just fine. 😊
