Speaking of PCs that don’t use x86 chips, Canonical and DeepComputing today announced a new RISC-V laptop running Ubuntu, available for pre-order in a few days. It’s the successor to the DC-ROMA, which shipped last year.
Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT’s SoC K1 – with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0GHz with 16GB of memory. This significantly doubled its overall performance and energy efficiency over the previous generation’s 4-cores SoC running at 1.5GHz. Moreover, SpacemiT’s SoC K1 is also the world’s first SoC to support RISC-V high performance computing RVA 22 Profile RVV 1.0 with 256 bit width, and to have powerful AI capabilities with its customised matrix operation instruction based on IME Group design principle!
This second-generation DC-ROMA RISC-V laptop also features an all-metal casing making it more durable, as well as improving heat dissipation and more on its premium class look and feel compared to previous generation.
Canonical’s blog
The DC-ROMA II is clearly aimed at developers, as it has what is essentially a GeekPort on the side of the laptop, to aid in porting and debugging software. Aside from that and the RISC-V processor, it’s a rather mid-range kind of device, and no pricing has been published yet so I’m not sure if this is something I could afford for an OSAlert review. Once the preorders go live in a few days, we’ll know more.
If you’d like to see this RISC-V laptop make an appearance on OSAlert, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.
Selling an “open architecture” laptop with a proprietary GPU driver, well done Canonical.
As one guy over at Phoronix said, this is Linux, so once development of GPU drivers stops, you are screwed.
From Canonical’s point of view, that’s not their problem. There will be a compatible driver with their LTS version (I assume 24.05) and that driver and version will be supported until 2029 (or 2036 if you pay).
If you, as a consumer, choose to install something else on it, it’s not the conditions Canonical’s certified the hardware,so it’s on you, not them.
What are you talking about? No one is going to be using this laptop that has incredible weak performance for today’s standards in 2029 let alone in 2036. This is for developers and maybe some enthusiast/early adapter types that will move on to the next RISC-V chipset.
Again, that’s not Canonical’s problem. You’re projecting dissatisfaction of a hardware product on to the the software provider, that is more than doing it’s part.
You were one that mentioned Ubuntu LTS and inferred this is a consumer device. I am just saying the former is not relevant and this is developer device. The OP didn’t make much sense either when said Canonical was “selling” this which they are not. It’s just a development device and Canonical wants Ubuntu to be seen at the forefront of the emerging RISC-V platform.
How do you know that?
Also, the whole point of an “open” developer laptop is that you should be able to install whatever Linux distro you want on it.
Because Ubuntu have officially certified the hardware and that’s (part of) what the process entails and guarantees.
https://ubuntu.com/certified
Ubuntu’s direct involvement ends as soon as you uninstall the certified OS/Hardware combo. If you choose to install something else, a BSD, or even a Newer Ubuntu release. You are on your own, but the LTS its certified against will continue to be supported for the full lifecycle.
And that’s the issue here, selling a “developer” laptop that runs only the OS it’s “certified” for. As if developers develop for only one OS, or even one Linux distro (or one version of one Linux distro). Also, let’s see how well the proprietary GPU driver works on LTS.
The problem here is that those ARM and RISC-V SoCs are designed to go into some locked-down trinket like a streaming stick or Smart TV, and some people want to put them into general-purpose laptops because “x86 is bad because it’s not open for new licensees”. The thing is, x86 has CPUs with iGPUs that come open-source drivers that allow you to run a variety of OSes. And it’s not like ARM offers more choice, your only choices realistically are Qualcomm and various SoCs packaging ARM’s cores. The same will happen with RISC-V when big players get involved. The fact x86 is not open for new licensees is an academic problem, not a practical one. And AMD’s chips are built on a modern process, so they don’t guzzle power like Intel’s.
OK – I’m in. Shame the screen isn’t a bit better (only HD? meh – Apple – you spoil me) but that geek port makes me tweaky. It’ll be *very* interesting to see it benchmarked because RV5 is currently *WELL* behind the curve (Phoenix have some good numbers) and I expect most of this is due to platform immaturity. But I’d like this just to use as a Linux machine mostly for my toy synth and RPi experiments. TBH I’d really like RV5 to succeed – how much? I wrote my own emulator just to learn the CPU!
It will be cool to see unbiased review! How about setting up some fundraiser to cover costs of a review unit?
Even if personally I am more interested in a NUC alike form factor.
We already got the 4K monitor, assuming that the price is going to be reasonable we could found that laptop for a proper independent review!
Sounds like what the Haiku port to this architecture has been waiting for!
Haiku is unusual because the risc-v port is quite far along but its arm port is dead in the water. Canonical might have intended people to entrench its distro of GNU, but for me Haiku would displace that legacy OS on day one.
Oh yeah, and it’s got what this article calls a geekport – further connection with the BeOS legacy. Definitely a candidate Haiku machine!
I don’t get what’s the point of a geekport when we now have USB.
From a quick glance, looks about the same as GPIO to me, just with a standardized connector you can put on a case instead of wiring direct to mainboard. Advantage with GPIO is that it lets you build your own interfaces, which is occasionally preferable to USB.
> If you’d like to see this RISC-V laptop make an appearance on OSAlert, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.
Yes please. riscv64 is pretty damn neat. Hell, Haiku even runs on riscv64
I’d *REALLY* like to see more laptops standardize on a “debug port” with some gpio pins, a 3.3v, 5v pin, ground, and some serial pins. It feels like a nice market need for tech folks.
* OS debugging
* Electrical Engineering
* Arduino projects
* Etc.
Explaining computers shows off the Banana Pi which has the same SOC. It seems a bit slow.
https://youtu.be/GZGryhBnkV0?si=bS98wwudgj752DjB