[fresh_broccoli]

As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.

The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.

[brucehoult]

> it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support

There are zero SoCs currently available to buy with RVA23 support, so that's not a mark against the RV2 if you want to buy a machine today.

Initial RVA23 machines available later this year are also likely to cost at least 5x to 10x more.

> meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it

There is currently no other hardware you could buy instead that will run that distro.

Check back in April or so, when Ubuntu 26.04 is actually officially released.

NB I'm currently using Ubuntu 26.04 on RVA23 hardware, but it is remote ssh access to a test board at the manufacturer.

[westurner]

Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.

What is the difference in performance?

Titan hw docs: https://milkv.io/docs/titan/getting-started/hardware

To add a 2x20 pin (IDE ribbon cable) interface like a Pi: add a USB-to-2x20 pin board, use an RP2040/RP2350 (Pi Pico (uf2 bootloader) over serial over USB or Bluetooth or WiFi; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967

[camel-cdr]

The SpacemiT K3 with 8 SpacemiT X100 RVA23 cores, which are faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5, should be available in a couple of months:

geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076

rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/...

There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator for number crunshing.

The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.

[LeFantome]

> faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5

It may actually be faster than a Pi5.

The benchmark is well tuned for ARM64 but not so well adapted to RISC-V, especially the vector extensions.

You may still be right of course. The SpaceMIT K3 is exciting because it may still be the first RVA23 hardware but it is not exectly going to launch a RISC-V laptop industry.

[camel-cdr]

There isn't much to tune in some, e.g. the clang benchmark. We know that many of the benchmarks already have RVV support (compare BPI-F3 results between versions) and three are still missing RVV support. I think the optimized score would be in the 500s, but that's still a lot lower than Pi5.

[kombine]

> The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.

So the main difference between this Milk-V Titan and the upcoming SpacemiT K3 is that the latter has better vector performance?

[camel-cdr]

The Titan has no SIMD/Vector support at all, so it doesn't support RVA23.

[snvzz]

The K3 is able to run RVA23 code, the Titan is not; it lacks V.

It matters, as the ecosystem settled on RVA23 as the baseline for application processors.

[LeFantome]

Well, today it is only Ubuntu 25.10 and newer that require RVA23. Almost everything else will run on plain old RV64GC which this board handles no problem.

But you are correct that once RVA23 chips begin to appear, everybody will move to it quite quickly.

RVA23 provides essentially the same feature-set as ARM64 or x86-64v4 including both virtualization and vector capabilities. In other words, RVA23 is the first RISC-V profile to match what modern applications and workflows require.

The good news is that I expect this to remain the minimum profile for quite a long time. Even once RVA30 and future profiles appear, there may not be much pressure for things like Linux distributions to drop support for RVA23. This is a lot like the modern x86-64 space where almost all Linux distributions work just fine on x86-64 v1 even though there are now v2, v3, and v4 available as well. You can run the latest edition of Arch Linux on hardware from 2005. It is hard to predict the future but it would not surprise me if Ubuntu 30.04 LTS ran just fine on RISC-V hardware released later this year.

But ya, anything before RVA23, like the RVA22 Titan we are discussing here, will be stuck forever on older distros or custom builds (like Ubuntu 25.04).

[LeFantome]

> As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi

The SpaceMIT K3 is rumored to be announced at FOSDEM (January 31, 2026)

https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1qdvw4l/k3_x100_a100...

Also at FOSDEM, mainline support for Orange Pi RV2 https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VF9CHG-mainline-suppo...

[LeFantome]

DeepComputing has announced a SpacemiT K3 based Framework laptop mainboard.

https://deepcomputing.io/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-unveil...

[LeFantome]

And so it was...

https://milkv.io/jupiter2

[Cieric]

I'm not even sure it's just instruction support that's the problem with the RV2. I bought one since I thought it would be cool to write a bare metal os for it (especially after I found the AI results to be so bad.) But the lack of documentation has been making it very hard to get anything actually up and running. The best I've got is compiling their custom u-boot and linux repos, and even those come with some problems.

[plagiarist]

I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.

Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.

Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.

[LeFantome]

Do not lose faith...

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VF9CHG-mainline-suppo...

[apitman]

My Pixel has gotten a couple major Android version bumps.

[api]

I’d also like an updated RISC-V Framework laptop board. There is one but it’s too limited. If they came out with that I’d try it as a laptop.

I mean a board with decent storage and better performance.