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Framework ships RISC-V board for its 13" laptops along with "boardless" laptop chassis.
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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A $200 board with soldered 8GB RAM and 64GB storage.
It is not marketed for consumers. It's a development board, and the first one at that. Check the videos from the team, they are on YouTube.
Just like kde 4.0 and wayland were not marketed to consumers and yet consumers used them anyway and then decided latter releases marketed to consumers must also be bad.
"Early KDE 4", but I'd add that the distros are also to blame for packaging it in the main repositories when it should have been stuck way out in some dev repos, out of sight of users. And of course, KDE 4 was actually quite good once it got the kinks worked out.
That's the future of RiscV. (The soldered down everything part)
How come?
Well, the RISC-V instruction set is open source, but that doesn't imply a system architecture standard. So there's not going to be one. The x86 PC became an industry standard basically by accident, an accident that is unlikely to happen again. Hell, even CP/M, the DOS before DOS had to come in different flavors for different manufacturers because the several manufacturers that supported it didn't build compatible computers.
Microsoft has so much inertia on x86 that it's probably not going anywhere, and RISC-V will become the new ARM, same cores slapped into whatever the hell the company wanted to build that day. With no standard platforms, there will be no modular accessories. What you'll get are sealed shut devices with no user serviceability, the RAM and storage soldered to the board and the bootloader stored in on-chip ROM.
https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-with-sg2380-a-revolutionary-risc-v-desktop-experience/780/122
Milk-V Oasis Mini ITX board was going to have replaceable RAM, M.2 slot for SSD, and 4x SATA slots. The only reason it didn’t release was because of Sophgo sanctions (They make the SG2380 which was the Oasis was based on)
Sure, it's technologically possible. Is there even an inkling of a plan to go from "dev kit" to "widely available consumer product?" Because basically the only "widely available consumer products" are locked down playpens like iPhones and such. Even a lot of x86 devices are going to the soldered everything approach.
It’s not a dev kit, it’s meant to be a regular PC with upgradable storage, RAM, and PCIe slot for $120. Milk-V and other RISC-V companies already have widely available consumer products (Milk-V Mars, Banana Pi, etc.), they’re just usually SBCs because that’s what’s easiest to produce and RISC-V is early in development. Remember that the first standard with Vector instructions just came out a few months ago (RVA23), and there’s no point in trying to seriously compete with X86/ARM PCs until you have that.
That right there tells you this is not a RISC-V/ARM problem. It’s just that everyone knows on-SOC memory performs better than DIMM, and manufacturers are starting to offer these to compete with Apple M chips.
I didn't say it's a problem inherent to RISC-V; it's more that anyone who can make the jump to RISC-V (or ARM) will do so in a locked down sealed shut proprietary format like Apple, or doesn't have the capability of making a platform shift at all like Microsoft. You could make an ATX form factor ARM or RISC-V machine with a lot of processing power and run Linux on it, but who would buy it and for what? That question is why no one makes such a thing.
The same people who buy ATX form factor x86? The only thing making these platforms different is software support, which is getting better for RISC-V everyday. You wouldn’t buy a RISC-V computer today for high performance gaming or scientific computing, but it definitely works as a general purpose machine (web browsing, office apps, watching videos, etc.) This year shouldn’t see much progress in hardware since RVA23 just came out (maybe some RVA22 + V), but you can expect some nice things to come out 2026-2027 since now you have all you need to build a competent RISC-V CPU.