non-x86 open-source-hardware laptops, let's take stock of Jul 2025

[brucehoult]

No, it's the Mid 2012 with the series 3 i5..

The current 1.8 GHz P550 RISC-V machines are around twice as fast as the previous gen StarFive JH7110 and SpaceMit K1, and around half the speed of a i7 3720QM @3.6 GHz ("Late 2012") Mac Mini (I bought one cheap recently and put Ubuntu 24.04 on it, so I can compare anything).

The 2012 Mac Mini with current Ubuntu is extremely pleasant to use for normal daily stuff.

The P550 (I have the Megrez) is noticeably slower, but also noticeably much better than a VisionFive 2 or SpacemiT board (BPI-3, Jupiter, OP RV2 etc).

By this time next year (±) RISC-V machines will definitely be noticeably better than a 2012 i3/i5/i7 laptop, at least if used with a discrete GPU such as AMD. Or if Imagination Technologies finally get their shit together upstreaming / opening their driver. The signs on that have been good recently

https://old.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1o4chfb/imagination_powervr_mesa_vulkan_driver/

The same goes for new N100 / N150 etc machines.

It's been known since pretty much 2020 or 2021 that 2026 will be the year RISC-V is competitive with the lower end of x86.

[JPortici]

Bottom line, wait and see.

[brucehoult]

Bottom line, wait and see.

Wait for what? The only thing that is in doubt is the exact timing of machines being released, and perhaps the final MHz achieved.

Tenstorrent have their final RTL available for licensing. They have tested and benchmarked it on multiple FPGAS (e.g. VCU118) and both Synposys' and Cadence's hugely expensive (millions?) hardware emulation systems. In the conference presentation I just watched from the recent RISC-V summit, Tenstorrent said you can download their Verilator model (e.g. a compiled C++ binary) of their CPU and run your own test code on it and check cycle counts etc. I think they meant anyone can do that, possibly after some sign up.

There is zero doubt that it works and performs as they say it does.

[JPortici]

Bottom line, wait and see.

Wait for what?

for the hardware

[JPortici]

two new mainboards for framework 13!
RISCV - https://community.frame.work/t/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-announced-by-deepcomputing/80698/7
ARM - https://community.frame.work/t/arm-based-cpus/7203/194

[brucehoult]

two new mainboards for framework 13!
RISCV - https://community.frame.work/t/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-announced-by-deepcomputing/80698/7
ARM - https://community.frame.work/t/arm-based-cpus/7203/194

This is interesting and the two options seem reasonably comparable.

In rough terms, for general use, I'd say the RISC-V board is like a late 2000s Core 2 Quad but with twice as many cores.


The Arm board uses a CIX CP8180 with 8 A720 cores and 4 A520. The A720s seem to be in pairs clocking at most at 2.6, 2.5, 2.4, 2.3 GHz. I'm not sure if that means if you're using all 8 then all will be at 2.3 GHz.

The four A520s are running at 1.8 GHz.

All cores have 128-bit SVE/NEON.

They claim a theoretical 45 TOPS when combining NPU + GPU + CPU.


The RISC-V board using the SpacemiT K3 has 8 OoO X100 cores running at 2.4 GHz with 256 bit vectors. There are also 8 in-order A100 cores (derived from the X60 in the K1 chip) with 1024 bit vectors which provide the "AI" capability with a claimed 60 TOPS. Both types of cores can run exactly the same program executables, but due to the difference vector register length you can't migrate once the program is active.

K3 machines have not shipped yet but I and a few others have has ssh access to a machine at SpacemiT in China for the last month.

SpacemiT have provided  a copy of llama that has been modified to do general processing on the X100 cores and running the model on the A100 cores. They claim good performance on models with 30B - 80B parameters.

One of us has a video on youtube showing  the performance running an local Qwen3 30B model. Seems quite impressive for a 15W SoC running the model on standard CPU cores, not a specialised NPU or GPU.

Note: I put a "&t=590s" (9m50s) on the URL but playing it in the thread doesn't respect that, so jump there manually.

[JPortici]

Add to the list: the new macbooks. Surprised they look like they're not made of plastic
Using the A18, i wonder how they will be limited

[DiTBho]

Add to the list: the new macbooks. Surprised they look like they're not made of plastic
Using the A18, i wonder how they will be limited

The hardware is quite good for the price, and I don't consider it "limited."
To what extent? The Bulgarian laptop I've been developing for three years is "limited" considering it's based on a tablet SoC.
Just like the new Apple laptop is based on the A18 smartphone chip.

But I'm not sure there will be Linux support.

[DiTBho]

Apple Neo:
- 8GB ram
- 256GB SSD
-----------------
~700 Euro


Apple Neo:
- 8GB ram
- 512GB SSD
-----------------
~800 Euro

[brucehoult]

Apple Neo:
- 8GB ram
- 256GB SSD
-----------------
~700 Euro


Apple Neo:
- 8GB ram
- 512GB SSD
-----------------
~800 Euro

Don't forget the TouchID sensor in the 512GB SSD model, which to me is worth the extra 100 euro all by itself -- I HATE typing passwords.

[DiTBho]

Yeah, the biometric sensor is very useful.
I think keyboards should integrate a biometric sensor.

[DiTBho]

New arm64 board for the Framework 13 laptop

[brucehoult]

New arm64 board for the Framework 13 laptop

Copycats :-)

It's a 12-core CIX P1 (aka CD8180), like Orange Pi 6 Plus or Radxa Orion O6. The main CPUs are 8x Cortex-A720 at 2.5 GHz.

It's probably around 3x-4x the performance of the latest SpacemiT K3 RISC-V main board, which itself is around 4x the performance of the previous generation RISC-V main board. Something like a NUC with an 8th gen CPU (I have one with a i7-8650U) and a Core 2 Quad. But with twice as many high performance CPU cores in each case.