World's first RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI smarts and octa-core chip DeepComputing has announced a successor to its Roma laptop, which was the first notebook of its kind to use a RISC-V-compatible processor. Called DC-Roma RISC-V Laptop II, the device is claimed to be the first RV-based laptop in the world to run Ubuntu out of the box. It's not the first RISC-V laptop to use Linux in general as …
If RISC becomes Popular x Chinese, US sanctions will kill it. That's what they are designed to do.
A much bigger problem is that kit is going to come with stuff many of us don't need or want as standard. I'll pay extra for more RAM or a larger HDD, but not an NPU. I have no use for and don't want AI, particularly if I can't turn it off. Especially on a laptop where it will eat power in the background. It's a bit like all PCs and laptops coming with a 5.25" FDD as standard. Great for those that want it, but not for the rest of us.
Having AI forced on us like this, against our will is offensive. The only defence is to decline to purchase it until the fad passes. We've been paying for excess CPU cycles, excess screen resolution/refresh and excess software features for years, but the AI gimmicks are a toxic overload.
Seeing AI and the Pi associated is particularly depressing. Just get on and release a Pi PC, without any AI BS wasting cycles/amps. It may well be the PC replacement that people want.
> Seeing AI and the Pi associated is particularly depressing
As you know, the AI on the R'Pi is just an M.2 stick that slides into a generic M.2 carrier HAT; the same sort of HAT onto which you can stick in a *non* AI-oriented M.2 stick.
Given this - that both the HAT and the stick are entirely optional and in no way built in to the Pi 5, should we assume that you have been becoming increasingly more depressed over the years as other, equally entirely optional, HATs have been released that don't happen to match your particular interests? Oh, how you must have shuddered as motor driver HATs appeared, or the sheer absurdity of the Space HAT, as you so desperately waited to do no more than replace your PC.
PS
> If RISC becomes Popular x Chinese, US sanctions will kill it. That's what they are designed to do
Assuming you meant RISC-V and not just any old RISC (or even used-to-be-RISC but seems to have grown a bit over the years) then - you *do* know that it isn't a China-only thing? That it is headquartered in Europe and that the US was recently being ridiculed because they were trying to keep all the RISC-V stuff within their own borders?
The idea that the US sanctions are *designed* to kill off RISC-V is - shall we say, far-fetched? The US would love to have loads and loads of the very bestest RISC-V In The World, just, preferably, only in their bit of the world.
"Just get on and release a Pi PC, without any AI BS wasting cycles/amps. It may well be the PC replacement that people want."
It's not. The people who wanted and were able to replace their PC with a Raspberry Pi have done it. A few of them tried to do it with the first few versions. Having used the same models, I doubt it worked very well. As of the Pi 4, it works much better. With the Pi 5, it should be even better. Nobody who wants to do that is incapable of installing that as their PC. I'm not even sure what other steps you think need to be taken to go from where we are now to having "a Pi PC", because it's likely to be a Pi in a box, and people are pretty capable of putting those together.
Meanwhile, the issues for everyone else will not be fixed by a Pi. There are some people who need more performance than that in their desktop. The Pi won't do it. There are some people who must have Windows. It can do that, but not very well, and not without some tweaking. There are some people who don't like some of the compatibility issues that the Pi has, and they'll find that running Linux on something else avoids some of them. Anyone who would know to buy a Pi PC either has considered using a Pi as a desktop or easily could, and having considered it, they either can replace it already or have a technical issue that will prevent them from making that choice.
PPS
> Just get on and release a Pi PC, without any AI BS wasting cycles/amps.
So, the Raspberry Pi 400.
Or is this just a complaint that they've not released a Pi 500 fast enough after the Pi 5?
Sorry, I seriously do not understand why people demand that the Pi has to become a boring old PC, with one specific model released from the manufacturer, and lose the "choose the bits you want to assemble what fits you best" that we've had right from the beginning.
If you just want a closed black box that happens to run Linux, they exist and have done for ages.
My bestest laptop runs a 6th gen i5 with a massive 2 cores at 1.9 GHz, with a staggering 8GB of RAM.
And it more than fulfills my needs for a laptop, nicely complementing in portability (under 13 inch screen, btw) the desktop and servers that do any heavy lifting and bulk storage that might be needed.
If you rely on just a laptop to drag around all the time, *this* RISC-V box might not be the one for you, but then there are plenty of other laptops that you'll view with disdain. If you are champing at the bit for a RISC-V laptop then this does show that they are progressing; won't be too long now...
A reasonably well performing RISC V laptop with a friendly OS and the ability to work for long periods without external power would only need decent software application availability to finally make real inroads into the MS and Apple domination. Given that MS is taking decades to figure out how to adopt ARM for Windows, they will never be able to catch up on RISC V.
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> And no-one needs so-called "AI"
The NPUs are just more compute in your box.
Believing that they are only usable for the much-hyped LLMs is a failure of the imagination: consider that GPUs were only ever talked about in terms of FPS in Doom, or shading models in Tetris 3D[1].
But we know full well that GPUs were long used for other number-crunching, encouraged by things like CUDA to ease use and Numpy/CuPy to make it even easier to apply in your own field.
Even if you stick to running ML (or even just neural nets) on these things, there are other models than LLMs (especially intetesting given that even TLA gives this laptop's NPU's performance a sneering report as "not much compared to...". As noted in other comments, this week I am mostly interested in Birdnet, 'cos it is fun.
Of course, if you are sure you have absolutely no use for any of this, then, yes, "being forced" to buy and run them is a waste of resources.
Although, running them - hmm, looking at temperatures and the power pulled by my PC, it almost looks as though it is reducing power and shutting off units inside the CPU that are not in use at the moment. Funny, that.
Generally, I don't subscribe to the catastrophism heard in these comments that you will be "forced" to buy them and they will never be of any use to you; yes, everyone and his dog is boasting about how their latest high-end CPUs have this built in, but you do not have to buy the biggest. Okay, if you have chosen to go with a specific manufacturer and they *only* supply supply the biggest NPU they can foist on you, then you are not going to get a perfect fit for your desires all the time, but, hey, who does? Maybe reconsider the choice if it is too painful.
"But Windows will force this onto you" - and haven't we seen, in The Register, a long history of MS being a right pain in the arse and someone then showing you how to apply some Preparation-M to ease the suffering?
[1] sorry, I know very little about video games - remember the discussions but the actual games aren't memorable to me
Their web site has it listed at £313.00, but currently marked as out of stock. The old is £602.00. So, either they've pretty much halved the price, or that 313 will change when they get some stock. ...Or to be really cynical, maybe the whole thing is a publicity stunt and the new one will never be in stock.
I am wondering if Ubuntu was the best distro to showcase a RISC-V laptop? As although I assume most of the apps in the Ubuntu repos will be complied for RISC-V, Canonical are pushing more and more apps out as snaps now and dropping the Deb support, and looking on the Snapcraft.io store RISC-V isn't even given as an architecture option which suggest they haven't got anything on there compatible with RISC-V atm?
So maybe dump Ubuntu and install Debian on it? At least then you can be more certain that most of what you need should be RISC-V compiled in the Debian repos.
The choice of Ubuntu seems more like a brand-recognition move on the part of DeepComputing, coupled with a "we are cutting edge" from the Ubuntu side.
Once it is out, it'll soon become clear which other distros work - or are moving to work - with the machine (hmmmmm, Devuan, aaaaargh!).
But first, get it into the market with a recognised name attached (and that ain't gonna be Red Hat!)
Pretty much where it stood before: in the middle, with lots of people on every side who think they're better and might be, but all kind of relying on that middle bit for something. The point of supporting Ubuntu is that it means the things it derived from will probably work and the things that derive from it can probably be made to run on it somewhat easily.
I'm just tagging on in general agreement with this discussion.
Canonical have been very good about supplying unique individual images for the low-performance RISC-V boards we've seen so far. My guess is : they want Ubuntu to be associated with RISC-V for the lucrative China market - an independent, well-known, open source provider with a user-friendly UI.
I share the general thought that a more lightweight OS would be better. I seriously considered buying the recently launched BananaPi board which has the same processor, but then I learnt that the OSs haven't been optimised to take advantage of the processor. There's an Armbian image available for it, for example - which would be much better, imo - but the GUI wasn't working.
I see that Christopher Barnatt posted a video on his Explaining Computers YouTube channel yesterday. It shows Bianbu (a Debian based OS) running on the Banana Pi BPI-F3 (which has the same SpacemiT K1 processor).
It would seem to me to be a consumer-grade PC...
- It has LibreOffice, a Web browser and an email client,
- It didn't seem particularly sluggish,
- And he said it had been very stable.
So what's the definition of consumer-grade hardware, as distinct from a developer board?
There isn't a firm one, but to me, something I can give to a relative, then leave for another city, confident that anything that breaks is user error that I can talk them through on the phone. That means any of the following things would exclude it from the list.
1. GUI doesn't work.
2. GUI sometimes doesn't work.
3. Driver problems for any of the important hardware in the unit.
4. Spontaneous reboots of any kind.
5. Missing hardware support that should be there by the design of the hardware (E.G. some classes of USB device not supported).
6. Lack of battery management (if there is a battery).
7. Typical software cannot run quickly enough for average home use.
8. Updates frequently change something 1-7.
9. Updates aren't supported at all.
Sadly, there are various pieces of open hardware that miss one or more of these points. Those are things I'll occasionally consider buying, but I would not give to anyone else.
...with a "RISC-V" key where the right-hand Shift normally goes.
What a PITA when you're trying to touch type, eh?
Still, makes a change from those ones with a biohazard or virus key, or a Chinese flag in place of "Enter".
Hmm, a shot of just one corner of the keyboard. Done in a rather stylish fashion, with a large aperture and a well-manicured finger in shot. Not exactly an engineering specs quality photograph.
You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
Or, if it it does really look like that, that it could just be a funky marketing label applied to an otherwise perfectly normal shift key?
> You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
No, I don't think it's just a marketing mockup.
I think (as per the subject line) that it's one of those endless silly stock photos of Photoshopped keyboards which I was taking the piss out of in general!
I mean, imagine using this keyboard- you're typing away happily, your muscle memory goes for the "return" key where it would normally be and... oops. There's radiation everywhere, what a disaster. :-O
I love those pianocktail-style keyboards, that compose refreshments as you type your code, enhancing productivity multifold over AI, and with smaller environmental footprint!
>> You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
> No, I don't think it's just a marketing mockup. I think (as per the subject line) that it's one of those endless silly stock photos of Photoshopped keyboards
So this photoshopped photo is NOT a mockup done by marketing?
In that case, who is doing the photoshopping and releasing them in marketing materials - the tealady? Sneaking it onto the website whilst passing around the digestives, distracting the head of marketing with an artfully placed chocolate bourbon as he is asked to agree their final layout?
I was reading a report a few days ago where researchers were "fuzzing" executable code on RISC-V implementations and coming up with unexpected results from the CPU. I expect the CPUs are fine if executing clean code but the consequences could be more serious if untrusted binaries are run even as unprivileged programs. This isn't a big issue with embedded systems having fixed code but could be a problem in general computing environments.
Because of this I'd hold off getting a RISC-V laptop for a few months until things become a bit clearer.
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