Framework Laptops Get Modular Makeover With RISC-V Main Board

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Framework CEO Nirav Patel had one of the bravest tech demos that we've seen at a conference yet -- modifying a Framework Laptop from x86 to RISC-V live on stage. In the five-minute duration of one of the Ubuntu Summit's Lightning Talks, he opened up a Framework machine, removed its motherboard, installed a RISC-V-powered replacement, reconnected it, and closed the machine up again. All while presenting the talk live, and pretty much without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. It was an impressive performance, and you can watch it yourself at the 8:56:30 mark in the video recording.

Now DeepComputing is taking orders for the DC-ROMA board, at least to those in its early access program. The new main board is powered by a StarFive JH7110 System-on-Chip. (Note: there are two tabs on the page, for both the JH7110 and JH7100, and we can't link directly to the latter.) CNX Software has more details about the SoC. Although the SoC has six CPU cores, two are dedicated processors, making it a quad-core 64-bit device. The four general-purpose cores are 64-bit and run at up to 1.5 GHz. It supports 8 GB of RAM and eMMC storage. [...]

In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance. However, this is a real, usable, general-purpose computer, based on an open instruction set. That's no mean feat, and it's got more than enough performance for less demanding work. It's also the first third-party main board for the Framework hardware, which is another welcome achievement. The company has now delivered several new generations of hardware, including a 16-inch model, and continues to upgrade its machines' specs.

Nice stunt

[ffkom]

Not many will actually want a RISC-V processor at this time, but it sure demonstrates the astonishing level of flexibility of their laptop "framework". That said, the general progress in laptop performance is so slow in recent years that I don't feel an urge to replace even 10 years+ old ones.

Re:Nice stunt

[grmoc]

I've broken various bits of my laptops over the years.
Screens, keyboards, and usb ports being the most common.
Framework has made it easy to deal with that.

Screen upgrades too-- it was nice to upgrade from 60hz to 120hz without having to throw a whole laptop away. .. and when I did upgrade from an older, more power-hungry intel CPU to a AMD one, I got to reuse the intel CPU to make a proxmox "box" (is a blade a box?) to use for other things.

It isn't perfect, but being able to upgrade and fix has been quite nice.

Gotta say.. Overall, I've been impressed, and hope to see more of the same in the future.

Well slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

This what you've always been bitching about. What excuses are you going to give as to why you won't buy it?

Only thing missing from the live demonstration.

[PseudoThink]

Like the audience member shouted out afterward, "let's see it turn on!" Impressive demo nonetheless, but that would have made it doubly so.

The amazing power of rehersal.

[SeaFox]

...he opened up a Framework machine, removed its motherboard, installed a RISC-V-powered replacement, reconnected it, and closed the machine up again. All while presenting the talk live, and pretty much without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. It was an impressive performance

Yes. The amazing power of doing something he likely practiced a half-dozen times in the week leading up to the event.

but will it run IRIX ?

[Zurk]

ive been waiting for a good board to run IRIX on since SGI discontnued the MIPS line which later transitioned to RISC V.
i'd love to have a native IRIX booting machine without resorting to MAME and its half broken MIPS emulation.

RISC-V laptops are sorely needed

[williamyf]

But there are better RISC-V laptops out there.

You see, even Linus (of Torvald's fame, not the Framework shareholder) said himself that one of the most important things for SW development (OSs included) is self-hosting. So, in order for a RISC-V ecosystem to develop faster, we need more RISC-V machines.

The good thing about the Framework RISC-V laptop is that, as the RISC-V architecture progresses and matures, one can cheaply change the Mobo and reap the benefits.

But, as of now, there are better RISC-V laptops. Some, in particular, include GPIO and I2S pins accesible from outside, for example de DCROMA or the SPACEMINT (so, not only good for development in general, but also for development for embeded in particular)

Can it boot any distro?

[caseih]

Hopefully the RISC V computers we see come to market (I mean real computers, not SBCs) will embrace some sort of open firmware to make it possible to boot easily from any device, and provide a means of enumerating hardware without devicetree. This RISC V board for framework is impressive, but I hope that it will allow installing any generic distro such as Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc, rather than just some specific Ubuntu fork. I also hope we'll see the same thing from ARM at some point. Until that happens, to me the Intel-compatible family of CPUs are the only way to go for general-purpose Linux computing.

Meanwhile I have all the same reservations about RISC V that I have about ARM. Much hay is made on slashdot and other open source communities that RISC V is open source. Even some companies have this idea they can just download a core and get someone to build a CPU out of it for them. The reality is RISC V is just as proprietary and encumbered as ARM is in most incarnations. While the core instruction set is license-free, unless you want to develop your own chip from scratch the cores available today for use in your custom SoC are all licensed. The end effect is it's not all that different from ARM.