Mark Himelstein, Chief Technology Officer, RISC-V International, and Dr. Philipp Tomsich, Chief Technologist & Founder, VRULL GmbH hinted that we may see a RISC-V laptop in 2022 in a presentation entitled “From Technology to Product – Maturing the RISC-V Ecosystem” with one of the slides showing what could be a RISC-V laptop prototype and The Register suspected it might come from the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) since it was planning to build 2,000 RISC-V laptops by the end of 2022.
But there’s at least one more potential RISC-V laptop project coming our way with StarFive asking users to fill out a survey about a laptop, mini PC, or development board/SBC based on a RISC-V SoC with performance comparable to Rockchip RK3588 or MediaTek MT8192 octa-core Cortex-A76/Cortex-A55 processors.
The hardware and software specifications of the device will depend on the answers to the survey. First, it’s not sure we’ll get a RISC-V laptop since respondents will first be asked for the type of product, so we may end up with a fairly powerful RISC-V mini PC or/and SBC first instead.
You’ll also be asked for your use case, preferred Linux operating system (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, others), desktop environment, as well as software packages you may need such as LibreOffice, Chromium or Firefox browsers, GIMP, Thunderbird, and so on. As a side note, they’ll select 5 winners from the respondents and send them on VisionFive RISC-V SBC with the results announced sometime in July on RVSpace community. If you don’t need to enter the draw, you do not need to leave your name and email to complete the survey.
It will likely take a lot of time before such hardware can be developed, and if StarFive is about the complete the design of such a powerful RISC-V processor (which has not been formally announced), the earliest would probably be H2 2023 before getting a somewhat usable RISC-V Linux laptop or mini PC. It should take even longer if the design of the processor is in its early stage.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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