First RISC-V laptop expected to go on sale in September

The world’s first laptop to use the open source instruction set architecture (ISA) RISC-V will reportedly go on sale in September.

The Roma laptop is available for pre-order on the Xcalibyte website , but the site is just taking information from interested parties without providing details or any pricing. According to The Register on Friday, the laptop will ship in September, according to representatives from Xcalibyte, which tuned the system for the laptop, DeepComputing, which developed the laptop, and RISC-V International.

According to a post from DeepComputing (which has the same CEO as Xcalibyte, The Register reports), Roma uses an unspecified quad-core processor with a 28nm or, for the “pro”version, 12nm node in a system-per-module package (SoM). There’s also an Arm SecurCore SC300 security enclave processor, an unnamed GPU and neural processing unit, and a feature accelerator.

It is assumed that the system-on-a-chip motherboard can also be upgraded by the user. DeepComputing’s announcement says that Roma owners will get free access to SoC and SoM updates.

“The Roma platform will be useful to developers who want to test their software natively running on RISC-V and should be able to easily port code developed on this platform to embedded systems,”said Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V International, at RISC. Blog post -V International on Friday.

RISC-V processors are generally less powerful than the more common x86-64 or Arm chips, but they have more open intellectual property so it’s easier for anyone to build RISC-V processors. We have seen RISC-V used in products such as the BeageBoard V single board computer, embedded processors and development kits, and enterprise workloads such as high performance computing. But Roma is the first RISC-V product to be presented as a laptop.

“This design is an important link between development boards and RISC-V-based business laptops that will be used for day-to-day work,” Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, said in a blog post for the nonprofit.

In addition to its RISC-V heritage, Roma has up to 16GB of LPDDR4x memory and 256GB of memory. It also supports “most”versions of Linux, according to DeepComputing.

While RISC-V ISA based PCs are far from the mainstream, Roma represents a small step towards features beyond just x86 and Arm. SiFive, which licenses RISC-V-based CPUs, has demonstrated microcontrollers that could lead to support for phones and laptops. And in March, the company told The Register that its customers could release a RISC-V SoC for PCs by 2025.