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 the original Roma came with Alibaba's own Linux-based OS, OpenAnolis. However, given that Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions, it's certainly a milestone for the upcoming instruction set architecture (ISA).

"As RISC-V is becoming a competitive ISA in multiple markets, porting Ubuntu to RISC-V to become the reference OS for early adopters was a natural choice," Ubuntu developer Canonical said in a statement.

DeepComputing's second RISC-V laptop features a SoC from a relatively obscure Chinese firm, SpacemiT. This isn't unusual for DeepComputing, which is based in Hong Kong and previously relied on an SoC from StarFive, a different Chinese chip designer, for the original Roma laptop.

That might sound strange to anyone following developments in RISC-V laptops, since it was initially reported even by RISC-V International itself that the Roma laptop used a chip from Alibaba. However, as far as The Register can tell, Roma shipped with StarFive's JH7110, which features a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.5 GHz, an integrated GPU made by Imagination, and no neural processing unit (NPU) at all, despite what DeepComputing's official product page says.

The Roma II uses SpacemiT's K1 SoC, which boasts eight SpacemiT 64-bit X60 cores (described here) running at up to 2 GHz, and an NPU with 2 TOPS. That's a big step up from the JH7110 in respect to both the CPU and NPU, though it's hard to say if the K1 is actually good in general considering how little is known about the chip's architecture. Plus, while eight cores is decent these days, a frequency of 2 GHz isn't that impressive.

For its part, SpacemiT told The Register: "The single computing power of K1 chip is more than 30 percent ahead of similar Arm chips, and the power consumption is reduced by more than 20 percent." We're not sure what the firm means by "similar Arm chips," and we've asked for clarification.

Probably not an AI powerhouse

Additionally, the 2 TOPS NPU doesn't seem like it can really back up Canonical's claims of "powerful AI capabilities." For reference, 2 TOPS is small even compared to the old Google Edge TPU with its 4 TOPS, and nowhere near Hailo's latest, low-end Hailo-8L, which features in the Raspberry Pi AI Kit.

The gap is wider when compared to somewhat recent chips from companies like Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm.

Although TOPS aren't everything, just two won't allow the Roma II laptop to run AI models particularly fast. Plus, the laptop only comes with up to 16 GB of LPDDR4X memory, and since a large language model (LLM) generally demands 1 GB per billion parameters, users might be limited to running really small models like LLaMa 3 8B at best.

Regardless of actual performance, DeepComputing and Canonical can at least claim to have achieved a first, one that's especially important for RISC-V's ambitions in the PC market. RISC-V has to start somewhere, and being able to offer the full Linux experience in a regular laptop is a significant step. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/06/13/riscv_laptop_ubuntu/