Milk-V Goes After LLMs on the Desktop with Its Powerful 16-Core RISC-V Oasis Motherboard

Chinese RISC-V specialist Milk-V has announced a partnership with Sophgo to release an almost single-board computer (SBC) built around the company's new SG2380 — with 16 desktop-class SiFive P670 RISC-V processing cores, an Imagination Technologies graphics processor, and a dedicated neural network coprocessor delivering up to 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS).

"We are excited to unveil, in collaboration with Sophgo, the Milk-V Oasis, powered by the SG2380," Milk-V announced of its latest design. "This innovation marks the debut of a truly desktop-grade RISC-V PC in the convenient mini-ITX form factor. The journey of the SG2380 SoC has officially begun. Expect the silicon to be at your fingertips in nine months, and the Milk-V Oasis in just 10 months."

Sophgo's SG2380 is a beastly chip, boasting a total of 16 SiFive P670 64-bit RISC-V cores — 12 of which are "performance cores" running at up to 2.5GHz and four of which are "efficiency cores" running at up to 1.6GHz. To this, Sophgo has added an Imagination AXT-16-512 "desktop-level" graphics processor and a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) based around eight SiFive X280 RISC-V cores and its own tensor processing unit (TPU), delivering a claimed 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision.

While the SG2380 is a system-on-chip, though, the Oasis device Milk-V is building around it won't be a true single-board computer: instead, it will house the SoC but require the addition of RAM to make it fully-functional — supporting up to 64GB of LPDDR5 running at 5,500 mega-transfers per second (MT/s). Elsewhere on the board are two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, with an additional head for front-panel USB 2.0, a USB Type-C connector with DisplayPort support, two HDMI connectors supporting 4k60 displays, embedded DisplayPort (eDP) with touch support, and two MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) and Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connectors.

The Oasis design also includes two 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet ports, three M.2 slots — one E-key for an optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio, one B-key for an optional 4G/5G cellular modem, and one M-key for a PCIe Gen. 3 NVMe solid-state drive, as an option for high-speed storage along with a UFS module slot, a microSD slot, and four SATA ports — and a PCI Express x16-mechanical x6-electrical slot. Rounding the board's feature set out is eight digital input/output (DIO) pins and two CAN buses.

Sophgo positions its SG2380 as ideal for everything from locally-running large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA-65B to driving a desktop-class experience for general-purpose computing — or even offering a high-performance low-power option for wearables. The mini-ITX format of the Milk-V Oasis might be compact by desktop standards, but it's not quite wearable-level — though with the connectivity the company is including there'll be no shortage of use-cases for its device.

More information on the new Oasis is available in the Milk-V forum; the company has teamed up with Arace to open pre-orders for the board for $120, which includes a 20 per cent discount over the planned retail price. Those ordering, though, should be aware that the hardware doesn't exist yet — and that the company's plan to have the device shipping just one month after the Sophgo SG2380 enters general availability could prove overly optimistic.