Milk-V Opens Orders for Its Edge AI 20 TOPS RISC-V Megrez Single-Board Computer, Starting at $199

RISC-V specialist Milk-V has opened orders for its Megrez single-board computer, a high-performance device designed for artificial intelligence at the edge with an ESWIN EIC7700X system-on-chip, and a near-20 tera-operations per second (TOPS) neural coprocessor, at its heart.

"Milk-V Megrez is a mini-ITX device powered by the ESWIN EIC7700X," the company explains of its latest launch. "It features a built-in quad-core SiFive P550 CPU, specifically designed for RISC-V native development. With a high-performance GPU, it delivers a smooth desktop experience, while its 19.95 TOPS NPU provides exceptional local AI capabilities. The Milk-V Megrez marks a significant milestone in RISC-V desktop technology."

First teased by the company back in August, the Megrez is a bigger beast than most single-board computers — using a mini-ITX footprint compatible with common PC cases and power supplies. The ESWIN EIC7700X system-on-chip at the board's heart includes four 64-bit SiFive P550 performance cores running at 1.8GHz, implementing the RV64GBCH variant of the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, a 3D-capable graphics processor, and a neural coprocessor.

It's this latter feature that has Milk-V positioning the Megrez as an "AI PC," delivering a claimed 19.95 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute for on-device machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision workloads at INT8 precision, with INT16 and FP16 supported at a lower 9.95 TOPS each. There's an option for 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of LPDDR5 memory, shared with the GPU, and storage expansion through microSD, optional eMMC module, and SATA 3.0.

Elsewhere on the board are four USB 3.0 ports, plus two front-panel ports, an M.2 E-key slot for an optional wireless module, another M.2 port delivering a SATA connection shared with the physical SATA port, and an x8-physical four-lane PCI Express Gen. 3 slot — suitable for the addition of a high-performance network card, graphics card, or AI accelerator, driver support allowing. There's an HDMI 2.0 port, analog audio in and out, UART and JTAG debug capabilities, and two gigabit Ethernet ports.

While Milk-V didn't disclose pricing at the time of unveiling, it has now put the board up for sale through its partner Arace — priced at $199 for the 16GB variant or $269 for the 32GB variant, both including a bundled heatsink and fan assembly and with the first 50 sales of the 32GB model including a free 256GB SATA SSD and M.2 Wi-Fi module; the promised 8GB variant had not been listed at the time of writing.