Milk-V Teases Five New RISC-V Designs, From an Eight-Node Cluster to the RuyiBook Laptop
Whether you need nearly 160 TOPS of INT8 compute for edge-AI and ML work or a laptop with an open source processor, Milk-V has you covered.
RISC-V specialist Milk-V has announced no fewer than five new products, including a single-board computer targeting artificial intelligence workloads, NVIDIA Jetson-compatible systems-on-modules, an eight-node cluster board, and what it claims is "the world's first laptop powered by an open source RISC-V processor," The RuyiBook.
Taking the RuyiBook as the first device on which to focus, the laptop is a partnership between the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS), Inchi, and Milk-V, and is powered by the second-generation XiangShan Nanhu — a Chinese chip built around the RV64GCBK variant of the free and open source RISC-V architecture, the design of which is made available under the Mulan PSL v2 license. In the case of the RuyiBook, it's clocked at an impressive 2.5GHz and paired with a closed-source AMD RX 550 graphics processor and 8GB of DDR5 memory.
The hardware is housed in a traditional clamshell laptop chassis with a 14" LCD display and an HDMI port supporting up to 4k resolution external displays. There are two USB 3.0 ports, two 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports, a keyboard, and a touchpad that, the company says, can recognize nine different gestures. What there isn't, just yet, is a price: as with the company's other announcements, the RuyiBook isn't up for sale quite yet — though Milk-V has opened a mailing list with the promise of "early access."
The company's Megrez single-board computer, meanwhile, is built around the ESWIN EIC7700X system-on-chip — chosen for its surprisingly hefty neural network coprocessor, which can accelerate on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads to the tune of 19.95 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision. That's alongside a quad-core SiFive P550 RV64GC processor running at 1.6GHz, an integrated Imagination A-series graphics processor, and multimedia blocks capable of H.265 encoding at 8k25 or 13 simultaneous 1080p30 streams and decoding at 8k50 or 32 simultaneous 1080p30 streams.
Elsewhere on the board is a choice of 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of LPDDR5 memory, an M.2 M-key connector for a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD with two lanes of PCI Express Gen. 2, an eMMC connector, and a microSD Card slot. There's a single gigabit Ethernet port, an on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module, and a PCI Express slot for expansion — delivering four lanes of PCIe Gen. 3 over a physical eight-lane connector. There's a single HDMI 2.0 port, four USB 3.0 ports, and a further two USB 3.0 ports available on a front-panel connector, along with analog audio input and output and dedicated UART and JTAG debugging headers — though no general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are mentioned.
The Milk-V Cluster 08 is, as the name suggests, a carrier board for an eight-node cluster — itself powered by the Wuhan Binary Semiconductor Corp. FSL1030 RISC-V L2 Ethernet switch, delivering 32Gb/s over the who cluster and up to 16Gb/s to individual nodes. There's a dedicated single-board computer management controller, dubbed the Milk-V BMC 08, and slots for eight node modules designed to be pin-compatible with the NVIDIA Jetson family — though Milk-V would much rather you use one of its own in-house modules instead.
The first of these is the Milk-V Jupiter NX, designed as a RISC-V alternative to the NVIDIA Jetson Nano — and pin-compatible with the Jetson Nano Developer Board. There's a Spacemit K1 or M1 system-on-chip on board, which the manufacturer rates as up to 2GHz across its eight 64-bit cores, with a 2 TOPS neural coprocessor and an Imagination BXE-2-32 graphics processor. The module includes on-board Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5 radios, an eMMC module for storage, and dual-screen 1920×1440p60 display outputs over HDMI and MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) with one four- and two two-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) ports for input.
For those who need more power, the Milk-V Megrez NX is designed as an alternative to the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX. Using the same ESWIN EIC7700X as the Megrez SBC, this modulized variant delivers the same CPU, GPU, and 19.95 TOPS INT8 neural network acceleration — and, as with the Jupiter NX, includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and eMMC storage on board. Fitted into the Milk-V Cluster 08, eight of these top-end modules would deliver a claimed 159.6 TOPS of INT8 compute from the neural processors alone, Milk-V says.
While the company is talking up the features of its new designs, though, it's less keen to mention pricing and availability. Those interested in any of the above can sign up to find out when more information is available on the respective product pages of the RuyiBook, Megrez, Cluster 08, Megrez NX, and Jupiter NX.