Daily Archives: 2022-10-05

Alibaba T-Head TH1520 RISC-V processor to power the ROMA laptop

Source: OSNews

Article note: Dang. It's a $5000 platform dev machine, and there are legitimate security concerns about Chinese-state-interest-all-the-way-down systems, but that is a shockingly credible RISC-V "real PC" class machine, years ahead of any reasonable expectation.

The ROMA RISC-V laptop was announced this summer with an unnamed RISC-V processor with GPU and NPU. We now know it will be the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core Xuantie C910 processor clocked at up to 2.5GHz with a 4 TOPS NPU, and support for 64-bit DDR at up 4266 MT.

The TH1520 is born out of the Wujian 600 platform unveiled by Alibaba in August 2022, and is capable of running desktop-level applications such as Firefox browser and LibreOffice office suite on OpenAnolis open-source Linux-based operating system launched by Alibaba in 2020.

This is a very important first step into ‘normal’ computing for RISC-V, but availability and pricing are, for now, major barriers here. I’d love to get my hands on one of these, but at these prices, that’s a massive ask.

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