At the pace every PC component is becoming quite expensive it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that my next CPU will be RISC-V based. /s (kind of)
PS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
The board itself looks pretty spartan, at least compared to any other x86 ITX board I’ve seen in the last ten years. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is audio jacks.
Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board?
As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.
The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.
To add a 2x20 pin (IDE ribbon cable) interface like a Pi: add a USB-to-2x20 pin board, use an RP2040/RP2350 (Pi Pico (uf2 bootloader) over serial over USB or Bluetooth or WiFi; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967
Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling.
For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive.
Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.
Like no UEFI, no PC architecture (every board is different), got to x86 complexity (a miriad of instruction sets and extensions) in just a couple of years, needs a special linux kernel to boot with support for newer versions not planed.
[EDIT: I may be the one with the reading comprehension problem. I think they are saying that ARM having better tooling is a wrong. I agree. I leave my comment to own my shame.]
Did you even bother to click the link that this story was about?
The Milk-V Titan supports UEFI, ACPI, CPPC, and SMBIOS. The board is otherwise bog standard PC architecture from the PCIe to the form factor (ITX). You can boot multiple Linux distros on it out-of-the-box. They are pushing support into the Linux kernel mainline.
The Titan supports RVA22 + virtualization (the H extension) which you could also frame as RVA23 minus the vector extension. Another way of saying RVA23 is to say that it is RISC-V with the same feature set as X86-64 v4. Why did I have to say "v4" when talking about x86? Because of the myriad of extensions offered on x86-64 that differ between v1, v2, v3, and v4.
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage
Not sure about the exact percentage but your basic point is valid. Adding "at this stage" makes it hard to argue with you.
> ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases
It may be 100% of use cases today. Facts are facts. You probably need to add "at this stage" again though.
> ARM ... has far more choices on the market
Very much so. Again, today...
That said, it is worth noting that almost all ARM "choices" are licensing the same small number of core designs from ARM. Already there are beginning to be enough RISC-V suppliers that some users may like the RISC-V options better in some niches (see automotive and some edge AI for example).
> ARM ... has ... much better performance
Absolutely. But that may not stay true for long. RISC-V CPUs will appear this year that equal or exceed CPU designs from ARM themselves in performance (eg. Ascalon). And we will see where things go from there. It will be a while before RISC-V beats Apple Silicon of course. And even once RISC-V gets there on performance, ARM may lead on price/performance for a while. That is, until RISC-V volumes start to equal or exceed other ISAs...
> greater software ecosystem and tooling
On the Open Source side at least, this is already a weak point. You can get multiple Linux distributions for RISC-V today, including from critical players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. The Linux kernel has a tonne of dedicated RISC-V support. Even though there are hardly any RISC-V chips with vector extensions in the wild, you already see Open Source packages adding support for these extensions. Both Clang and GCC have great RISC-V support. There are already x86-64 emulation layers for RISC-V. Ecosystems like QEMU support RISC-V. Even niche projects like Haiku OS support RISC-V. And on the hardware side, RISC-V players like Tenstorrent are advancing Open Source tooling and toolkits like crazy. The ecosystem is great now and getting better every day which, given the complete lack of real RISC-V hardware on desktops and servers, shows you how excited the industry is for RISC-V and how much support it is going to get.
Remaining gaps in ecosystem and tooling will close quickly. Starting with the board that we are discussing here, Titan, RISC-V is entering an era of being good enough to actually use. Linux and the universe of software associated with it are going to support RISC-V rather robustly. And while some RISC-V suppliers will follow the ARM path, many RISC-V suppliers are being good about getting support into the Linux mainline.
I expect ecosystem and tooling to be better for RISC-V than for ARM in general (though both will be great).
> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different"
> _false_
False.
Here we disagree. But again, it may mostly be about the percentage. Because most users just want something that runs their software at the highest speed for the lowest price. And see above for how we agree that it will be a few years yet before people that do not otherwise care about RISC-V will find it the best option based on simple price/performance (though I do think that day will come).
But there are many "real" benefits to RISC-V.
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is an ecosystem that cannot be truly dominated by a single player or even by a small few. I wish RISC-V suppliers great success, and many will find niches that make them rich. But the amount of market power they can ever wield is limited by competition. I for one want this to be my future and I cannot wait to get on the train.
This is just my opinion but I think RISC-V is very well designed. I want to build software for the platform. I want to use assembly language on it. It seems much more pleasant than x86-64 and even ARM. This is a big benefit to me.
I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
> I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance
No one with any true knowledge of RISC-V would ever make such a claim. Know-nothing marketers might, I suppose, but why would you listen to them rather than to actual insiders?
The current newest RISC-V boards (Megrez and Titan and whatever the upcoming SpacemiT K3 ones are called) are solidly in mid-range Core 2 territory, especially K3 which has SMID/vectors which the other fast chips currently don't.
Older boards using JH7110, TH1520, K1 are closer to Pentium III or PowerPC G4 though with 4 or 8 cores instead of 1, but without an equivalent to the SSE or Altivec SIMD those old, or if they have it with near zero software using it.
Late this year is expected to see RISC-V products with performance in Skylake to Zen 2 performance levels, verging on M1 (M1 IPC but lower MHz).
> they are much slower than similar priced arm systems
Irrelevant to the technology. They are competitive with similar µarch (five years older) Arm systems.
Price can never be competitive (assuming no deliberate loss-making) until production and sales volumes are similar. Which can't happen until performance matches current Arm and X86 performance -- which RISC-V is converging with quite quickly, certainly by 2030.
i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?
RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward.
High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.
Indeed. With Ascalon, we will exit this year with RISC-V chips as fast as anything available from ARM themselves (eg. not Qualcomm or Apple Silicon).
The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano.
That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance.
As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.
25 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 64.7 ms ] threadPS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
conda-forge/conda-forge > "RISC-V Support?" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...
Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board?
https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-o...
The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
What is the difference in performance?
Titan hw docs: https://milkv.io/docs/titan/getting-started/hardware
To add a 2x20 pin (IDE ribbon cable) interface like a Pi: add a USB-to-2x20 pin board, use an RP2040/RP2350 (Pi Pico (uf2 bootloader) over serial over USB or Bluetooth or WiFi; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967
The SpaceMIT K3 is rumored to be announced at FOSDEM (January 31, 2026)
https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1qdvw4l/k3_x100_a100...
Also at FOSDEM, mainline support for Orange Pi RV2 https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VF9CHG-mainline-suppo...
https://milkv.io/jupiter2
https://deepcomputing.io/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-unveil...
There are zero SoCs currently available to buy with RVA23 support, so that's not a mark against the RV2 if you want to buy a machine today.
Initial RVA23 machines available later this year are also likely to cost at least 5x to 10x more.
> meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it
There is currently no other hardware you could buy instead that will run that distro.
Check back in April or so, when Ubuntu 26.04 is actually officially released.
NB I'm currently using Ubuntu 26.04 on RVA23 hardware, but it is remote ssh access to a test board at the manufacturer.
For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive.
Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.
Agreed. Boards like this are helpful for getting RISC-V to the next stage, where it could make sense for more users.
Like no UEFI, no PC architecture (every board is different), got to x86 complexity (a miriad of instruction sets and extensions) in just a couple of years, needs a special linux kernel to boot with support for newer versions not planed.
Yeah, great software, great tooling. /s
Did you even bother to click the link that this story was about?
The Milk-V Titan supports UEFI, ACPI, CPPC, and SMBIOS. The board is otherwise bog standard PC architecture from the PCIe to the form factor (ITX). You can boot multiple Linux distros on it out-of-the-box. They are pushing support into the Linux kernel mainline.
The Titan supports RVA22 + virtualization (the H extension) which you could also frame as RVA23 minus the vector extension. Another way of saying RVA23 is to say that it is RISC-V with the same feature set as X86-64 v4. Why did I have to say "v4" when talking about x86? Because of the myriad of extensions offered on x86-64 that differ between v1, v2, v3, and v4.
Honestly, what the hell are you talking about?
Not sure why anybody would downvote your comment
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage
Not sure about the exact percentage but your basic point is valid. Adding "at this stage" makes it hard to argue with you.
> ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases
It may be 100% of use cases today. Facts are facts. You probably need to add "at this stage" again though.
> ARM ... has far more choices on the market
Very much so. Again, today...
That said, it is worth noting that almost all ARM "choices" are licensing the same small number of core designs from ARM. Already there are beginning to be enough RISC-V suppliers that some users may like the RISC-V options better in some niches (see automotive and some edge AI for example).
> ARM ... has ... much better performance
Absolutely. But that may not stay true for long. RISC-V CPUs will appear this year that equal or exceed CPU designs from ARM themselves in performance (eg. Ascalon). And we will see where things go from there. It will be a while before RISC-V beats Apple Silicon of course. And even once RISC-V gets there on performance, ARM may lead on price/performance for a while. That is, until RISC-V volumes start to equal or exceed other ISAs...
> greater software ecosystem and tooling
On the Open Source side at least, this is already a weak point. You can get multiple Linux distributions for RISC-V today, including from critical players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. The Linux kernel has a tonne of dedicated RISC-V support. Even though there are hardly any RISC-V chips with vector extensions in the wild, you already see Open Source packages adding support for these extensions. Both Clang and GCC have great RISC-V support. There are already x86-64 emulation layers for RISC-V. Ecosystems like QEMU support RISC-V. Even niche projects like Haiku OS support RISC-V. And on the hardware side, RISC-V players like Tenstorrent are advancing Open Source tooling and toolkits like crazy. The ecosystem is great now and getting better every day which, given the complete lack of real RISC-V hardware on desktops and servers, shows you how excited the industry is for RISC-V and how much support it is going to get.
Remaining gaps in ecosystem and tooling will close quickly. Starting with the board that we are discussing here, Titan, RISC-V is entering an era of being good enough to actually use. Linux and the universe of software associated with it are going to support RISC-V rather robustly. And while some RISC-V suppliers will follow the ARM path, many RISC-V suppliers are being good about getting support into the Linux mainline.
I expect ecosystem and tooling to be better for RISC-V than for ARM in general (though both will be great).
> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different"
> _false_
False.
Here we disagree. But again, it may mostly be about the percentage. Because most users just want something that runs their software at the highest speed for the lowest price. And see above for how we agree that it will be a few years yet before people that do not otherwise care about RISC-V will find it the best option based on simple price/performance (though I do think that day will come).
But there are many "real" benefits to RISC-V.
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is an ecosystem that cannot be truly dominated by a single player or even by a small few. I wish RISC-V suppliers great success, and many will find niches that make them rich. But the amount of market power they can ever wield is limited by competition. I for one want this to be my future and I cannot wait to get on the train.
This is just my opinion but I think RISC-V is very well designed. I want to build software for the platform. I want to use assembly language on it. It seems much more pleasant than x86-64 and even ARM. This is a big benefit to me.
Similarly, RISC-V as an ISA and...
No one with any true knowledge of RISC-V would ever make such a claim. Know-nothing marketers might, I suppose, but why would you listen to them rather than to actual insiders?
The current newest RISC-V boards (Megrez and Titan and whatever the upcoming SpacemiT K3 ones are called) are solidly in mid-range Core 2 territory, especially K3 which has SMID/vectors which the other fast chips currently don't.
Older boards using JH7110, TH1520, K1 are closer to Pentium III or PowerPC G4 though with 4 or 8 cores instead of 1, but without an equivalent to the SSE or Altivec SIMD those old, or if they have it with near zero software using it.
Late this year is expected to see RISC-V products with performance in Skylake to Zen 2 performance levels, verging on M1 (M1 IPC but lower MHz).
> they are much slower than similar priced arm systems
Irrelevant to the technology. They are competitive with similar µarch (five years older) Arm systems.
Price can never be competitive (assuming no deliberate loss-making) until production and sales volumes are similar. Which can't happen until performance matches current Arm and X86 performance -- which RISC-V is converging with quite quickly, certainly by 2030.
The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano.
That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance.
As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.