The rise of RISC: 2025 will be the year of the first quasi-mainstream RISC-V laptop, as confirmed by Framework CEO, but I don’t think it will be ready for primetime
- Modular laptop supplier Framework said it will launch a RISC-V product in 2025
- RISC-V is the equivalent of Linux for hardware, open source and free
- More and more tech companies are adopting it, but it has yet to become mainstream in a meaningful way
RISC-V, an open source ISA developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, has been steadily gaining attention as a customizable alternative to proprietary ISAs such as x86 and Arm.
The license-free approach allows manufacturers to create and customize processors without restrictions, leading to adoption in a variety of specialized applications, and this year could be an important step toward broader consumer adoption of the architecture.
For RISC-V to truly reach the mainstream, it still needs to gain traction in the laptop market. Hong Kong-based DeepComputing introduced the first RISC-V notebook, the Roma, in 2023, followed by the DC-Roma II in 2024, which came with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Although praised for its open source flexibility, the laptop’s performance lagged behind x86 and Arm alternatives, but compared to IEEE spectrumYuning Liang, CEO of DeepComputing, said the company’s upcoming DC-Roma III will close that gap with performance on par with the Arm Cortex-A76.
Enter Frame
Perhaps even more exciting is that DeepComputing is teaming up with Framework, a company known for its modular, repairable laptops, to create a RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13. Framework CEO Nirav Patel said: “If As we get a few generations further down the (software) stack, we start to see a line of sight to consumer-ready RISC-V in something like a laptop or even a phone.”
According to IEEE spectrum“While still aimed at early adopters and developers, it will be the most accessible and polished RISC-V laptop yet, and will be delivered to users with the same look and feel as the Framework laptops that support x86 use chips.”
After its initial announcement in June 2024, Framework launched a product page for the RISC-V motherboard, but it remains a placeholder.
DeepComputing site however, reveals more details, including images of the DC-Roma RISC-V motherboard for the Framework 13 laptop, one of which you can see at the top of the page. The board is powered by the RISC-V 64-bit quad-core CPU JH7110 and supports both Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 and Fedora 41.
RISC-V has already been embraced by a number of technology companies. Western Digital uses it for storage controllers, British startup Blueshift Memory’s BlueFive processor is built on an open-source RISC-V core, China’s XiangShan project has developed two RISC-V designs, and Ubitium has a universal RISC V processor that powers all computing workloads on a single, affordable chip.
We’ll likely see more details about Frameworks RISC-V Laptop 13 in the coming months, but given the current focus on developers and early adopters, along with performance limitations compared to established architectures like x86 and Arm, it seems fair to say that while this is undoubtedly a huge step forward for the architecture, but RISC-V is not yet ready for mainstream consumer adoption.