Upcoming RISC-V laptop promises free silicon upgrades
The world's first laptop to use the RISC-V open source instruction set architecture (ISA) will reportedly start shipping in September.
The Roma laptop is available for preorder on Xcalibyte's website, but the site merely takes interested parties' information without providing much detail or any pricing. The laptop will start shipping in September, according to spokespeople from Xcalibyte, which did system tuning for the laptop; a company called DeepComputing, which engineered the laptop; and RISC-V International in a report Friday from The Register.
According to the announcement from DeepComputing (which shares the same CEO with Xcalibyte, The Register reported), the Roma uses an unspecified quad-core processor with a 28 nm or, for the "pro" version, 12 nm node in a system-on-module (SoM) package. There's also an Arm SecurCore SC300 security enclave processor, an unnamed GPU and neural processing unit, and a feature accelerator. The system-on-chip's motherboard is supposed to be user-upgradeable, too. DeepComputing's announcement said that owners of a Roma will have access to SoC and SoM upgrades for free.
