A Chinese chip design company called SpacemiT has unveiled a new laptop that will be powered by the company’s K1 processor, which is an octa-core processor that should offer better-than ARM Cortex-A55 performance, support for 4K video, and a 2 TOPS NPU for hardware-accelerated AI features.
While the upcoming MUSE Book isn’t the first laptop with a RISC-V processor, there’s still not very much competition in this space, which makes the notebook interesting… even though it’s unclear if it will ever be available outside of China. It’s expected to run a Debian-based GNU/Linux distro called Bianbu OS and it’s positioned as a hardware development platform for folks looking to get work with RISC-V architecture.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
MUSE Book laptop features SpacemiT K1 octa-core RISC-V AI processor, up to 16GB RAM [CNX Software]
The MUSE Book is expected to sell for around $300 (in China, at least), and in addition to a standard set of laptop ports like USB-C, USB-A, headphone, and a microSD card reader, there are I2C, UART, PWM, and GPIO interfaces exposed on the side of the notebook. The Muse Book has a 14 inch, 1080p display and supports up to 16GB of LPDDR4x memory and eMMC storage.
SpacemiT is also developing other products including a mini PC called the MUSE Box, a MUSE Pi single-board computer, a MUSE Card system-on-a-module, and a MUSE Shelf server.Â
Pineberry Pi rebrands as Pineboards and launches 4 new Raspberry Pi HATs [bret.dk]
One of the new boards lets you connect a mini PCIe card to a Raspberry Pi 5. Another combines an M.2 2242 connector with audio features including a headphone jack, RCA audio jacks, and TI 112 dB Audio Stereo DAC (with a 32-bit, 384 KHz interface). There’s also an AI HAT with a Dual Edge TPU for up to 8 TOPS of performance. The uPCIty Lite is the most unusual, with an open ended PCIe X4 slot and support for external power supplies, allowing you to connect things like graphics cards.
Librem 5 Flash Sale at $599 [Purism]
When Purism launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 for its Librem 5 Linux smartphone, the company asked backers to spend $599 to reserve one. It took a few years for the phone to ship, and prices climbed as high as $1,299 last year. But now Purism is offering the phone for $599 again for a limited time. Just keep in mind that the specs haven’t changed, so this is still a pretty low-power device that runs an interesting Linux-based operating system called PureOS that allows you to run desktop apps as well as mobile apps… but there still aren’t nearly as many mobile apps for the platform as for Android or iOS.
The Arc browser arrives on Windows to take on Chrome and Edge [Engadget]
Available for Mac since 2022, the browser launched in beta for Windows late last year and now it’s generally available for Windows 11 users. It’s built on Chromium, but features a very different user interface with a sidebar for navigation, spaces for organizing links, and a split-screen view.
Announcing the ASUS Chromebook CZ Series [Asus]
Asus launches four new Chromebooks for the education market. The CZ11 series feature 11.6 inch HD displays, while the CZ12 have 12.2 inch FHD screens. All have MTK Kompanio 520 processors and up to 8GB RAM.
RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback [Android Authority]
Google removes Android Generic Kernel Image support for RISC-V architecture, which means it’ll be a lot tougher for device makers who want to port Android to RISC-V hardware moving forward, although Google says it’s not ending RISC-V support altogether.
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RE my previous comment about schematics, Dos just posted a link to this on Mastodon: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/l5-schematic
…not many phones on the market where you get this level of openness!
Looks like part of the reason for this price reduction might be that Purism is potentially just about to break even on their investment in the L5 and Liberty Phone; the indicator for that is that they could be on the verge of releasing the 3D CAD files, according to JCS in the Purism forum, and unless I missed something, that would be the final (?) schematics release necessary to meet Purism’s statement from quite a while ago about making the L5 as FLOSSH as possible once they’d recovered their investment in it.
Whilst definitely not a secure solution, it’s not quite correct to say that PureOS (or other #MobileLinux distros) lacks the number of apps available on Android since you can have access to those through running Waydroid on your distro.
Hopefully western reviewers can get their hands on that laptop. Would be pretty interesting to see how it stacks up.
Also oh boy another Chromium fork just what we needed /s
CNX review says that the device “cannot be turned on”, so it works about as one would expect from $300 Chinese RISX-V device.
The laptop shell appears to be from the same mold as the Nexdock 2, which is all cast aluminum and rather brittle. As in, “don’t chuck it in the trunk without some extra padding” brittle.
The K1 processor ought to be a more power efficient chip… I’m surprised that there’s not the mention of building a phone around it.
That it meets the RV22 specification makes it a really attractive device. I’ve read that it’s 20% more performant than an Arm Cortex A55, so it’s no slouch either.
Old fashioned as I am, I’d like to see it in the ‘Pod’ form factor, with a decent screen, and removable battery and storage… running converging lomiri. A man can wish.
With a ‘Pod’, you mean basically a “UMPC” or a pocket PC without a keyboard (or basically a smartphone “form” without integrated GSM)? Like for example those Gole PC devices or the form of a Noodle Pi?
There was also Dutch company that used to sell X86 in that form as well, but I can’t remember the name.
We also need to come up with a simple naming scheme to differentiate between such device forms with removable and non-removable parts (storage, battery, etc.). Perhaps we can simply use a prefix “modular” or “mod”. Maybe “Modular pod” or “Modpod” (hand-removable parts) vs just “Pod” (requires tools to disassemble).
I like the name you came up with because we need a name for that form factor other than unwieldy “smartphone without GSM” or other forms of hand waving, because that is probably the ultimate form factor for now.
Oh! I hadn’t come across the acronym UMPC – thank you. I used ‘Pod’ because the later Apple iPods were basically pocket PCs without a keyboard.
‘ModPod’ is very good though!