RISC-V is more like 1-3 years away from CPUs existing that have competitive performance in datacenter workloads. Not decades.

But they won’t be manufactured in Europe. Getting fabs up and running is indeed something that takes a very long time.

A lot of the AI marketing you see for various devices might be meant to appease and interest investors rather than potential users. Or the result of some marketing person or executive being convinced that absolutely every product needs to have an AI angle.

Even so, not every “AI” workload needs to be running the biggest local LLMs you can at the highest speeds possible.

Robotics often need low-power chips that can handle computer vision, for example, and that’s a use-case that Nvidia Jetson seems to focus on, to great success, with only 8-16GB RAM. SpacemiT’s engineers seem to be aiming at that market considering they put K3 on modules that are pin-compatible with Jetson NX carrier boards, and gave it dedicated cores for matrix and vector processing.

Regardless whether they manage to succeed at all for AI uses, K3 is designed for that. Maybe it makes more sense for that domestically in China, where they would want drop-in substitutes for less reliance on Nvidia imports.

For anyone else, it’s a RISC-V devboard that manages to be faster than any others despite the low power budget and having so much of the silicon wasted on AI stuff instead of more general-purpose cores. It’s not really designed for general dev use but the alternatives just happen to be so much worse for now.

This (or frankly any other single-board computer releasing this decade) absolutely isn’t something that’d make sense to use as an inference server that you access from a desktop that already has a GPU and plenty of memory.

It’s not even remotely in the same product category as GB10. More akin to a Jetson NX: a low-power device that can do a little local processing for contexts where it doesn’t have a reliable connection to a more powerful server, though even for that purpose it has lower performance than Orin. Probably would’ve been substantially cheaper than Orin if not for the RAM crisis.

I’d guess most of the actual users of this thing probably will ignore the AI cores entirely and just use it as a RISC-V development board. It’s the first hardware that supports RVA23, which is the set of ISA extensions that most distros will treat as the baseline requirement for RISC-V. Also the fastest RISC-V CPU to date, meaning faster code compile (if you can’t cross-compile) and automated tests than any other RISC-V system.

This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn’t meant for laptop use.

Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn’t need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.