Mini-ITX mainboard with a slightly more powerful RISC-V processor
The Chinese company Milk-V is expanding its range of RISC-V hardware with another Mini-ITX board: The Megrez is powered by an Eswin EIC7700X.
Milk-V Megrez with Radeon graphics card; unfortunately there is only this blurred video screenshot so far.
(Image: X / Milk-V)
At the RISC-V Summit North America event, the Chinese company Milk-V demonstrated a new mini-ITX mainboard with a RISC-V processor. The Milk-V Megrez ran there with an AMD Radeon 7900XTX graphics card under Linux. The processor is an Eswin EIC7700X, which uses four RV64GC cores of the SiFive P550 type. An AI computing unit (Neural Processing Unit, NPU) is also integrated, which is designed to perform almost 20 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with INT8 integers and half that with INT16 or FP16.
Milk-V has already set up a product website for the Megrez, but has not yet announced a delivery date or price. There is no product photo there yet, the picture above is from a video published by X of the demonstration at the RISC-V Summit North America.
(Image:Â Milk-V)
At least there is more detailed information on the features: the board is equipped with 8, 16 or 32 GByte LPDDR5 RAM. The Eswin EIC7700X system-on-chip (SoC) connects an HDMI 2.0 port and contains an unspecified graphics processor with 3D accelerator, which can be used with OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.2, among others.
There is also a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot (designed as an x8 slot) and an M.2 socket for a SATA SSD. A USB 3.0 controller (5 Gbit/s, later renamed USB 3.2 Gen 1) is also integrated into the chip.
Videos by heise
Milk-V Oasis has not yet arrived
Milk-V originally planned to sell the Oasis mini-ITX motherboard with the Sophgo SG2380 RISC-V chip inthe third quarter of 2024 at prices starting at around 120 US dollars. However, the board no longer appears on the Milk-V website. According to discussions in the Milk-V forum, the delays are due to problems and probably even redundancies at the Chinese chip developer Sophgo.
According to its technical data, the Sophgo SG2380 should be one of the most powerful RISC-V processors to date. It contains 16 RISC-V processor cores of the SiFive P670 type, which was announced two years ago. These cores contain 128-bit vector units with an RVA22 profile. In addition, there are SiFive X280 AI computing units and the AXT-16-512 Imagination GPU.
(ciw)
