Milk-V’s Jupiter Is a Mini-ITX Desktop-Class RISC-V System with Expandability, AI Smarts, and Extra

Single-board pc specialist Milk-V is getting ready to open orders for Jupiter, its mini-ITX system based mostly on the SpacemIT K1 or M1 eight-core RISC-V processor — full with a devoted neural processing unit (NPU) delivering two tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute for on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence.

“Milk-V Jupiter, powered by the SpacemIT K1/M1 SoC [System-on-Chip] is the world’s first mini-ITX gadget to assist each RVA22 and RVV1.0,” Milk-V explains of its newest design. “This gadget integrates a typical PCIe [PCI Express] connector supporting widespread PCIe gadgets reminiscent of graphics playing cards, PCIe to SATA adapters, and community playing cards. It options twin gigabit Ethernet interfaces, onboard Wi-Fi 6/BT [Bluetooth] 5.2, and helps NVMe [Non-Volatile Memory Express] SSDs, making it a super alternative for an entry-level RISC-V desktop.”

Designed as a desktop-class system, the Jupiter’s system-on-chip contains eight 64-bit processor cores based mostly on the RISC-V structure — although, on the time of writing, the corporate had not confirmed clock pace, although SpacemIT charges the K1 as much as 2GHz with the M1 providing improved efficiency. As Milk-V says, what makes the chip notably fascinating is its assist for each the RVA22 extension profile and the fully-ratified RVV 1.0 vector extensions — the latter providing a efficiency increase for on-device ML and AI.

These workloads may be additional accelerated by SpacemIT’s inclusion of a devoted neural coprocessor, providing a claimed two TOPS of compute at minimal precision. There’s an Creativeness BXE-2-32 graphics processor with OpenGL ES 1.1/3.2, EGL 1.5, OpenCL 3.0, and Vulkan 1.3 assist, {hardware} H.265/H.264/VP8/VP9/MPEG4/MPEG2 decoders good to 4k60 and H.265/H.264/VP8/VP9 good to 4k30, and a alternative of 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of LPDDR4X reminiscence.

Whereas technically practical as a single-board pc, the Jupiter can also be expandable: there is a connector for an non-obligatory eMMC module in addition to a microSD Card slot for storage, an M.2 M-key connector with two PCI Categorical Gen. 2 lanes for an non-obligatory NVMe SSD, and an eight-lane mechanical two-lane-electrical PCIe Gen. 2 slot for add-in boards. There are two gigabit Ethernet ports supporting non-obligatory Energy-over-Ethernet (PoE) and two USB 3.0 Kind-A, two USB 2.0 Kind-A, and one USB 2.0 On-The-Go Kind-C ports, plus two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports accessible by way of a entrance header connector. There’s two SATA ports, a UART bus, and analog audio jacks too.

Briefly, the Jupiter contains all the things you’d count on to see in a desktop-class machine — together with the promise of assist for Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, which is quickly changing into a well-liked alternative for RISC-V machines because of the corporate’s first-party assist for a number of standard gadgets. Milk-V additionally guarantees assist for Casa OS, a Linux distribution tailor-made for network-attached storage (NAS) gadgets.

Extra info on the Milk-V Jupiter is obtainable on the official product web page; pricing has not but been disclosed, and on the time of writing the retail companions listed have been solely delivery to China.