In embedded systems it's very common to have a bigger SoC and a satellite MCU to handle e.g. network comm and power lifecycle. I've still not really tried out my Milk-V Duo, but it's interesting to get a combo like this in a hobbyist board form factor.
They also claim desktop-class performance for this RISC-V-based miniITX board, it's a bit weird though since it doesn't claim RVA23 compliance:
I wanted to support RISC-V boards too, so I went with the Milk-V Duo S as the test device. I have managed to get Tailscale working, and our Device SDK works too, with the bundled Python.
The experience of using the Milk-V Duo is definitely not as straightforward as the Pi Zero, but it does work, and is easily available in most places, unlike some of their other products. The Linux distro they provide is quite barebones, and I wasn't able to get Debian working. The docs for the device are pretty decent. I hope we get better support for Debian/Alpine/Arch for these kinds of boards soon.
As a consumer, all I want if a very minimal "phone", with wifi, touch screen, battery, but no 4g or mobile networking, and linux on it. Just the cheapest, smallest, wifi, battery-powered, touchscreen LCD device that could exist that can run executables.
People are going to say "but just buy a cheap phone", but I cannot really run custom software on those, I can't expect to install a custom system image, and generally even cheap phones CPU SOC are way way too powerful. Open source phones are generally crazy expensive and very powerful, and I am not going to buy those.
With the range of hardware that exist out there, I think such device could cost about 60 euros, and it would be more interesting than a RPI.
The RPI is an amazing product, but it lacks an all integrated consumer device with an actual screen and battery. Of course I can already build one with a compute module etc, but it's not really portable and not designed around a flat battery.
I'm not sure about what you want. You don't want a phone, so you want... A tablet, maybe? Or a Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 with a touch screen? Do you want a small screen? Big? Keyboard/Keypad? Touch only?
Making a thing made, shipped and delivered at 60 euros each on credit cards is HARD. 600 is easier. 60m consider it done. I wouldn't want to even make and sell, idk, a lens cap for a camera, at that price, without first owning couple factories running at healthy levels of utilization. Maaaaybe if my customers would be happy with a 3D printed artisanal version of it. But even then it'll technically be delivered at a slight loss.
Edit: oh damn this one is even worse 8.4 days ha
But more seriously... I don't think that Linux has ever been booted on a non-monolithic CPU (I wanted to say 'discrete cpu' first, but there's some PDP-11s with 4 chip CPUs)
Any turning machine can boot Linux under emulation
The fastest available RISC-V consumer chip is orders of magnitude slower than a Raspberry Pi 5. Example: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/15998376?baseli...
Honest question, I don't follow much on the hardware front.
https://schwarztech.net/articles/my-ipads-raspberry-pi-sidec...
This method configures the Raspberry Pi [Zero] in “gadget” mode, creating a private link that appears as a wired Ethernet connection over a USB cable. The Pi’s address will never change, either as it is also a DHCP server for the iPad. As an added bonus, the same cable powers the Pi, creating a setup as simple as plugging the Pi into your iPad and waiting for it to appear .. you have a full-blown Linux computer working in tandem with your iPad and the iPad acting as a directly-connected console that is also providing power.This article is about the RP2350's microcontroller cores. It doesn't even have an MMU, so running Linux on it is much more interesting. It's not as capable as the normal Linux we run on bigger boards, but it's still interesting.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/07/08/rp2350-pizero-rp2350...
side note: I wish it had more ram so you could mount it in VS Code vs. developing through SSH
Can do everything you wanna do, in a cute little box attached to a backpack.
My battery lasts about 3 hours, but its easy to juice it up if we go hiking and need a common filesystem up some mountain somewhere, know what I’m saying ..
(PS - the pwnatotchi part is just an app you can disable if you just want your Linux box to be a Linux box, but it sure is a fun little toy also ..)
I was trying to make an attached Linux machine for my iPad instead of using a cloud VM. It was pretty effective, but at the time the ARM distributions were difficult to run what I wanted. Now, however, it would be significantly better.
Similar to synergy/barrier/input-leap, but using USB gadget mode instead of local network, since iOS wouldn't allow installation of non-Apple keyboard-mouse remoting software, https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
I feel there is a gap between MCU and modern CPU, and also between the software running on top of them. The missing piece is a mid-size computer with: - A processor, single or multi-core, with computing power like 20 years ago, but modern fabrication process. Maybe without MMU for simplicity. - RAM between 100MB~1GB and DDR2/3 bandwidth. - An OS designed and implemented for this type of hardware rather than tailored Linux.
I don't think you can use it for working or your daily entertainment, so I guess not a good business to attract interests.
The marketing was confusing, I’m not sure Intel even knew what it was for, except to show investors they had an IoT play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark
I found some of these boards in a box last year and was unable to do anything with them… Intel has thoroughly erased all documentation and SDKs from the internet. If anyone has those artifacts, please push to archive.org
sylware•14h ago
That said, I wonder how much they did improve their hazard3 design, because we all know the future is no PI locked ARM cores. I wonder if they are sharing part of the design of other open source RISC-V cores.
If those efforts are kept significant, the future is looking good and better there. Hopefully, all that will be a success (=latest silicon process, ultra-performant RISC-V implementation in mobile/embedded/desktop/server).
danhor•13h ago
The source code is all from Luke Wren and I don't think other cores use the source code directly, but improvements to test harnesses or general implementation patterns as well as better software support help other cores: https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3
For the SoCs I would expect to see an off-the-shelf Risc-V core (certainly no Hazard3 as the main CPU), but we'll see.
sylware•13h ago
I am curious to know which RISC-V design they'll go for in this SOC.
M. Wren getting real hard experience on RISC-V is going only to help RP to select and audit more seriously any RISC-V design which would make its way in their SOCs.
I just don't want to contribute to arm IP racketering (and we have mpeg and hdmi to take into account too with avX and eDP/DP).
Findecanor•12h ago
You're supposed to be able to just recompile most Pico projects to use them as long as there is no ARM assembly in it.
They are only inferior to the ARM Cortex-M33 cores in the Pico 2.
PunchyHamster•12h ago
ipdashc•7h ago
Quick edit: sounds like "basically" wasn't doing that much heavy lifting after all, wow https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/risc-v-on-raspberry-pi-pico...
Tharre•13h ago
But I'm assuming you're talking about for consumer use, in which case my question is why? There is absolutely no way you're ever benefiting from them spinning up an extra SKU with significantly less volume (most people want the ARM cores).
Even if they decide to eat the costs for the benefit of consumers, at most the chip would be what, 15 cents cheaper? I really struggle to see how that's a meaningful difference for hobbyist use.
phkahler•11h ago
Better yet, put 4 RISC-V cores on there!