Okay, honestly for all that I wouldn't go for it myself, $1500 doesn't seem super bad for what it is. It's got 4 cores with a decent clock speed and 16GB of RAM, and it's a completely novel system that's not mass-market. The first RISC-V laptop isn't going to benefit from economies of scale; dev boards are barely starting to get there.
$1500... hell no.<p>VisionFive2[0] w/JH7110, U74x4 @ 1.5GHz, 8GB, 2x GbE, M.2 slot, pi-like gpio header, is less than $100, and thus a much more cost efficient way to get started with RISC-V.<p>0. <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2</a>
Sounds like progress. I don't need a RISC-V laptop badly enough to spend $1500 on this one, but I'm glad to see a shrinking delta between my desires and the market's offerings.
> weighing 1.7 kg (3.7 pounds), it’s definitely at the thinner and lighter end of the market,<p>Seems more like medium weight to me; hoping that's due to a large battery.<p>> Battery life is rated at 10 hours.<p>Oops, apparently not.<p>Still, cool to see RISC-V in a laptop.
> It can support up to 16GB LPDDR4 or 4X RAM<p>4X RAM? And is the RAM socketed or soldered?<p>> 4 TOPS NPU and an Imagination Technologies GPU<p>Drivers are open source for both or are we stuck with vendor kernel images or some other garbage? How easy will it be to port Open/Net/FreeBSD or another OS?<p>> The Roma is available from Alibaba (opens in new tab) as a basic package for $1,499<p>I have a better idea: Buy a mnt reform.
My problem with this laptop isn't with it's pricing but with who's selling it. If it was Asus or some other reputable OEM, I think I would have bought it.<p>I've had <i>extremely</i> poor experiences with some Chinese OEMs in the past and I'm not risking 1500 with unproven OEMs unless I have to.
I was interested in buying one until i saw the price.. "The Roma as a basic package for $1,499"<p>Overpriced, or better, why is the price so high?
Oh the name of that linux distro: "Anolis". Does not say if based on debian.<p>I wonder if the user will be able to change the distro, or the drivers will be somehow fix with the distro.
But this is of course less about trying to create a competitive laptop and more about China attempting to become technologically independent. Having the ability to mass produce something entirely within their own soil. Pardon the politics.
Interesting to see china develop its own processors. I don't know much about RISC-V or other processor, beside the openness what are the drawbacks and advantages ?
Neat to see a RISC V laptop but they must be smoking crack if they think I’m paying $1500 for the privilege of recompiling my operating system really, really slowly. And the 5k option is outright predatory. Someone needs to protect the vulnerable enthusiast market (you know who I’m referring to) from this kind of pricing. Ask a fair price. It’s an $800 laptop, maxed out.