The PC shown in the video uses Milk-V’s Megrez board, which is equipped with Chinese RISC-V chip maker Eswin’s EIC7700X, a system-on-chip (SoC) that hosts four P550 CPU cores designed by SiFive. The P550 core has been around since 2021, so it’s nothing cutting-edge at the tail end of 2024. The SoC sport H.265 encoding and decoding at 8K, and has a 20 TOPS NPU, which are both reasonably robust for PCs.
The particular 7900 XTX that Milk-V used was made by XFX and ran on Debian Linux. There wasn’t much choice in terms of the OS, as Linux boasts the best support for RISC-V at the moment. The brief demo showed the system running the glmark2 benchmark, which renders 3D objects at the highest framerate possible.
However, Milk-V got a 7900 XTX up and running on this RISC-V board, which marks another milestone for RISC-V’s ambitions in PCs. So far, the open-standard architecture has been primarily used for data centers, AI, and tiny, low-function chips that form just one small part of a whole product. Although the usage of RISC-V has been growing steadily for the last few years, the architecture hasn’t penetrated the PC market, the domain of x86, and now Arm.
Milk-V Megrez running AMD 7900XTXQuad core SiFive P550, 19.95TOPS NPU#riscv #RISCVSummit pic.twitter.com/xSuTLjcIqOOctober 24, 2024