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The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn't meant for laptop use.
Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn't need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.
Pine64 also has the Star64 as will, in 4GB and 8GB for $70 and $90 respectively. They're not exactly hard to find.
If I was developing for RISC-V, I'd buy one of those SBCs, not a Framework laptop. But it's cool that it exists, I suppose.
I bought a Milk-V Mars (4GB version) last year. Pi-like form factor and price seemed like an easy pick for dipping my toes into RISC-V development, and I paid US$49 plus shipping at the time. There's an 8GB version too but that was out of stock when I ordered.
If I wanted to spend more I'd personally prefer to put that budget toward a higher core system (for faster compile times) before any laptop parts, as either HDMI+USB or VNC would be plenty sufficient even if I did need to work on GUI things.
Other RISC-V laptops already are cheaper and with higher performance than this would be with Framework's shell+screen+battery, so I'm not sure what need this fills. If you intend to use the board in an alternate case without laptop parts you might as well buy an SBC instead.