RISC-V is more like 1-3 years away from CPUs existing that have competitive performance in datacenter workloads. Not decades.

But they won’t be manufactured in Europe. Getting fabs up and running is indeed something that takes a very long time.

A lot of the AI marketing you see for various devices might be meant to appease and interest investors rather than potential users. Or the result of some marketing person or executive being convinced that absolutely every product needs to have an AI angle.

Even so, not every “AI” workload needs to be running the biggest local LLMs you can at the highest speeds possible.

Robotics often need low-power chips that can handle computer vision, for example, and that’s a use-case that Nvidia Jetson seems to focus on, to great success, with only 8-16GB RAM. SpacemiT’s engineers seem to be aiming at that market considering they put K3 on modules that are pin-compatible with Jetson NX carrier boards, and gave it dedicated cores for matrix and vector processing.

Regardless whether they manage to succeed at all for AI uses, K3 is designed for that. Maybe it makes more sense for that domestically in China, where they would want drop-in substitutes for less reliance on Nvidia imports.

For anyone else, it’s a RISC-V devboard that manages to be faster than any others despite the low power budget and having so much of the silicon wasted on AI stuff instead of more general-purpose cores. It’s not really designed for general dev use but the alternatives just happen to be so much worse for now.

This (or frankly any other single-board computer releasing this decade) absolutely isn’t something that’d make sense to use as an inference server that you access from a desktop that already has a GPU and plenty of memory.

It’s not even remotely in the same product category as GB10. More akin to a Jetson NX: a low-power device that can do a little local processing for contexts where it doesn’t have a reliable connection to a more powerful server, though even for that purpose it has lower performance than Orin. Probably would’ve been substantially cheaper than Orin if not for the RAM crisis.

I’d guess most of the actual users of this thing probably will ignore the AI cores entirely and just use it as a RISC-V development board. It’s the first hardware that supports RVA23, which is the set of ISA extensions that most distros will treat as the baseline requirement for RISC-V. Also the fastest RISC-V CPU to date, meaning faster code compile (if you can’t cross-compile) and automated tests than any other RISC-V system.

Encrypted email in the way that Proton and Tuta do it has a lot of drawbacks. Because I almost never use my personal/non-work email to communicate with another human, and automated mails tend to have the message body be no more sensitive than the subject line and metadata, zero-knowledge encryption at rest for just the mail body has a negligible privacy impact for me.

It helps to consider your actual needs and privacy goals, using the services or software that fits them best rather than just following what others say has the best privacy.

I used Proton for two years and, similarly, just recently migrated off of it last month. Since I use custom domains for email through it, and I never cared to use their other services outside of Mail (and occasionally VPN), it was a quick and painless migration. Unlike the painful migration of changing my email address everywhere to be non-gmail (which I still haven’t 100% finished after two years), this time I only needed to update DNS records and copy mailbox data. After migrating, having actual IMAP/JMAP access without a bridge is nice.

Note that you don’t necessarily need to import your entire mailbox when migrating. I never imported my email archive from gmail to proton; an offline archive of all old received emails on my NAS is enough for me if I ever need to search through it. I can even view that archive in Thunderbird.

My thoughts on a few of the other Proton services:

• Proton VPN is really nice. One of the few good ones with port forwarding. But some other options have better pricing than VPN Plus alone outside of the Proton Unlimited bundle.
• SimpleLogin (or Proton Pass masks) is nice, though using anonymous email masks is a trade-off in dependence. I prefer disposable addresses under my custom domain for anything associated with my identity regardless (like services that use my billing or shipping info), and shared domain masks for anything else. My existing shared-domain email masks in Proton still work even after my subscription ended. Addy and Firefox Relay are fine alternatives, and some other mail services like Fastmail have their own equivalent included.
• I’d rather self-host CalDAV/CardDAV than rely on online services for calendar, contacts, etc.
• I had already been using a local KeePassXC database and a NAS for many years so I had no reason to use Proton Drive and Pass, except for the latter’s email masks.

It seems they actually changed its official romanization to “Bracky” about 3 years ago, probably to avoid that problem. I listed them from memory and hadn’t realized it changed. Still, that old name was used on Japanese merch and marketing for decades, but not in any main series games since those only use the katakana “ブラッキー”.

Eevee’s name sounds close enough to being the same in Japanese and English that they even used the same voice clips for both in some anime episodes and Let’s Go Eevee. The official romanization just has a strange spelling.

Only the French version uses those names. English has Eevee, Vaporeon, Jolteon, Flareon, Espeon, Umbreon, Leafeon, Glaceon, and Sylveon. Japanese can be considered the original names, which are (when written in latin letters) Eievui, Showers, Thunders, Booster, Eifie, Blacky, Leafia, Glacia, and Nymphia.

German, Korean, and Chinese each have different names for them and most other Pokémon too. Other languages like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese use the same names as English.

RISC-V is designed to be an extensible instruction set, where the base is very minimal and reduced but a plethora of extensions exist. The ISA can be small for academic and microcontroller uses, large (more than a hundred extensions) for server uses, or anything in between.

Despite the name, a powerful RISC-V server can arguably not be considered “RISC”, though that term doesn’t have a single agreed-upon meaning and some design characteristics strongly associated with RISC still apply such as limiting memory access to dedicated load/store instructions only rather than allowing computation instructions to operate on memory.

Also, not everything is CPU instructions. Acceleration for media codecs, for example, normally means off-loading those tasks to the GPU rather than the CPU. Even if the CPU and GPU are both part of the same SoC, that doesn’t touch the CPU instruction set.

The common issues with RISC-V laptops, or rather any laptops made with SoCs that weren’t designed to be laptop-first, include things like sleep not putting the system in a low enough power state (battery will run out if you leave it folded without turning it off), underwhelming GPU, higher power draw when idle, and lower peak performance for intermittent load. If none of those are a dealbreaker, the newest DeepComputing Framework board (on K3) can arguably be considered a viable daily driver RISC-V laptop option, though I wouldn’t want to use it as one.

Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are the big names for GPUs and they all have products that integrate a GPU into the same SoC as the CPU, but none of them would be likely to license out their GPU IP to other SoC vendors in modern times. Same goes for the in-house GPU designs for Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung. ARM does license out its Mali GPU IP, and that’s often the go-to option for SoC vendors that don’t have their own in-house GPU, but RISC-V systems can’t use that. So RISC-V systems’ GPU options effectively amount to either:

1. Use separate processors for your CPU and GPU. Desktop/server can just slot in a video card. Laptops in the 15-inch or larger space often solder a GeForce or Radeon chip to the board. Smaller 13-inch laptops normally don’t do this because of cooling and battery life concerns.
2. License the integrated GPU from Imagination. That seems to be the only notable GPU offering available to license on non-ARM. Users don’t seem very fond of Imagination GPUs but they’re better than nothing.
3. Pray that one of the companies with an established GPU portfolio decides to not only enter the RISC-V space but also makes a RISC-V processor that can be used in laptops. I think that’s unlikely and they’ll probably focus on server only.

In the first place, consider why you even want to switch to RISC-V. If it’s because of an enthusiasm for open-source and hearing the ISA described as open, know that any performant hardware you’ll get likely won’t be as open as you expect. The SoC won’t be open-source, the CPU cores in it won’t be open-source, the firmware and bootloader might be an open-source u-boot fork but there’s a good chance it’s proprietary. Even the actual implemented ISA won’t be open since major core designers add custom instructions that aren’t part of the RISC-V spec.

Distros like Ubuntu and Fedora seem slated to treat RISC-V as a main architecture that has close to the same number of packages and the same update schedule as x86/ARM by the end of next year, if not sooner. Just like is also the case for ARM, proprietary software like games can run with a nontrivial performance overhead, and other binary software distributed through other channels outside the distro repos (like docker containers, third-party apt/yum repos, or appimage) is often only distributed for x86 even for things that are open-source and can be compiled for other arches without issue.

The software situation can be either a major annoyance or completely seamless depending on how closely you stick to just the distro repos.

Hardware vendors will probably have stuff comparable enough to recent Intel/AMD for desktop in about a year from now. Likely not better, but within the same realm at least. Within another couple years after that you’ll almost definitely see more than one of the established major SoC vendors (like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung) release something RISC-V in the desktop, server, or mobile space, which is sure to be competitive with x86 and ARM hardware in that space.

Laptops might not see anything good. An alternate ISA can be viable on servers and mobile (both being Linux-first ecosystems), and desktop can easily inherit from stuff made for server, but laptop has unique hardware needs and the market isn’t there for vendors to bother investing too much R&D on laptop chips that can’t run Windows nor Mac. RISC-V laptops do exist but they’re basically taking chips designed for SBC/edge and throwing them in a laptop shell, with the result naturally being awful at power draw since it was never meant to be a good laptop chip, and the iGPU situation is a mess too. That’s unlikely to change in the next few years.

There are plenty of RISC-V cores available on the market for SoC vendors to license and use. So many that they even outnumber the SoCs using them.

Several RISC-V SoC vendors design their own cores and license those core designs out for other vendors to use in their own SoCs (T-Head, SpacemiT, Tenstorrent), some are focused entirely on core designs that they sell and don’t currently make SoCs themselves (SiFive, etc.), and countless open-source RISC-V cores exist online.

StarFive, ESWIN, and Sophgo are some of the companies that make RISC-V processors/SoCs but which don’t actually “design it from the ground up” since they license the CPU core design from either SiFive or T-Head. Similar to how most ARM SoC vendors license the ARM Cortex CPU cores.

Its VRAM (8GB) is soldered and not upgradeable. Its main memory (16GB) uses SODIMM but accessing those slots seems to require removing the heatsink which means anyone who does so should be ready to replace the thermal paste as well. That’s a lot to expect from the people who buy this thing considering it’s largely intended for people who don’t already use a custom desktop build.

Even if they do want to sell it without the SODIMM slots populated to avoid supply issues there, they can’t avoid the supply issues on the VRAM side.

3DS does have an account system and is able to log in to an account that previously was used for a different 3DS, but only if that account has already been unlinked from the previous system. Unlinking is easy if the device still works, and absurdly inconvenient if it’s lost/broken. The latter requires contacting their customer service, which seems like an utterly insane requirement for what should be part of a standard login flow and also means that as a non-automated process a human has the ability to refuse, but in almost all cases (currently) it is generally possible to “legally get those games back”.

Wii, in contrast, doesn’t have that ability at all. There’s no account system there.

Cartridges and game discs don’t pass the “hammer test”. They also have a limited lifespan: disc rot exists and flash memory loses its data if unpowered for a long time.

Regardless whether the game is a physical copy or has any digital updates/DLC, true game preservation requires creating usable backups, which requires (for offline games) either properly DRM-free game releases or viable DRM circumvention. Which yes, doesn’t exist for Switch 2, and is outlawed by DMCA and similar laws in most other countries. Ability to create personal backups (and reasonably short copyright terms) should be a consumer right and those laws are a major problem, but both physical and digital game releases are equally terrible in this particular respect. Unless they’re DRM-free, and on consoles they never are.

In any case, this Pokémon rerelease is for original Switch, with no differences for Switch 2, so it’s entirely possible to dump a backup. Though there’s unlikely to be much meaningful difference between that and one made from the original release. Aside from the emulator code, but community-made emulators have better features; the only people likely to care about it are those who want to reverse-engineer Nintendo’s emulator for reasons like making tools compatible with its local wireless connection.

Past 2DS/3DS purchases aren’t lost yet. Nintendo shut down the ability to buy additional games or DLC on it several years ago but the servers to handle logging in, redownloading “owned” digital games, and downloading update patches are still running.

And, even when those servers are eventually killed (for either 3DS or Switch), any digital games already installed on a system will still continue to work as long as your hardware does. Unlike a lot of PC games’ DRM that requires either constant or occasional check-in with license servers.

Of course, that’s still not proper ownership, as you don’t truly own something you bought unless you’re able to freely transfer your purchased data between different devices you own without seeking the publisher’s permission (or relying on DRM circumvention) and able to transfer ownership through loan or resale. But understanding the actual implications of any restrictions still matters.

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.