Milk-V, a renowned hardware firm in the space of RISC-V products, has unveiled its newest "AI PC" focused mini-ITX motherboard, coming in support of AMD's flagship Radeon GPUs such as the RX 7900 XTX.
Milk-V's Megrez Motherboard Is Being Pitched As An "AI PC" Product, Comes With A Chip that features Dedicated AI NPU Onboard & Support For Up To AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU
It's not every day that RISC-V-based products drop into the markets, especially when they're mini-ITX motherboards. There haven't been many instances where manufacturers have integrated the architecture into a compact design, given the lack of interest from both the consumer and the clientele segment.
However, with the debut of the AI hype, RISC-V solutions have specifically seen massive attention, given their scalability and perf/$ figures and Milk-V's newest "Megrez" motherboard aims at catalyzing RISC-V adoption among the average consumer.
Starting with the specifications, the Milk-V Megrez reportedly features the Eswin EIC7700X SoC onboard, which is a 64-bit RISC-V high-performance CPU with a 4x SIFIVE P550 core configuration and a frequency up to 1.6 GHz. What makes the EIC7700X distinctive is how the manufacturer has been able to integrate a dedicated NPU onboard, which provides up to 19.95 TOPS INT8 performance, making it the first instance where we have seen a dedicated AI engine in a RISC-V-based processor.
Milk-V Megrez running AMD 7900XTX
Quad core SiFive P550, 19.95TOPS NPU#riscv #RISCVSummit pic.twitter.com/xSuTLjcIqO
— Milk-V (@MilkV_Official) October 24, 2024
What makes the Milk-V Megrez interesting apart from the SoC onboard is its ability to be used with a consumer GPU, such as AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which opens new doorways when it comes to cross-compatibility between the architectures,
In this case, RISC-V and RDNA. Milk-V's official X account has shared a running demo of using the Radeon RX 7900 XTX mounted on the Megrez motherboard; hence, this is surely a great breakthrough for the RISC-V segment and its potential adoption in the consumer markets, although this is still far away.
Diving a bit into other specifications of the Milk-V Megrez, the motherboard offers support for a single LPDDR5-6400 memory module and comes with a 1x SATA SSD slot and a 1x microSD card slot. Hence, it is not too high-end when it comes to memory and storage options.
So overall, the Milk-V Megrez is one step closer to making RISC-V mainstream in the consumer markets, yet the destination is too far away, given that not many industry players are looking to experiment with RISC-V, and existing solutions, such as those from Tenstorrent, haven't seen much of a spotlight relative to other counterpart architectures.
Milk-V hasn't disclosed the pricing and release date of their Megrez "AI PC" motherboard, so it's likely that the product is in its testing phases.
