GoKawiilThis is a fascinating box–so much so that after almost three weeks playing with it, I amassed so much material that I nearly decided to split my review into two parts, but in the end I decided to condense it a bit and post a longer piece than usual, even if that means almost half of it is a fairly wide-ranging exploration of how to get AI workloads on it.
The MilkV Jupiter 2 in its metal case
Spoiler: We’re tantalizingly close to having usable non-GPU inference on SBCs, and surprisingly enough, RISC-V is more interesting than ARM right now.
I’ve tested a lot of ARM boards over the past few years, but only a couple of RISC-V machines–and the MilkV Jupiter 2 is quite a substantial system: Sixteen cores (with a twist), a refreshingly roomy 32GB of RAM, a 10GbE SFP, Wi-Fi 6, a GPU with actual DRM nodes, all in a Pico ITX form factor.
Disclaimer: my contacts at Radxa supplied me with a Jupiter 2 free of charge, and as usual, this article follows my review policy.
On paper, this is the first RISC-V board that doesn’t feel like a science project.
In person, and unlike most of the SBCs I get, the Jupiter 2 is a finished product, and came in a neat little box, fully assembled and contained in an unassuming metal case with external antennae as the only extra parts. No power brick, but since it has a USB-C PD port, I had zero trouble powering it from one of my monitors.
Hardware
After some careful disassembly, the board itself is pretty dense: 1× DP out, 1× eDP ribbon, 1× USB-C PD power input, 3× USB-A 3.0, 1× GbE RJ-45, 1× 10GbE SFP+ cage, an M.2 slot and what looks like a second M.2 for storage. There are also MIPI/eDP ribbon connectors I haven’t tested.
The board is dwarfed on the top side by the cooler, which I dared not remove
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