SpacemiT's K3 is the first commercially available chip to meet Ubuntu's RVA23 hardware profile, ending the era of QEMU only Linux on the open instruction set. The catch: it costs roughly twice what a Raspberry Pi 5 does.
For the first time, a commercially available RISC-V computer can run a full Ubuntu desktop on bare metal, no emulation required. SpacemiT, a Hangzhou-based chip designer, demonstrated its 16-core Key Stone K3 system-on-chip at last week's Ubuntu Summit, where the hardware ran Ubuntu's GNOME desktop smoothly, played video without stuttering, and stayed responsive under load, according to The Register's Liam Proven, who tested it on the show floor. The demonstration is a quiet but real threshold: until now, the official RISC-V build of Ubuntu effectively required an emulator, because no shipping silicon met the distro's hardware profile.
That profile is called RVA23, ratified at the 2024 RISC-V Summit North America. RISC-V International describes it as a major milestone for the open instruction-set architecture: it bundles the vector math and hypervisor features a modern, general-purpose operating system needs, and it gives distributions a stable binary-compatibility target. Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka," released in October 2025, was the first Ubuntu to make RVA23 a hard requirement for the RISC-V build. The problem: at that point, no commercial RVA23 chip existed. Ubuntu's RISC-V path was, in practice, a QEMU emulation target.
The K3 ends that gap. It pairs eight SpacemiT X100 general-purpose cores clocked up to 2.4 GHz with eight A100 cores SpacemiT calls "AI cores," and it implements the RVA23S64 sub-profile, per the company's product brief as cited by The Register. It ships commercially through Banana Pi as the K3 Pico-ITX board, a 10-by-7.2 centimeter card with copper Gigabit Ethernet plus an SFP+ cage for 10-gigabit fiber, 16 or 32 GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, 128 or 256 GB of UFS storage, two M.2 NVMe slots, and display output capable of 4K at 60 Hz or 2.5K at 90 Hz. A NUC-sized mini-desktop case is optional.
Independent benchmarks put the K3 in roughly the same neighborhood as the Raspberry Pi 5, with specific wins over higher-end RISC-V reference hardware. Phoronix's review of the K3 Pico-ITX found it beat the SiFive P550 Premier, the RISC-V dev board most often cited as the mainstream reference since late 2024, and outperformed the Raspberry Pi 500+ across several tests. Earlier remote benchmarks from CNX Software in January 2026 pegged K3 performance at roughly Raspberry Pi 5 levels. The Register's hands-on at the Summit adds a usability layer the synthetic numbers don't capture: full Ubuntu GNOME loaded, video played smoothly, and the machine stayed responsive, a sharp jump from The Reg's earlier test of a Framework RISC-V mainboard.
The price is the catch. The Register calls the K3 "moderately hefty," and the numbers back that up: a third-party AliExpress listing puts an 8 GB K3-Pico at roughly £300, or about $400, with a stated RRP of £595 (~$800). For comparison, a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB sells for £168 in the UK and $175 in the US. The RISC-V option costs roughly twice as much, before counting the optional case or extra storage. For a hobbyist or maker audience, where the Raspberry Pi sets the price anchor, that gap matters.
Software support is real, if still narrow. Canonical announced Ubuntu support for the K3 and K1 series in February 2026, and SpacemiT also maintains Bianbu OS, an Ubuntu-plus-LXQt distribution that ships with the K3, alongside a roster of other Western and Chinese Linux distributions. The official K3 product page lists broader distribution compatibility. The RISC-V desktop software ecosystem, though, is still a step behind x86 and ARM in terms of polished desktop applications, packaged builds, and out-of-the-box hardware support.
The next signal to watch is laptops. Deep Computing's third-generation RISC-V mainboard for the Framework Laptop 13, codenamed "Roma" III, is built around the K3 and, according to The Register, "should become available soon." A user-upgradeable RISC-V laptop would be a different kind of threshold than a niche mini desktop, and it would put pressure on SpacemiT and competitors like SiFive to ship more RVA23 silicon at price points closer to the Pi 5's.
For now, the K3-Pico is the closest thing the RISC-V world has to a usable everyday Linux desktop, and it earns that label by finally giving buyers a real piece of hardware to install Ubuntu on, rather than an emulated image. The price, the still-thin software layer, and the wait for retail laptop boards are the obvious caveats. The fact that the question has shifted from "does RISC-V have a desktop" to "is the desktop worth the money" is itself the story.