This month we received the new SpacemiT K3 board. Since its inception, felix86 wasn’t able to run on any of the out-of-order execution hardware, such as the SiFive P550 or the SOPHON SG2042. The former has no vector support, the latter has XTheadVector support. While initially there was consideration for supporting hardware without RVV 1.0 or hardware with XTheadVector, ultimately the decision was that we should instead focus on the future of RISC-V consumer hardware which will have RVV 1.0 due to it being mandatory in the RVA23 profile.

If you watched the felix86 talk at the RISC-V NA summit you might’ve seen a video of gameplay on K1 hardware. You would notice the lack of modern 3D games running on the emulator, because a lot of them would run at less than 5 frames per second. Now that we have much faster hardware, there’s more to show!

TLDW: Huge performance improvements over the K1, and RISC-V performance will only go up from here.

This month we received the new SpacemiT K3 board. Since its inception, felix86 wasn’t able to run on any of the out-of-order execution hardware, such as the SiFive P550 or the SOPHON SG2042. The former has no vector support, the latter has XTheadVector support. While initially there was consideration for supporting hardware without RVV 1.0 or hardware with XTheadVector, ultimately the decision was that we should instead focus on the future of RISC-V consumer hardware which will have RVV 1.0 due to it being mandatory in the RVA23 profile.

If you watched the felix86 talk at the RISC-V NA summit you might’ve seen a video of gameplay on K1 hardware. You would notice the lack of modern 3D games running on the emulator, because a lot of them would run at less than 5 frames per second. Now that we have much faster hardware, there’s more to show!

TLDW: Huge performance improvements over the K1, and RISC-V performance will only go up from here.

I'd find it very entertaining if the massive computing hardware hoarding ends up blowing up in the faces of the mega spenders who have yet to corner the market with subscribers to fend off the cheaper alternatives

Airbnb's Brian Chesky said last year that while the company uses OpenAI's latest models, they don't rely on them heavily in production — favoring faster, cheaper alternatives like Alibaba's Qwen. And in the latest episode of VentureBeat’s podcast Beyond the Pilot, Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal confirmed that the company went all-in on an open-source AI strategy, post-training Alibaba’s open Qwen model on the company’s proprietary "taste graph" to drive Pinterest’s assistant — achieving frontier-like quality at a 90% reduction in costs. DeepSeek’s subsequent price drop makes the possibility of such cost differences even greater.