Milk-V Jupiter 2: RISC-V RVA23 SBC

[00:00:03][music] >> Welcome to another video from explainingcomputers.com.

[00:00:18]This time, we're going to take a look at this, the Milk-V Jupiter 2.

[00:00:24]This is one of the first computers with an RVA23 compliant RISC-V system-on-a-chip.

[00:00:32]RVA23 is a standard for RISC-V processors able to run the same software. And so, this is an important step forward towards end-user RISC-V systems that can provide an alternative to ARM and x86.

[00:00:50]So, let's go and take a closer look.

[00:01:00]Right. Here we have our Milk-V Jupiter 2 and specifically a model with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of UFS on-board storage.

[00:01:12]I ordered this from AliExpress in May 2026 for $250.86, having bought a $5 code in February for a $50 discount.

[00:01:23]And I also paid about $90 in shipping and import duties.

[00:01:28]This said, giving you prices is getting pretty meaningless for any product that include RAM and flash storage.

[00:01:37]So, let's open this up. Let's bring in Stanley the knife. I think we just have to cut I think it's just here.

[00:01:44]And here, I got it right.

[00:01:46]Will that let us in? It will. And um Oh, look. It's boxed inside the box. I didn't know that. There we are. We got box in box.

[00:01:56]Get rid of that. This has got some of that stuff on, green filmy stuff.

[00:02:00]Let's get rid of that, too.

[00:02:02]Oh, this is exciting.

[00:02:04]I always like a new SBC, especially a RISC-V SBC. There we are, got into that, too. And then presumably, I think it comes up here. Oh, is it a box? It's a box. And here we are. It's coming out. And usually for this channel, what we have here is not just an SBC, but an SBC that comes in a case, a metal case, which I can't get the packaging off. How does the packaging come off the case? I'm sure I can do it.

[00:02:37]Well, that's one way to do it. I've got it off, and let's take a a closer look at our box, which is probably more exciting around the back, isn't it, where we can see all the connectors, including the connections here for these antenna, which were included in the packaging.

[00:02:55]This said, I'm sure we really all want to see inside, so let's use the magic of filmmaking to achieve that. And there we are, I've performed some significant disassembly.

[00:03:07]The form factor of this board is pico ITX, and the processor is a SiFive K3 here under this very large active heatsink. And let's just turn the board over, so we have a look at it underneath. There we are, our first RISC-V computer with an RV64GC compliant processor.

[00:03:27]However, before we leap into specs and testing, I want to stress that this is development hardware for RISC-V pioneers and possible industrial use, and is absolutely not a consumer product.

[00:03:40]So, whilst we will be comparing this to ARM and x86, right now, if you want to buy an SBC or mini PC for general computing, RISC-V is not a sensible option.

[00:03:52]But, it will be in the future due to pioneering hardware like this.

[00:03:58]It's also worth noting that the MilkV Jupiter 2 is one of several virtually identical Space Mic K3 pico-ITX SBCs that are just becoming available with others including boards from Banana Pi, Sipeed, and Space Mic themselves. But, I'm now the proud owner of this MilkV Jupiter 2 and I'm not planning on testing hardware based on the same reference design from other manufacturers.

[00:04:31]So, here we have our board with its cooler removed and if we turn it over, we can see its Space Mic K3 system-on-a-chip.

[00:04:41]This has eight Space Mic X100 CPU cores clocked at up to 2.4 GHz. In addition, there are another eight A100 NPU cores providing up to 60 tops of AI performance. And the K3 also has an Imagination IMG BXM-464MC1 GPU.

[00:05:05]Additionally, on this side of the board, we have a four-pin CPU fan connector as well as our RAM and flash storage.

[00:05:14]Here, this is 8 GB of 6400 LPDDR5 and 128 GB of UFS 2.2.

[00:05:23]But, boards with 16 and 32 GB of RAM and 256 GB UFS are also available.

[00:05:32]If we flip board back over like that, we can see that little wireless module offering Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2.

[00:05:40]There's also a nano SIM slot to support 4G or 5G connectivity if an appropriate card is fitted in this B-keyed PCIe 3.0 two-lane 2242 or 3042 M.2 slot.

[00:05:56]Talking of which, we also have this 2280 M-keyed M.2 slot, which can take an NVMe SSD.

[00:06:04]This slot is PCIe 3.0 four-lane if no other PCIe card is fitted, but drops to two-lane if there's a PCIe card in the other slot.

[00:06:17]Turning to the main long edge, we start with a USB Type-C connector. That's the way to power the board when fitted in the supplied case.

[00:06:27]Bizarrely, this port also provides the only means of connecting a monitor as it includes DisplayPort Alt Mode supporting up to 4K at 60 frames a second.

[00:06:38]This means that it's possible to power the board from a monitor connected via a single cable to this port.

[00:06:46]But, in most scenarios, a hub will have to be connected to use it for both power in and monitor out, which, in my view, is a crazy design choice.

[00:06:56]And when we test out the board, I'll be using this powered USB-C hub and this 65-W USB-C power adapter.

[00:07:07]Back on the main connector edge, we also find a second USB-C port, which is OTG for flashing an operating system to the UFS, and which also supports a standard data connection.

[00:07:20]We then have four Type-A USB 2 ports and an RJ45 connector for Gigabit Ethernet.

[00:07:28]Finally, on the end, there's an enhanced small form factor pluggable or SFP+ port.

[00:07:35]This is not something I've seen on an SBC before and can provide a 10-Gigabit optical or Ethernet network connection when used with an appropriate cable or modular transceiver.

[00:07:48]Spinning 90 on the next edge, there are 36 and 26-pin FPC IO connectors.

[00:07:55]These are a bit like the GPIO pins on other SBCs as they provide UART, PWM, SPI, I²C, and CAN for interfacing with sensors and other electronic devices.

[00:08:11]Quarter turning again, we discover power, flashing, and reset switches, an indicator LED, and an eDP interface for connecting an LCD panel.

[00:08:23]There's also this three-pin connector whose function is not indicated in any specification I can find.

[00:08:31]On the last edge, clearly specified are a real-time clock battery connector, a front panel audio header, a front panel switch header, and an eDP expansion header.

[00:08:42]Finally, we have a two-pin 12-V ATX power connector, which can be used to power the board, and a three-pin UART header.

[00:08:51]And so, there we are, the Milk V Jupiter 2.

[00:08:55]So, let's now see how it performs.

[00:09:05]Greetings. I've now put the board back in its case and got it connected up, including to this USB-C hub plugged into the main USB-C port, which is taking a power input here and an HDMI output here.

[00:09:19]And in theory, there's an operating system, Beelink OS, pre-installed on the UFS. So, all we have to do is to turn on the power, so I will do that.

[00:09:33]Here we go.

[00:09:34]Well, I can hear a little bit of fan noise. Very quiet fan noise, but definitely some fan noise. Something is clearly happening.

[00:09:41]Very exciting. You don't ever know what's going to happen on the first boot on really cutting-edge hardware like this, but hopefully things are going to be okay.

[00:09:50]Little bit more fan noise now, and oh, look, Biamp boot on screen.

[00:09:56]This is looking good. And here we are.

[00:09:59]We have to select our language.

[00:10:02]Initially here in Chinese, but hopefully down here Yes, American English will do me fine.

[00:10:08]And I can now select my region. It's given me Guernsey. Can I get closer?

[00:10:14]Oh, that'll be good enough.

[00:10:16]Keyboard, I want to be English UK.

[00:10:21]And now I just need to set up a local account.

[00:10:25]There we go.

[00:10:27]And it's just checking I'm okay to proceed. I certainly am.

[00:10:31]And there we are. We just need to restart the system.

[00:10:36]This is going remarkably well, isn't it?

[00:10:39]RISC-V has progressed over the years.

[00:10:41]This is a very good initial experience.

[00:10:44]But we will speed on through as things progress.

[00:10:49]And after what was in the real world quite a long time, many minutes, rather worrying, we have got to the login screen. So hopefully I can log in.

[00:11:01]And here we are on the desktop running Biamp boot OS, which describes itself as an operating system deeply optimized for RISC-V.

[00:11:11]Specifically, case three boards run Biamp boot four, which is based on Ubuntu 20.04.

[00:11:18]Anyway, what I'm now going to do is to take a look around and apply a bit of scaling, and I'll come back to you after that.

[00:11:32]In the next part of the video, we'll run some specific benchmarks.

[00:11:37]But first, I think it's important to get a feel of whether this RISC-V system performs well enough to handle basic desktop computing.

[00:11:46]As if it does, RISC-V has reached a point where entry-level RISC-V mini PCs and laptops are a technical possibility.

[00:11:57]If we look in settings and about, we can see that we're running Biambu 4.0.1, which I upgraded to using software update.

[00:12:08]Our desktop environment is LXQt, our windowing system is Wayland, and we're running Linux kernel 6.18.

[00:12:18]If we take a look in the menu, we can see what's pre-installed, and there are various standard utilities, things like disks, calculator, etc. But if we scroll down a bit, we can see that we've got the Chromium web browser, and if we scroll even further, we find that we have LibreOffice. So, let's launch LibreOffice Writer, see how rapidly a word processor comes up on this system. That was pretty good.

[00:12:43]Let's type hello and select it all and make it very large, which is the law.

[00:12:49]That's certainly okay. We have a working word processor on this system.

[00:12:54]If we return to the menu, what is below that, you cry? Well, we've also got a webcam application, a couple of media players, including VLC media player.

[00:13:04]Good to have that here. Let's just bring in a file. People will say to me, "You don't play local media files." So, let's play a local media file. This is a Explaining Computers trailer. This works perfectly well, as you can see. So, we've got [music] decent local media playback.

[00:13:20]If we return to the bottom, just so I've shown you everything. Not a lot more down here, but let's run up Htop. I know some of you like to see Htop. Here it is running along and over here we've got our eight X100 cores not very busy right now and over on the right we have our eight AI cores which have got nothing to do right now therefore they've got zero use. But I know a lot of you like to see what's happening here in H top so there you are you've had your H top fill.

[00:13:47]So guess what I'm going to do now. Are you going to launch the Chromium web browser Chris? I am. Here is the Chromium web browser with some pages pre-loading. We've got here the no sandbox unsupported command line flag probably because there's been development work going on in this system but we'll get rid of that for now. I'll go across to the first tab I pre-loaded which is for GPU internals whereas we can see we've got quite a lot of GPU hardware acceleration including for video decoding which is always good to see.

[00:14:17]So let's go across to the third tab which is showing the WebGL aquarium all the fishes swimming around. The refresh rate on the system is currently 50 frames a second which is what we're getting with 500 fish. Let's go across to 1,000 fish though still sticks at 50 frames a second. What about 5,000 fish?

[00:14:37]Getting quite a lot of fish there. We're still getting just over 30 frames a second which is pretty good here in the WebGL aquarium.

[00:14:44]But guess what when I go to go to YouTube specifically to the Christopher Barnett YouTube channel where we'll find my standard test video and we'll bring that up make it full screen. There were no problems navigating here on the web it's working absolutely fine. Let's just check on the resolution well initially have it in 1080p. We'll bring up stats for nerds and we have no drop frames we're having no problems here playing 1080p video even though I move the cursor around make the test more difficult no drop frames at all. But we will also try 4K. 4K on a 1080p desktop it still actually streaming the 4K media. Just gives you a feel. And again, we have no dropped frames. We've got very good streaming media playback on this K3 based RISC-V system.

[00:15:33]So, let's come out of this like that and launch the terminal where I'm going to do an lsblk list block devices to see the block devices as storage on the system. And guess what? We're going to test the speed of the UFS, the internal flash storage, which is SDA. So, let's bring up the command for that.

[00:15:55]There we are. And I'll have to enter my password.

[00:16:01]And what are we going to get? I know what we're going to get. I have run the test already. Guess what it's going to be?

[00:16:06]480 MB a second, a very respectable result for internal flash storage. So, we've got a feel I hope of this system.

[00:16:16]And my conclusion is that K3 RISC-V hardware is capable of basic desktop computing.

[00:16:30]Right. Let's now run some performance tests starting with Geekbench.

[00:16:36]This is still in preview for RISC-V, so cannot have a license applied. But, in its latest version, it should be able to take advantage of our RVA23 compliant processor.

[00:16:49]For comparison, we have this table of Geekbench scores for three other RISC-V SBCs, as well as an ARM based Raspberry Pi 5 and an X86 N100 system.

[00:17:02]So, let's come back to the Milk-V Jupiter 2 where we'll run the test.

[00:17:07]And as it will take a little while, we'll now accelerate time.

[00:17:14]And there we are. It's finished. And I can smell totally warm electronics.

[00:17:20]And because it is a preview version of Geekbench, we also need to view the results in a browser.

[00:17:26]And here we are. 342 single core and 1703 multi-core.

[00:17:31]So, let's put those across onto our table, where as we can see, it's a massive improvement over previous generation RISC-V systems, although we're not up to the performance of a Raspberry Pi 5 or an M100 PC.

[00:17:46]Next, let's go to our Chromium browser and run This is a browser-based CPU only multi-core ray tracing test, and it's very important to note that it only runs properly in Chrome or related browser like Chromium as we're running here.

[00:18:07]And there we are. It's finished with a score of P5284, which is very exciting because if we put it across onto the table, we can see that the Milk-V Jupiter 2 has beaten the Raspberry Pi 5.

[00:18:23]Admittedly, it's still a long way behind an M100 x86 PC, but this, I think, is a very significant result.

[00:18:32]So, for final test, let's go back to the computer. We'll get rid of the browser, and we're going to bring up in the menu, guess what? The GNU Image Manipulation Program, which I have installed here on this system, 2.2, and we're going to do my standard Lava Filter test.

[00:18:52]And uh as you may know, this requires to do a new document, 1920 1080, like that.

[00:18:59]And then we'll go to Filters, and we'll go down to Render and Lava, and bring up a clock, and then run the test.

[00:19:10]And here, we won't speed on through.

[00:19:12]This won't take very long, it's going to be a matter of seconds.

[00:19:18]And indeed, this has finished in 8.3 seconds.

[00:19:22]So, let's again put the results across onto a comparative table where, as in the first test, the Milk-V Jupiter 2 has massively beaten previous generation RISC-V boards, but is not quite as fast as a Raspberry Pi 5 or an M100. But, regardless, my own takeaway from all three of our benchmarks is that RISC-V performance has increased significantly on a Spacemit K3 system.

[00:19:54]Right, just a couple of final tests. And earlier, I hooked up a power meter and measured about 14.4 W at idle, followed by a maximum of 20.5 W at load when using Silverbench to max out all eight X100 CPU cores.

[00:20:14]And the reason I ran this test earlier is that I've now installed an NVMe SSD, and I wanted to run the power test before that.

[00:20:23]So, let's open up a terminal and do an lsblk just to show you the NVMe drive is there. It is. And we're now going to test its speed.

[00:20:36]Here we go.

[00:20:37]Very exciting. What are we going to get?

[00:20:40]It's a good result, I think. Yes, look at that, 2,200 MB/s. That's a very decent speed for an NVMe SSD on a single-board computer.

[00:20:50]And the other thing I've done, if we look to the menu, is I've installed the Kdenlive video editor, which comes up pretty promptly.

[00:20:59]Come on, you can get there. There it is.

[00:21:01]Let's just do uh that. And I've got a quick test edit. Let's just go down to there and uh bring it in.

[00:21:10]Here we are, video editing in RISC-V.

[00:21:12]You'll see the timeline is scrollable, and if I just to play the thing, it'll play the clips okay.

[00:21:18]Can it do the transition?

[00:21:20]Reasonably well. This is certainly a workable system.

[00:21:24]And I have managed to install Kdenlive on other RISC-V computers, but I've never got it to a usable workable state.

[00:21:32]And this clearly opens up various possibilities, including one to repeat my week doing all of my computing on RISC-V hardware, which could now include video editing.

[00:21:49]The Milk-V Jupiter 2 is a lot more powerful than the 11 other RISC-V single-board computers I previously tested.

[00:21:58]Without doubt, its SpacemiT K3 system-on-a-chip can handle many desktop computing activities.

[00:22:05]And according to SpacemiT, it can also run 30 billion parameter large language models, so making it suitable for a range of AI applications.

[00:22:16]I therefore look forward to experimenting further with this computer in future videos, especially as software support grows.

[00:22:25]But now that's it for another video. If you've enjoyed what you've seen here, please press that like button. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe, and I hope to talk to you again very soon.

[00:22:43]>> [music]