Ahead of the RISC-V Summit China 2025, Canonical and ESWIN Computing have announced the launch of a new RISC-V single-board computer (SBC) with full support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
The EBC77 Series SBC is, like many RISC-V boards of this type, primarily intended for use in development, embedded systems and specific-task scenarios. It’s not going to work well as a general-purpose desktop PC (though it can with limitations) for consumers.
Indeed, RISC-V devices in general can’t compete with ARM-based SBCs like the Raspberry Pi on price or performance. Arguably, they don’t need to yet – it’s a fledgling tech and people who buy RISC-V buy it because they want to test or develop for RISC-V.
From every acorn, and all that.
Cheap RISC-V SBCs do exist and are able to cater to the curious, but it is powerful RISC-V hardware that will drive the tech forward in adoption, use-cases and abilities — and this new board trends in that direction.
ESWIN EIC77 Specifications
The ESWIN EBC77 specs include a quad-core EIC7700X 64-bit RISC-V SoC running at up to 1.8GHz, delivering, per its spec sheet, ARM Cortex-A75 class performance – which for RISC-V, is decent, putting it somewhere near a Raspberry Pi 4.
The EBC77 also boasts an NPU of up to 19.95 TOPS; includes up to 32GB LPDDR5 memory; and there is onboard multimedia decoding/encoding of HEVC (H.265) & AVC (H.264) up to 8K. The Imagination GPU supports OpenGL-ES 3.2, EGL 1.4, OpenCL 1.2/2.1 EP2 and Vulkan 1.2.
While only 8MB SPI flash storage is included, the microSD card slot provides quick storage expansion, as does the 4-lane PCIe Gen3 FPC connector for anyone looking to add an SSD.
Ports include micro HDMI out, Gigabit Ethernet, 4x USB 3.0/2.0 type-A ports, a 40-pin GPIO header, and Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 are built-in for connectivity needs.
A fan connector is present.
The RVA23 Problem
The 4x SiFive Performance P550 RISC-V cores on board implement the RV64GC ISA and conform to the RVA20 profile. They do not support the newer RVA23 profile.
Why is that a problem? Because it means this brand-new SBC will not be able to run (or upgrade to) Ubuntu 25.10 or beyond.
Canonical has (proactively) chosen to only support RISC-V devices with the RVA23 profile (mandates Vector 1.0 and Hypervisor extensions) in new distro releases.
It’s doing so because the performance and feature set of RVA23-capable devices (though none are yet on sale) will surpass the fastest, priciest RVA20 boards on the market right now. Raising the profile requirements will raise the bar on what users can expect.
It might sound like a glaring negative, but the ESWIN EBC77 has full support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, which is a long-term support release receiving updates until 2029.
Availability and Pricing
Jonathan Mok, Silicon Alliances Ecosystem Development Manager at Canonical, says the launch of the device “represents a significant advancement for the open-source community, empowering everyone from seasoned developers to newcomers to innovate on the RISC-V architecture.”
Price is from $149 on Amazon US, though other stockists of ESWIN devices are likely to have it too.
The EBC77 Series SBC is available to look at in person at the ESWIN Computing and Canonical booths during the RISC-V Summit China.
Canonical (via CNX Software)