Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will support the SpacemiT K3, one of the first RISC-V processors compliant with the RVA23 specification. This eight-core chip includes advanced features like vector processing and an AI accelerator, marking a step forward for Linux on RISC-V hardware. Development boards from Banana Pi and Milk-V are already available for testing.
The SpacemiT K3 represents a significant advancement in RISC-V technology, delivering one of the first processors with RVA23 features, including vector processing units and virtualization functions required by newer Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 25.10.
SpacemiT announced RVA23-compatible X100 CPU cores in early 2025, initially for the more powerful 64-core VitalStone V100. Now, the company is providing first samples of the eight-core K3, which clocks at up to 2.4 GHz. Each core has 64 KB L1 caches for instructions and data, with a total of 8 MB L2 cache shared in 4 MB segments among groups of four cores. The chip's thermal design power ranges from 15 to 25 watts, necessitating a fan cooler.
Integrated components include an AI accelerator with eight A100 units capable of up to 60 TOPS, and a 3D graphics core from Imagination Technology's IMG BXM-4-64-MC1, supporting OpenGL ES, Vulkan, and OpenCL. I/O options encompass eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, USB 3.0, 1 Gbit/s Ethernet, eMMC 5.1, UFS 2.2, SDIO, I2C, SPI, I2S, and up to 132 GPIOs. The memory controller supports two 32-bit channels of LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-6400, enabling up to 51 GByte/s bandwidth and a maximum of 32 GB RAM.
Canonical's blog confirms that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon and slated for April 2026, will run on the K3. Meanwhile, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS continues support for the earlier SpacemiT K1, used in boards like the Orange Pi RV2 (Ky K1) and Banana Pi BPI-F3. SpacemiT compares the K3's X100 cores to the 2018 ARM Cortex-A76, found in the Raspberry Pi 5's Broadcom BCM2712.
Development is facilitated by the K3 CoM260 core module, available with 8, 16, or 32 GB LPDDR5-6400 RAM. Carrier boards include Banana Pi's BPI-SM10, featuring two M.2 slots, four USB-A 3.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.2, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB-C. Milk-V's Jupiter 2 offers similar interfaces. The Jupiter 2 Dev Kit with 8 GB RAM is priced at 251 Euros but currently sold out via Arace in Hong Kong. The K3 promises decent performance yet costs more than a Raspberry Pi 5.
