[Pre-order] MuseBook RISC-V Laptop (Estimated ship date 15th July)

[Pre-order] MuseBook RISC-V Laptop (Estimated ship date 15th July)

$299.00
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Out of stock
SKU:
DL002-D8E64
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Introduction

The MUSE Book is a flagship device powered by an 8-core RISC-V AI-CPU M1 by SpacemiT, which provides top-tier performance, making it one of the most powerful devices in its category. The MUSE Book leverages the RISC-V architecture, which is renowned for its open-source nature and flexibility. This allows the device to be highly adaptable and future-proof, supporting both current and emerging technologies. The design significantly enhances the RISC-V architecture's capabilities, offering a robust and efficient platform.

The M1 CPU is the high performance variant of the SpacemiT K1, which is based on the RISC-V X60 architecture, delivering exceptional graphics performance. It achieves up to 2 TOPS AI performance and has a processing speed of 50K DMIPS, ensuring swift and efficient operations. The device supports advanced video processing capabilities, including 4K video formats with codecs such as H.265, H.264, VP9, and VP8, ensuring stunning visual quality. It also supports 3D graphics acceleration, OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.3, providing extensive support for a wide range of applications and ensuring excellent multimedia and gaming experiences.

Features

  • A display that achieves perfect color accuracy, with 100% sRGB color gamut coverage.
  • The MUSE Book's display is resistant to light and reflection, reducing glare and improving visual comfort.
  • Lightweight, weighing only 1.3 KG, and thin, with a thickness of just 17.8mm.
  • Supports Type-C PD 3.1 for fast charging.
  • Features a 1080P high-definition camera, enhancing video quality and clarity, ideal for video calls and conferences.
  • Equipped with a 38Wh battery, offering up to 8+ hours of continuous usage.
  • Includes an 8-pin connector, 2.54mm pitch standard interface, supporting I2C, UART, PWM, GPIO, and JTAG functionalities, facilitating easy integration and expansion for DIY projects and developers.

This Muse Book runs the Bianbu OS operating system based on the Debian distribution and optimized to run on the SpacemiT M1 octa-core RISC-V SoC. Let’s first take a look at its external interfaces. On the left side of the laptop, there are two USB Type-C interfaces, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and a reset pinhole.


The 8-pin header on the right side of the laptop is quite interesting, and SpacemiT hopes the Muse Book can become one of the most convenient hardware development platforms for RISC-V.  In addition to the power pins, users will find multiplexed I2C, UART, PWM, GPIO, and other interfaces. There’s also another USB Type-A port on that side and an additional pinhole to enter USB download mode for flashing the firmware.

Muse Book IO specifications:

  • Storage – eMMC + NVMe SSD 2280
  •  USB
    • 1x USB Type-C port (USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transmission, PD fast charging)
    • 1x USB Type-C port (USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transmission, PD fast charging, DP video signal)
    • 2x USB 3.0 Type-A ports
  • Audio – 3.5mm headphone jack
  • Misc
    • Reset pinhole
    • USB start pinhole to set the USB interface to download mode
    • Expansion – 8-pin 2.54mm pitch female header with Tx/Rx (UART), 3.3V/GND, I2C, PWM, etc…

The laptop features a 14.1-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1920×1080 and a 60 Hz refresh rate, a relatively conventional configuration. It also comes with a basic touchpad and keyboard whose Windows button has been replaced by a RISC-V button.

The notebook adopts a relatively lightweight design, with a weight of 1.3kg and a thickness of approximately 18mm. A teardown of the Muse Book reveals an all-metal fanless design, indicating that SpacemiT is very confident in the heat dissipation control of the K1 SoC.

The main board features the K1 SoC, up to 16GB of LPDDR4X memory, eMMC storage, and a WiFi 6 wireless module (Fn-Link 6252C-PUB). A 36.48Wh/7.6V battery was selected for the laptop with support for USB PD 3.1 fast charging and a battery life of over 6 hours in typical conditions.

MuseBook specifications

  • SoC – SpacemiT K1 octa-core X60 RISC-V core compliant with RVA22 (See SoC specifications details below)
  • System memory – Up to 16GB 32bit LPDDR4-2400MT, 32bit LPDDR4X-2666MT
  • Storage
    • 64GB eMMC flash (default), option up to 512GB
    • M.2 (PCIe Gen 2 2x) socket for NVMe SSD up to 1TB
    • MicroSD card slot
  • Display
    • 14.1-inch IPS display with 1920×1080 resolution, 60Hz refresh rate
    • 72% NTSC (≈100%sRGB) Color gamut
    • 250 nits brightness
  • Networking – RTL8852BE-based WiFi 6 module
  • Power Supply – USB PD 3.1 Type-C port (65W power adapter)
  • Dimensions – 322.6 x 209.2 x 17.8mm
  • Weight – 1.36kg
  • OS: Bianbu OS by Debian, Ubuntu, Linux
  • Browser: Chromium
Returns Policy

You may return most new, unopened items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. We'll also pay the return shipping costs if the return is a result of our error (you received an incorrect or defective item, etc.).

You should expect to receive your refund within four weeks of giving your package to the return shipper, however, in many cases you will receive a refund more quickly. This time period includes the transit time for us to receive your return from the shipper (5 to 10 business days), the time it takes us to process your return once we receive it (3 to 5 business days), and the time it takes your bank to process our refund request (5 to 10 business days).

If you need to return an item, simply login to your account, view the order using the 'Complete Orders' link under the My Account menu and click the Return Item(s) button. We'll notify you via e-mail of your refund once we've received and processed the returned item.

Shipping

We can ship to virtually any address in the world. Note that there are restrictions on some products, and some products cannot be shipped to international destinations.

When you place an order, we will estimate shipping and delivery dates for you based on the availability of your items and the shipping options you choose. Depending on the shipping provider you choose, shipping date estimates may appear on the shipping quotes page.

Please also note that the shipping rates for many items we sell are weight-based. The weight of any such item can be found on its detail page. To reflect the policies of the shipping companies we use, all weights will be rounded up to the next full pound.

Customer Reviews

Based on 3 reviews
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C
Carlos Julian Dominguez Marcos
excellent

Excellent product, and good package handling. The unique bad pont is, oposite other plarforms, the price decrease with the time, penalizing the customers who purchase in advance.

C
Che-Wei Chuang
Well-packaged

I received the order item that was very well-packaged, providing excellent protection during transit.
This RISC-V Laptop is good.
I can run it's AI program from the hints from it's website.

d
dkk
Good deal but not for everyone

TL;DR; for target market (risc-v tinkerers) it's one best in its class, on the other hand it isn't very usable as a daily driver due to severe lacks in software.

Build quality is superb, laptop feels kinda premium especially that built-in LCD is rather bright and vivid.
On the plus side is 180° lid hinge.
Device is very light.
One of USB ports supports alt mode, yet i wasn't able to show different images on two displays connected via docking station. It's only built-in panel + externals, so two "logical displays" so to speak.

Touchpad hardware-wise is very nice - it doesn't squeak and has possibly two hardware buttons hidden beneath the surface. Software-wise: garbage( more on that later).
Keyboard on the other hand feels like best offers from the cheapest - better than Pinebook Pro but nowhere near even low-end Lenovos or Dells. Prolonged usage doesn't hurt your fingers but there's room for improvements.

Built-in UART as well as few GPIOs is really nice touch. Earliest consoles (FSBL, SBI) are available there from the very start, greatly improving tinkerin experience. Same goes for fastboot mode, however i was able to run external binary but new Bianbu flashing showed successes everywhere but storage wasn't touched at all.

Weakest side is software. As long as one's comfortable with GNOME on Wayland, Musebook is really usable piece of hardware. Xorg + Xfce causes xfwm4 process to consume 100% of one core and response time is unacceptably long.
Touchpad's support is also very basic. There's very noticeable lag of 100-150ms( depends on running desktop environment), no palm detection so get used to disabling this cursed thing when typing, also when something's happening (like software is loading) cursor either doesn't respond or responds like mouse with broken cable.
Shipped Bianbu (1.0.7) contains some demo-downloading scripts (like chatglm) but domain where they're trying to get their resources from (nexus.bianbu.com IIRC) have expired, so not much demos besides these present on desktop.
There's a propietary Titan Flasher for... hard to tell because no localization other than Chinese, but it's also being unstable.

Despite clear Ubuntu heritage, do-release-upgrade does *something* but ultimatey dies without error message besides "Aborted".

Device is fanless so silent, yet can get pretty hot below and above motheboard (left side). Sensors show up to 60°C in stress on CPU(sensor's arent labelled in any way) probably thanks to metal shield covering almost entire mainboard.

There's also single speaker pointing towards the screen(?) which does reproduce sound but nowhere near to pleasant listening experience. Again, better than Pinebook Pro, nowhere near cheap regular laptops.

But it's not the device for average consumer. As a RISC-V hacking playground Musebook is simply awesome. 8 cores does decent job when compiling and in realm of risc-v devices this one is really snappy. Input devices are all usb-based so they're compatible with anything that follows HID standards and doesn't require any propietary firmware or drivers to operate.

Definetely would buy again.