Canonical and SpacemiT announced today that Ubuntu Linux will be officially supported on SpacemiT’s new K3 RISC-V SoC. What makes the K3 interesting is being one of the first available RISC-V RVA23 designs.
Canonical announced last year with Ubuntu 25.10 they’d be raising the Ubuntu RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with a lack of RVA23-compatible hardware being readily available. This cuts off existing RISC-V boards from working on Ubuntu 25.10 and newer, leaving them mainly to the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS series. For Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V it meant mainly testing within QEMU environments given the lack of readily available hardware.
Now the SpacemiT K3 is working its way to the marketplace as one of the first RVA23 compatible SoCs and will be officially supported on Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS coming up, this is great to see. The K3 features eight RISC-V RVA23-compliant cores with clock speeds up to 2.4GHz and a reported 60 TOPS for general purpose AI. The K3 will support up to 32GB of LPDDR5 memory.
In today’s announcement they also note the SpacemiT K1 being officially supported on Ubuntu Linux too. But that’s not an RVA23 design and thus Ubuntu 24.04 LTS usage. SpacemiT previously talked of sending some review hardware over so hopefully that will happen for some modern RISC-V benchmarking on Phoronix.
