Edit July 25, 2025, 6:30 PM ET: Corrected base price to $159 (exchange rate applies) and removed mention of general purpose.
There's been a flurry of news surrounding RISC-V lately, like Steam support for RISC-V through an emulator and Nvidia's announcement of CUDA support for RISC-V processors, but as expected with the 2025 RISC-V Summit China underway, more news continues to surface, including that the world's first RISC-V tablet now comes with a functional Linux operating system (early models lacked an OS and were for developers only).
When we talk about RISC-V, we barely mention support of real-time operating systems and seldom mention support of rich OSes, such as Linux or Windows, mainly because of a lack of support. However, this does not mean all rich Linux distributions cannot be run on RISC-V hardware: enter PineTab-V, reports ITHome.
The PineTab‑V ships with a big screen and a Debian‑based Linux distribution, maintained by StarFive, which is, of course, tailored for RISC‑V. With a base price of $159 (exchange rates apply), it features a 10.1-inch IPS screen, a 2-megapixel front camera, a 5-megapixel rear camera, and a detachable magnetic keyboard, according to reports.
Early units, released in 2023, lacked any operating system, but as of March 2025, a functional image based on Debian 12 (Bookworm/Sid) with GNOME (a rich operating system) was included and pre-installed.
The PineTab-V obviously supports browsing, editing documents, and playing video, but as expected for a tablet, it isn't up to the task for heavier workloads, such as video editing (perhaps because the vast majority of owners tend to have much more performant chips in their iPhones). Demonstration images from the event showed the device running lightweight games, highlighting the capability of RISC-V-based system-on-chip in mobile computing applications beyond embedded systems.
The announcement, to some extent, highlights growing confidence in the maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem. The summit reflected momentum across multiple layers—from chip-level IP to consumer hardware, which perhaps signals expanding opportunities for RISC-V in mainstream electronics.
While the PineTab-V is not a powerhouse by modern standards, its value for technology geeks lies in what it represents: a working example of an RISC-V device capable consumer device running a desktop Linux environment out of the box. This is a notable milestone for the instruction set architecture, which has so far been confined to academic, embedded, or industrial domains with minimal user-facing software. The fact that users can now interact with a GNOME desktop, open a browser, type documents, and even play simple games on a RISC-V chip is a strong signal that the software ecosystem is beginning to catch up with the hardware.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
