DC‑ROMA RISC‑V Mainboard III: DeepComputing’s Open‑Source Motherboard That Challenges Intel

Every laptop you have ever owned has one thing in common: the chip inside it is proprietary. Intel’s x86 architecture is licensed and controlled by Intel. AMD’s x86-64 is licensed and controlled by AMD. Arm’s architecture is licensed by Arm Holdings, which charges royalties to every company that uses it. The processor that runs your computer — the fundamental layer of everything your machine does — belongs to a corporation, not to you.

RISC-V is the first credible attempt to change that at the laptop level. It is an open-source instruction set architecture developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010 — free for anyone to use, modify, implement, or build on without licensing fees or restrictions. And for the first time, a company has built a mainboard powered by RISC-V that drops directly into an existing, widely-owned laptop chassis — the Framework Laptop 13 — allowing owners to swap their Intel processor for an open-source alternative without replacing the screen, keyboard, battery, or chassis.

That mainboard is the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III, made by Hong Kong-based DeepComputing. It ships in June 2026. Here is everything confirmed about what it is and why it matters.

// DeepComputing CEO Yuning Liang & Canonical — RISC-V Forward to the Future: The Move to RVA23 (Ubuntu Summit 2025)

Who Is DeepComputing and Who Made This?

DeepComputing is a hardware company founded in 2022 and headquartered in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Its founder and CEO is Yuning Liang, who previously founded Xcalibyte — a compiler software company — in 2018. The idea for DeepComputing came when Liang configured an old MIPS processor to compile for RISC-V and realised there was almost no RISC-V hardware available for personal use. He identified a self-reinforcing problem: developers were not building RISC-V software because there was no accessible hardware, and hardware manufacturers were not building RISC-V devices because there was insufficient software. His solution was to become the hardware company that breaks that cycle.

DeepComputing shipped the world’s first RISC-V laptop — the DC-Roma — in 2023, followed by the DC-Roma II in 2024 with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. The Framework Laptop 13 mainboard programme began with the Mainboard I (StarFive JH7110 chip) and Mainboard II (ESWIN EIC7702X chip, 50 TOPS). The Mainboard III is the third generation of that programme and the most capable yet.

The mainboard was first unveiled publicly at FOSDEM 2026 on January 31, 2026 — the world’s largest open-source software conference — and appeared again at Framework’s NextGen event in April 2026. Orders opened in May 2026 with first batch delivery confirmed for the end of June 2026.

What Is RISC-V and Why Does It Matter?

RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) is an open-source Instruction Set Architecture — the fundamental language that defines how software communicates with hardware. It was developed at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 2010 and released publicly with no licensing restrictions. Any company, individual, researcher, or government can implement RISC-V in hardware without paying royalties to anyone.

This is fundamentally different from every other mainstream chip architecture. Intel and AMD’s x86 is proprietary — you cannot legally build an x86 chip without licensing from those companies. Arm’s architecture, used in Apple Silicon and most smartphones, requires licensing from Arm Holdings. RISC-V has no such gatekeeper. It has been described as “the Linux of processor architectures” — open, community-developed, and free to use.

Full Confirmed Specifications

The Framework Laptop 13 Connection — Why It Matters

The Framework Laptop 13 is one of the most significant laptops sold in the past five years — not because of its performance, but because of its philosophy. Framework designed it to be fully repairable and modular: the display, keyboard, battery, ports, and mainboard are all replaceable by the owner with standard screwdrivers. The mainboard is not soldered to the chassis. It slides in and out.

This design decision — which Framework calls the Expansion Card system — makes the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III possible in a way that would be impossible with any other laptop brand. An owner of a Framework Laptop 13 with an 11th, 12th, or 13th generation Intel mainboard can unscrew the bottom panel, slide out the existing Intel motherboard, slide in the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III, and boot into Ubuntu on a completely open-source processor architecture — while keeping every other component they already own.

How It Compares to Previous DC-ROMA Mainboards

How to Install the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III

Who Is the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III For?

What About Performance?

This is the honest question and the article would be incomplete without addressing it directly. The DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III is significantly more capable than its predecessors — but it is not a performance competitor to the Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen chips that normally go in a Framework Laptop 13.

DeepComputing’s CEO Yuning Liang confirmed in his IEEE Spectrum interview that the Mainboard III targets performance comparable to an Arm Cortex-A76 — the architecture used in the Raspberry Pi 5. Phoronix, which tested a K3-powered system ahead of the DC-ROMA launch, independently confirmed the X100 cores running at 2.4GHz deliver performance broadly comparable to a Cortex-A76 — consistent with DeepComputing’s own positioning and giving the claim third-party corroboration beyond manufacturer statements.

CNX Software notes that the 8 RVA23 X100 cores achieve approximately 130 KDMIPS — a performance metric comparable to Rockchip’s RK3588 chip used in high-end single-board computers. For RISC-V, this represents a generational leap. For anyone coming from an Intel laptop, it represents a meaningful step down in raw compute performance.

The 60 TOPS AI performance figure changes the calculus for AI workloads specifically. For inference tasks — running pre-trained models locally — TOPS matter more than CPU GHz. At 60 TOPS, the Mainboard III is capable of running meaningful local AI inference workloads that the previous generations could not touch.

RISC-V Mainboard III vs Standard Intel or AMD Framework Mainboard — The Direct Question

Framework Laptop 13 owners will ask this directly: should I get a RISC-V mainboard or stick with Intel or AMD? The honest answer depends entirely on your use case. A Framework Laptop 13 with a 12th or 13th Gen Intel Core Ultra mainboard will outperform the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III on virtually every general computing task — web browsing, document editing, video playback, and productivity software. Intel and AMD mainboards for the Framework cost between $179 and $399 and run the full Windows or mainstream Linux software stack without compatibility concerns.

The DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III is not competing on those terms. It exists for a different purpose: native RISC-V development, open hardware research, edge AI on an open architecture, and computing independence from proprietary chip licensing. If those goals matter to you — professionally or philosophically — the RISC-V mainboard is the only option. If you simply want the best-performing Framework Laptop 13 for everyday use, an Intel or AMD mainboard is the correct choice.

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Mr Wangdoo

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Mr Wangdoo is the founder and editorial lead of Wangdoo.com, an independent technology news publication launched in September 2025. All articles are fact-checked against primary sources before publication. Where commercial relationships exist, they are disclosed clearly within the relevant article.