Sipeed has launched its new K3 series Single Board Computers, powered by the RISC-V ISA. Using SpacemiT's new "Fusion Architecture" with dedicated matrix multiplication blocks, Sipeed claims these systems can run 30B LLMs locally at over 10 tokens per second.
SpacemiT, a fabless Chinese semiconductor designer, is the silicon architect, while Sipeed serves as the hardware integrator. The K3 SoC is packaged with 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory and 10GbE networking, offering an alternative to proprietary AI hardware for enthusiasts and researchers. Prices start at $299 and go up to $629 for the 32GB flagship.
At the silicon level, the K3 SoC features 8 general-purpose X100 cores, each with 4 MB of L2 cache. The company claims the X100 performs similarly to ARM's Cortex-A76 core. The K3 also offers 8 A100 AI matrix units with TCM (Tightly Coupled Memory) and supports up to 1024-bit RVV 1.0 vector processing. These deliver up to 60 TOPS of performance (format unspecified) and support BF16, FP16, FP8, INT8, and INT4 data types.
Both X100 and A100 cores connect to the memory controller via a coherent interconnect bus, sharing the same memory. This is not like a traditional NPU, which usually resides separately. While not as fast as GPU cores, the K3 architecture supports zero-copy, allowing CPU and AI cores to share the same memory space.
The dual 32-bit controllers support LPDDR4x-4200/LPDDR5-6400 memory, delivering up to 51GB/s of bandwidth. The SoC is rated at a TDP of 15-25W. Sipeed offers the K3 in two form factors: the CoM (Computer-on-Module) and the Pico-ITX.
The K3 CoM260 is a 69.6mm x 45mm module, pin-compatible with NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano carrier boards. The Pico-ITX version, similar to a Raspberry Pi, measures 100mm x 86mm and features 2 USB Type-C ports (Power Delivery and Alt-DP), 1 10 GbE port, and 1 1 GbE port.
The K3 officially supports Ubuntu 26.04 and ROS. In terms of AI throughput, the company claims inference speeds exceeding 10 tokens per second with a 30B-parameter model. The 32GB version should be able to fit a quantized version of Qwen 3.6 A3B 35B (~22GB), though space will be tight. Smaller MoE models, such as Gemma 4 26B A4B (~15GB), may be more suitable.
The Sipeed K3 series, starting at $299 for the 8GB model, provides an accessible gateway into the RISC-V landscape. While it may not yet challenge NVIDIA's dominance in high-end GPUs, the K3 represents an important milestone as one of the first RVA23-compliant platforms with a full Ubuntu 26.04 LTS environment. The platform gives enthusiasts and researchers a practical way to explore local inference on an open instruction-set architecture.
