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SpacemiT MUSE Book

The Chinese start-up that put open-architecture RISC-V silicon inside a laptop you can actually buy

Active — SpacemiT is a Hangzhou chip designer building processors on RISC-V, the open instruction set that anyone may implement without paying ARM or Intel. Its eight-core K1 powers the MUSE Book, a cheap RISC-V laptop marketed as the first mass-producible machine of its kind. It is an active, shipping product line.

SpacemiT, known in Chinese as Jindie Space-Time, is a chip company based in Hangzhou. It designs processors on RISC-V — an open instruction set architecture that anybody can implement without licensing fees or permission from ARM, Intel or AMD. That openness is the whole point: RISC-V has spent a decade being described as the future of computing, while remaining almost impossible to buy as an ordinary consumer product.

SpacemiT's answer is the Key Stone K1, an eight-core RISC-V AI CPU that the company has described as the first of its kind. Around that chip it has built a small hardware family: the MUSE Book laptop, the MUSE Box mini desktop, the MUSE Pi Pro developer board, and the K1 MUSE Card. It also ships Bianbu OS, a Debian-based Linux distribution tuned for its silicon.

The MUSE Book is the headline. Priced at roughly US$300 internationally and from around 2,399 yuan in China, it has been marketed as the world's first mass-producible RISC-V laptop — a claim about availability as much as technology, because previous RISC-V machines tended to be developer curiosities made in small batches. Independent reviewers have since tested it as a working octa-core RISC-V Linux laptop rather than a prototype.

SpacemiT is not the only company in this space. DeepComputing's DC-ROMA Laptop II, a slightly pricier machine, also uses SpacemiT silicon. And in a sign that the architecture is being taken seriously beyond niche hardware, mainline Linux added support for SpacemiT's RISC-V CPUs, which means the chips work with a standard kernel rather than requiring bespoke patches forever.

The honest framing is that a MUSE Book is not a competitor to a mainstream laptop. It is slower, and it runs Linux with an ecosystem still filling in its gaps. What it represents is different: a genuinely purchasable, openly-licensed computer architecture, at a price normal people can pay — which for two decades was the thing RISC-V could not deliver.

Quick facts

Company
SpacemiT (Hangzhou, China)
Architecture
RISC-V — open, royalty-free instruction set
Chip
Key Stone K1, an eight-core RISC-V AI CPU
Flagship product
MUSE Book RISC-V laptop
Price
around US$300 (from about ¥2,399 in China)
Also makes
MUSE Box, MUSE Pi Pro, K1 MUSE Card
Operating system
Bianbu OS (Debian-based)
Kernel
mainline Linux support added in 6.14
Rival
DC-ROMA Laptop II, which also uses SpacemiT silicon

Lineage — where the name went

SpacemiT's story is a chip-first lineage: one piece of open silicon, and a family of machines built on top of it — plus the moment that silicon reached the mainline Linux kernel.

  1. 2024 — SpacemiT created Key Stone K1 (the chip the whole family is built on)
  2. SpacemiT created Bianbu OS (the operating system layer)
  3. SpacemiT created MUSE Pi Pro (developer board)
  4. 2025 — SpacemiT created MUSE Book (the flagship: a RISC-V laptop you can buy)
  5. SpacemiT created MUSE Box (mini desktop)
  6. SpacemiT created K1 MUSE Card (expansion card)

Entities in this tree: SpacemiT (company); Key Stone K1 (product, 2024); Bianbu OS (product); MUSE Pi Pro (product); MUSE Book (product, 2025); MUSE Box (product); K1 MUSE Card (product)

Sources

  1. SpacemiT - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-15)
  2. MUSE Book laptop review: testing an octa-core RISC-V Linux laptop in 2026 — CNX Software (2026-09-15)
  3. RISC-V laptops: $299 MUSE Book and $399 DC-ROMA II with SpacemiT processors are now available — GeekChamp (2026-09-15)
  4. Chinese startup launching RISC-V laptop for devs and engineers priced at around $300 — Yahoo Tech (2026-09-15)
  5. Linux 6.14 to add support for SpacemiT's energy-efficient AI RISC-V CPUs — Phoronix (2026-09-15)

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