I’ve been eye-balling RISC-V for many years but never wanted to jump the gun and buy into RISC-V until I saw the beautiful Jupiter.
However, I can’t find download links for any Linux builds even though the page shows Ubuntu and Fedora is supported; and there’s supposedly a Manjaro build, but I couldn’t find that one either. Additionally, I can’t find the exact dimensions to fit a heatsink over the chips though I’m assuming it appears to be 40x40mm. Correct me if I’m wrong and please provide an accurate term for that heatsink slot as I’d like to attach a copper heatsink to make my board glow under RGB.
Does Milk-V have plans to release the Jupiter with faster Spacemit X60 or even X100 processors and PCIe x16 slots?
I’d recommend getting started with the Getting Started Guide. When you get to the correct step under Install OS it’ll have a link to the Resource Download page which includes flashable images for Ubuntu, Bianbu OS, and Fedora. (The Ubuntu image is out of date, use one of the others.) Note that “generic” downloads provided by Linux Distro vendors will not work; the Jupiter board needs a bootable image with board-specific bootloader and vendor patched kernel in order to work. For other distros, find the distro’s RISC-V support community and ask about whether such an image is available there.
To mount a heatsink, it needs to have two springloaded mounting pins spaced 55mm apart, with offset positions. This is a somewhat common mounting pattern that was used on older low power graphics cards and some motherboard chipsets, but I don’t think it has any specific name. Heatsinks larger than 40×40mm will fit (might cover the eMMC slot; be careful of some nearby passive components), but anything smaller than that won’t cover both the CPU and RAM. You will need some relatively thick thermal pads for the RAM, since the CPU stands quite a bit taller than the RAM - especially the M1 with its metal packaging.
There are no SoCs available or announced with faster X60 cores (it’s a low power in-order core design, not intended for high performance). The Milk-V Oasis, which is currently stuck because of development/production issues with the Sophgo SG2380 SoC, is planned to have much faster Sifive X280 cores, and might have a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot.
There’s also the Milk-V Megrez which has SiFive P550 cores. It’s on sale (although out of stock as of December 16, 2024) here. Although the PCIE slot is still x4 and gen 3, the PCIE controller has definitely been replaced, reportedly it can support a 7900XTX which wouldn’t have been possible on the old 32-bit controller.