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MUSE Book laptop review – Testing an octa-core RISC-V Linux laptop in 2026

SpacemiT sent me a sample of the MUSE Book RISC-V Linux laptop for review. It’s based on the SpacemiT K1/M1 octa-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC, ships with up to 16 GB of RAM, eMMC flash and/or NVMe SSD, and features a 14.1-inch IPS display with 1920×1080 resolution, WiFi 6 connectivity, a few USB ports, and more.

I won’t go through all the hardware specifications since Leo already did that when he wrote about the MUSE Book Laptop in April 2024, along with a teardown, and additional details about the SpacemiT K1/M1 SoC. I’ll still do an unboxing and quickly check the hardware, but I’ll focus on the software part to show the progress with Bianbu OS 2.3 (Ubuntu 24.04-based) on RISC-V hardware, as I just did for the low-end StarFive JH7110S-based VisionFive 2 Lite SBC. It’s quite a long review, so if you are short on time, you can jump directly to the summary of what works and what doesn’t.

MUSE Book RISC-V Laptop Review 2026

MUSE Book laptop unboxing

I received the MUSE Book (MBM100) laptop in a retail package, and my model comes with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB NVMe SSD.

MUSE Book MBM100 laptop retail package

The laptop ships with a 65W USB power supply, a USB Type-C cable for power, a GPIO/UART cable, a SIM card tool (to enter bootloader mode), a user guide, a packing list, a warranty card, a safe use guide, and an I/O expansion interface guide.

MUSE Book unboxing

The included myACT APS-PD65WZ-G fast charger delivers up to 65W (20V/3.25A).

myACT 65W USB C power adapter

The external ports remain the same as in 2024. The right side features a Fastboot pinhole to flash the OS, an 8-pin GPIO/I2C/UART header, and a USB 3.0 Type-A port. The left side comes with another USB 3.0 Type-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB-C port for power and data, a USB-C “full function” port with DisplayPort Alt mode, a microSD card slot, and a “Restart” pinhole.

RISC V Laptop ports USB GPIO audio microsd Card slot

The keyboard features a QWERTY keyboard, a touchpad, and three LEDs.

Muse BOOK Keyboard layout

Back in April 2024, Leo could not turn on the laptop as it was an early prototype, but I had no such problem, and Bianbu OS booted normally after I pressed the power button. The front also features a Full HD webcam. The wizard allows users to switch between simplified Chinese and American English and set the timezone and other configuration settings.

MUSE Book First boot

As a side note, Bianbu OS was also used in the Jupiter Mini-ITX motherboard board I reviewed in 2024, and there were a few issues at the time, including poor YouTube performance, unstable ffmpeg video playback, and some issues with specific USB mass storage devices. It will be interesting to find out if any of that has improved on SpacemiT K1/M1 since then.

MUSE Book 2026 teardown

While Leo did a teardown, there are some minor changes to the hardware, so I did my own. I had to loosen fourteen screws on the back. Note there’s a sticker on one of the screws (bottom right) that’s usually used to void the warranty. It’s unclear whether that’s the case here.

MUSE Book bottom side

The internal design looks fairly neat. We have the 38Wh, 7.6V battery, a speaker, the NVMe SSD, and the main board covered by a metal plate for cooling. The system is entirely fanless.

SpacemiT MUSE BOOK teardown

After removing additional screws, we can take out the black metal plate and check out the main board. Three thermal pads are used for cooling, including two for the SpacemiT M1 SoC.

MUSE BOOK Main Board

The main components are the same as in Leo samples, and some that were not previously mentioned include a VLI817-Q7 4-port USB 3.1 Gen1 Hub controller, Lontium LT6711A HDMI 2.0 to DP 1.2 converter with internal Type-C Alternate Mode switch and PD controller, and SlimPort ANX7447 USB Power Delivery (PD) version 3.0 port controller with a DisplayPort Alt Mode mux. The WiFI 6 and Bluetooth module is still the Fn-Link 6252C-PUB (Realtek RTL8852BE-based).

Bianbu OS system information

After I went through the setup wizard, I was brought to the LxQt desktop environment. The system was still not connected to WiFI, so I just enabled it, entered my 5GHz access point credentials, and connected without issue.

MUSE BOOK Laptop Bianbi OS LxQt Desktop

We can get some system information using hardinfo and About LXQt programs. We have an M1-MUSE-BOOK motherboard with a quad-core/eight-thread RISC-V processor, 8GB of RAM, running Bianbu 2.3 OS with LXQt 2.1 lightweight desktop environment.

Bianbu OS MUSE Book Laptop System information

As usual, I also ran inxi to get further technical details:


The MUSE Book is powered by an octa-core SpacemiT X60 processor clocked at up to 1.6 GHz, and is equipped with a 128GB NVMe SSD and 8GB of RAM. All peripherals are detected properly, including HDMI video/audio, the Chicony USB2.0 FHD UVC  webcam, and the Realtek RTL8852BE WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 module.  Bianbu 2.3 is based on Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” and runs on top of Linux 6.6 LTS, supported until December 2026.

SpacemiT (M1) MUSE Book Benchmarks

Let’s start the benchmarks with sbc-bench.sh:


There was no throttling detected (reported vs measured CPU frequency), but the temperature was not reported by the script (See full sbc-bench.sh log). In terms of performance, the SpacemiT M1 octa-core laptop achieved 6,730 MIPS in 7-Zip, which compares to 3290 MIPS for the StarFive JH7110S quad-core RISC-V SBC. So over double the score which should be expected with the higher number of cores and CPU frequency. This multi-core score is also higher than for the Raspberry Pi 4 (quad-core Cortex-A72) with heatsink (5,397 MIPS) (tested in 2019).

You’ll note that the script complains about a high load average. That’s because it’s about 2.0 when idle due to some processes in the wrong state.

SpacemiT K1 Laptop high load average

Let’s test the GPU and 3D graphics acceleration with glmark2-es2-wayland.

MUSE BOOK RISC-V Laptop glmark2-es2-wayland


I’m not surprised it works, as this was already the case on the Jupiter motherboard in 2024. The score is 498 points, or higher than on the VisionFive 2 Lite (322 points). It’s a bit surprising since the SpacemiT M1 features a BXE-2-32, while the StarFive JH7110S comes with a more powerful BXE-4-32 GPU. It’s probably because of a higher frequency, and the VisionFive 2 Lite relies on GNOME instead of a lightweight desktop environment. It’s almost the exact same score of the ODROID-M1S SBC based on a Rockchip RK3566 SoC which achieved 496 points.

We’ll now use Speedometer 2.0 to check browsing performance in the pre-installed Chromium web browser…

SpacemiT M1 RISC-V Chromium Linux Speedometer 2.0 benchmark

8.90 runs per minute is quite better than 3.56 runs per minute I got with the VisionFive 2 Lite in Firefox (default web browser). For reference, the ODROID-M1S and Raspberry Pi 4 can render the same benchmark at 11 runs per minute.

Finally, I tested the 3D graphics acceleration in the Chromium browser using the WebGL Aquarium demo.

WebGL Aquarium SpacemiT M1 RISC-V Laptop Chromium

Seeing I got 34 FPS with 500 fish, I increased the number of fish to 1,000, for which I got a respectable 28 FPS, and the frame rate only really dropped when I switched to 5,000 fish (11 FPS). It’s pretty clear the GPU is enabled, but I still went to chrome://gpu to confirm.

Chrome GPU acceleration RISC-V
We can see the GPU is enabled for WebGL and WebGL2. As a side note, Video decode is also enabled, which looks promising for YouTube video playback. Scrolling down in the chrome://gpu tab, we can confirm the PowerBR B-Series BXE-2-32 GPU is indeed used here.

Chrome GPU Imagination PowerVR BXE-2-32

Storage and USB performance

Let’s now check storage performance, starting by running iozone3 on the 128GB NVMe SSD card:


That would be 761 MB/s for sequential reads, and 526 MB/s for sequential writes. That’s slightly under what a PCIe Gen3 x1 would offer. Let’s check PCIe information for the storage device:


It’s actually PCIe Gen2 x2 instead.

I’ve already inserted a 64GB Raspberry Pi-branded Class A2 microSD card to test the SD card slot:


86 MB/s for reads and 56MB/s for writes is much better than on the VisionFive 2 Lite (about 23MB/s R/W), and closer to the performance I got when testing the same 64GB Raspberry Pi micro SD card with a Raspberry Pi 5 SBC. Here are the Pi 5 results for reference (91MB/s reads, 72 MB/s writes):


I also tested the USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) Type-A/C ports with an ORICO enclosure using an NVMe drive, as well as lsusb and iozone utilities to confirm the advertised speed and actual throughput.

Here’s the output for the USB 3.0 port on the right side of the laptop for reference:


Here’s the summary for all USB ports:

  • Right side – USB 3.0 – 5 Gbps – Read speed: 312 MB/s; write speed: 335 MB/s
  • Side side
    • USB 3.0 Type-A – 5 Gbps – Read speed: 313 MB/s; write speed: 335 MB/s
    • USB 3.0 Type-C (power/data) – 5 Gbps – Read speed: 313 MB/s; write speed: 335 MB/s; power input supported
    • USB 3.0 Type-C (“full function”) – 5 Gbps – Read speed: 313 MB/s; write speed: 336 MB/s; power input supported

All four ports are USB 3.0 ports as advertised, although the read and write speeds are quite slower than with the Raspberry Pi 5, where I measured about 388MB/s sequential read speeds and 411MB/s write speeds.

WiFi and Bluetooth performance evaluation

Let’s see how 5GHz WiFi 6 performs using a Xiaomi Mi AX6000 router and iperf3:

  • Download
  • Upload

With 876 Mbps downloads and 380 Mbps uploads, WiFi (6) performance is better than the WiFi (5) performance on the Raspberry Pi 5 (259 Mbps UL, 224 Mbps DL).

After a few attempts, I could transfer an 8MB photo between the laptop and my Android phone successfully in a few seconds.

Bianbu OS RISC-V Bluetooth file transfer

I could also use the laptop as an audio sink, listening to music playing from my phone through the laptop’s speaker. Bluetooth is a pass as well.

YouTube and 1080p60 video playback

Let’s see how YouTube does in Chromium.

MUSE BOOK Laptop Ubuntu Chromium YouTube 1080p60

I loaded a 4K video and set the resolution to 1080p60. There were some dropped frames (1,153 out of 10,034, or 11.49%), but it was kind of watchable.

MUSE BOOK Laptop Ubuntu Chromium YouTube 1440p60

So I switched to 1440p60, and it was still kind of watchable, but it had more dropped frames: 659 out of 4,242 frames, or 15.5%. When I decided to go for 4Kp60, it became truly unwatchable, and at some point, I had a frozen, blurry frame. So it’s ideal for watching YouTube videos, but at least it performs better than the lower-end VisionFive 2 Lite in Firefox in that regard.

So I switched to playing local 4K videos since it’s usually much easier on the system as long as hardware video decoding is supported. The documentation mentions FFmpeg is supported with hardware video decoding, so I tried to play the videos with ffplay.

MUSE Book ffplay 4K H.264

Big Buck Bunny 4K 60 FPS using H.264 video didn’t look good with very high CPU usage and slideshow-like video playback.

MUSE Book ffplay 4K H.265

Trying the same with a 4K H.265 video was even worse. This is a clear sign of software video decoding, and the system can’t keep up.

I eventually found out “mpv” was supported in the mixed languages (English/Chinese) documentation.

MUSE Book mpv 4K H.264
The Big Buck Bunny could play smoothly with audio and relatively low CPU usage.

MUSE Book mpv 4K H.265

The H.265 video was fine too. That means ffplay doesn’t support hardware video decoding, but mpv does, and it works well.

AI workloads

The SpacemiT K1/M1 does not include an AI accelerator per se, but can deliver up to 2 TOPS of AI performance. You’ll find documentation and plenty of demos for CV (Computer Vision) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) on the Bianbu SpacemiT website.

The first step is to download the demos. Note that the instructions point to a repo on gitee.com, but if you live outside of China, it will be super slow (1024 byte/s when I tried). Luckily, I found a mirror on GitHub instead that took only a few seconds to clone:


You’ll also need to install some dependencies:


Let’s now try one of the Computer Vision samples:


If everything works as expected, the output will look as follows:


The result.jpg image features bounding boxes around detected persons in the image.

YoloV5 RISC-V
result.jpg

You can try with our own 500×375 test image by changing the file in ../data/test.jpg, or changing to Python code to point to another image on the system.

GPIO / UART testing

Since the MUSE Book is also a development platform, the company exposed UART and GPIOs through an 8-pin connector, and provides a cable to which I attached one of my USB to TLL debug boards. You can find specific documentation on the developer website.

MUSE Book UART console

I’ll use Bootterm to connect to the serial console, but other programs like Putty, minicom, picocom, and so on would do too. The USB adapter is detected…


… and I can access the serial console of the laptop using the default configuration (115,000 baud rate) and log in to the board.

MUSE Book laptop serial console

It’s especially convenient for debugging and bootloader development, as there’s no need to open the laptop to access the serial console.

I also quickly checked that the GPIOs were accessible, and two gpiochip devices can be found:


I could list the GPIOs using gpiod userspace tool:

Summary of what works, what doesn’t

  • Storage
    • Built-in NVMe SSD – OK. PCIe Gen2 x2, tested up to 761 MB/s (not optimal, but acceptable)
    • MicroSD card slot – OK Tested with a Raspberry Pi Class A2 microSD card with acceptable performance
  • Display & Audio interfaces
    • Built-in display – OK
    • Built-in speaker – OK. Tested with YouTube
    • Built-in audio jack – OK. Tested with YouTube
    • USB-C DisplayPort – Video OK, Audio OK
  • Camera – Video and Audio OK. Tested with guvcview. Detected in Microsoft Teams in Chromium, but no image when testing
  • GPU – 3D graphics acceleration enabled, tested with glmark2-es2-wayland and WebGL in Firefox.
  • VPU – OK. Works with mpv, but not with ffplay (software decoding)
  • Wireless
    • WiFi 6 – OK. Relatively good performance: 876 Mbps downloads, 380 Mbps uploads
    • Bluetooth – OK. Tested with file transfer (8MB photo in a few seconds) and as an audio sink.
  • USB – USB 3.0 port tested with an ORICO NVMe SSD enclosure
    • USB 3.0 Type-A (right side) – 5 Gbps; tested up to 335 MB/s with iozone3
    • USB 3.0 Type-A (left side) – 5 Gbps; tested up to 335 MB/s iozone3
    • USB 3.0 Type-C (power/data) – 5 Gbps; tested up to 335 MB/s with iozone3
    • USB 3.0 Type-C (full function) – 5 Gbps; tested up to 336 MB/s with iozone3
  • GPIO – OK – Quickly checked with sysfs and libgpio.
SpacemiT M1 RISC-V Laptop USB-C DisplayPort MIPI DSI
MUSE Book laptop connected to Eazeye Radiant 15.6-inch Transflective LCD via USB-C

Battery, charging, and power consumption

I fully charged the battery to 100% and did a mix of web browsing, webcam test, idle time, and YouTube streaming. After 4 hours and 10 minutes, the battery was down to 8%. I charged the battery again to 100%. The power draw starts at about 45W and drops as the battery charges. After one hour, it was at about 30W charging and 80% full. Getting to 100% takes about two extra hours, as charging is much slower to preserve the battery.

I measured the MUSE Book laptop’s power consumption using a wall power meter when the battery is 100% full:

  • Power off – 0.4 Watts
  • Lid closed – 3.5 – 3.8 Watts (this seems high, my Intel laptop draws 0.5-0.6W in this mode)
  • Idle
    • Min brightness – 7.6 Watts
    • Max brightness – 10.8 Watts
  • YouTube 1080p video playback in Chromium (Max brightness) – 12.6 to 14.9 Watts
  • 4K H.265 video playback with mpv (Max brightness) – 12.5 – 13.9 Watts
  • Stress test on all 8 cores (stress -c 8 + max brightness) – 14.2 – 14.6 Watts

To further test the lid closed situation, I closed the lid at 17:00 and disconnected the power supply, and opened it at 08:00 the following morning (15 hours with the lid closed). Battery charge went from 100% to 48%, so it’s not exactly ideal.

Conclusion

The MUSE Book laptop is excellent as a RISC-V development kit; every key feature works to some extent, and the performance, including I/O performance, is much better than on the low-end VisionFive 2 Lite I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I’m impressed by the progress made on the software front for the RISC-V ecosystem, as it rivals some of its Arm competitors. It also like that it’s possible to access the UART console without opening the laptop.

However, if you plan to use the MUSE Book RISC-V laptop as a consumer device instead, it falls short in several areas and has some shortcomings. First, you’ll get what’s roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop, with higher multi-core performance, but lower single-core performance. There will also be a few bugs here and there since RISC-V is still not as mature as x86 or Arm. Some shortcomings I discovered when testing include that YouTube video playback is limited to 720p to be really watchable, I could not use the webcam in Microsoft Teams (USB camera detected, but blank output), and the power consumption is fairly high when the lid is closed.

I’d like to thank SpacemiT for sending the MUSE Book RISC-V laptop for review. The model reviewed here, with 8GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash preloaded with Bianbu OS, does not seem available for sale at this time outside of China. Instead, the MUSE Book laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD preloaded with Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 [update: the SpacemiT explained it’s Bianbu OS as used in this review] or Fedora 41 is sold for $599 / $629 on the DeepComputing store, a price tag that mainly makes it interesting to RISC-V developers and enthusiasts.

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