What if your laptop didn’t need a processor from an established brand like Intel or AMD? What if it didn’t even rely on proprietary paid architectures like Arm and x86? RISC-V is one of the answers to those questions — it’s free for anyone to use! — and modular computer company Framework has just decided to welcome RISC-V into its laptop lineup.

While it’s exciting to see the open-source RISC-V become so accessible, you should know it’s pretty early days. Framework warns that the performance and features aren’t on par with Intel and AMD:

And when Framework says they “aren’t yet competitive,” that may be something of an understatement: Phoronix’s Michael Larabel points out that even a Raspberry Pi 4 mini-computer is likely faster than the quad-core 1.5GHz RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC you’re getting here.

But this is still an intriguing step in bringing more competition to the chip market, especially now that we no longer live in an age where “native” x86 chips and native Windows are required to run decades of legacy applications decently well. The Steam Deck, Apple Silicon, and now a wave of Qualcomm and Arm-powered Windows laptops are all here to prove that native isn’t always best and that we deserve more.

And RISC-V isn’t such an outlandish choice as all that: the “R” in Arm stands for “RISC,” after all, and RISC-V chips are already in use in embedded and server applications. The Framework Laptop 13 even technically already has a RISC-V chip — it’s in the fingerprint reader.