Firefly has launched the AIBOX-K3, an industrial edge computing box built on the SpacemiT Key Stone K3 SoC and aimed squarely at developers who want to run modern AI workloads on a fully RISC-V platform. Packed inside a 93.4 x 93.4 x 50.0 mm (3.7 x 3.7 x 2.0 inches) aluminum chassis weighing roughly 500 grams (1.1 lbs), the machine pairs an octa-core CPU cluster with a separate AI core array that the company rates at up to 60 TOPS of INT4 sparse performance.
The K3 SoC combines eight 64-bit X100 application cores running at up to 2.4 GHz with RVA23 profile compliance and 130 KDMIPS of integer throughput, alongside eight A100 AI cores that support 1024-bit RVV 1.0 vector operations tuned for matrix math. Graphics come from Imagination's BXM4-64-MC1 GPU with Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL 3.0, and OpenGL ES 3.2, while the video block handles H.265, H.264, and VP9 decode up to 4K at 120 FPS and 4K at 60 FPS encode. Firefly offers configurations with 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 (51 GB/s bandwidth) paired with 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of onboard UFS 2.2 storage, and an M.2 2242/2280 slot exposes four lanes of PCIe 3.0 for NVMe expansion.
I/O is generous for a box this size, with HDMI 2.0 at 4K@60Hz, dual Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a USB 3.0 Type-C DRD port, and a separate USB-C serial console. The SoC includes hardware mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown-style attacks, PMP/ePMP and IOPMP memory protection, and built-in AES, SHA, RSA, and SM2/3/4 crypto engines. Firefly claims the system can run models up to 30 billion parameters locally, including Mixture of Experts configurations, with inference speeds above 10 tokens per second on a 30B model.
On the software side, SpacemiT lists support for Bianbu OS 3.0, Ubuntu 26.04 (co-developed with Canonical, which formally announced K3 and K1 series support and identifies the K3 as among the first RVA23-compliant SoCs to receive official Ubuntu LTS backing), OpenHarmony, OpenKylin, Fedora, and Deepin, with Docker, KVM virtualization, and ROS all working on the platform. Initial mainline kernel support for the K3 landed in Linux 7.0, and additional drivers and tooling are published on the SpacemiT GitHub organization. Firefly's download portal currently provides flashing utilities for Linux and Windows hosts, so buyers may need to install an OS image themselves.
The AIBOX-K3 is available now on Firefly's store, starting at $349 (€320) for the 8GB RAM and 128GB storage configuration and topping out at $689 (€630) for the 32GB model. Power input is a wide 9V to 20V via a 5.5 x 2.1 mm barrel jack, with 12V/5A recommended, and the box is rated for operation between -20°C and 60°C (-4°F to 140°F).
