[Arm-netbook] The future of EOMA-68

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On Saturday 2. May 2015 09.51.11 gacuest at gmail.com wrote:
>> I have seen that are developing several EOMA-68, but all have very little
>> power or are old (like A20, JZ4775 or IC1T). This makes that many people
>> that are looking for powerful hardware is left out of the EOMA-68 market.
>
> I personally regard low power consumption as a good thing, and I guess the
> reason for focusing on that is the original intention to use EOMA-68 in, well,
> an "ARM netbook". ;-)

 :)

> As for things being old, I suppose the A20 is "old" if you regard anything
> that isn't the manufacturer's current generation of products as old. Then
> again, maybe I don't care as much as you about this: my desktop computer is
> ten years old, and running GNU/Linux means that I've not been forced to
> upgrade to bail out various large corporations repeatedly over that period.

 it's something like 17 seconds to boot a full desktop GUI on the A20.

>> What is the future of EOMA-68? Any EOMA-68 with a powerful hardware (like
>> Tegra X1 or Intel Bay-Trail)?
>
> Another consideration is openness. Are either of these technologies
> sufficiently open? Nvidia have traditionally had a bad reputation for this,
> perhaps only courting openness when they've struggled to attract customers, as
> I remember being the case with their SoCs: I think the summary was that they
> promised a lot and delivered comparatively little, and the customers all
> switched their future designs to other SoCs in disgust.

 that, and the fact that the pricing will be $17 vs a $5 allwinner
processor, it becomes hard to justify the price differential when you
can't really tell the difference if the game you're running on a 7in
screen is 30fps instead of 120fps (i.e. beyond the refresh rate of the
LCD)

 the whole point is that there's a threshold of "good enough" that all
these lower-priced (and lower-power) processors fit perfectly well.

 that and the fact that the IC3128 and the JZ4775 are FSF-Endorseable
means that there are people willing to buy them irrespective of the
slightly lower performance.  the JZ4775 CPU Card will come with 2gb of
RAM, so the fact that it's only a 1ghz single-core MIPS will be less
of an issue.

l.