[Arm-netbook] The future of EOMA-68

[Christopher Havel]

Luke, I just want to poke in here and thank you for mentioning something --
I myself was thinking of poking you on the subject of Intel's Bay Trail
stuff -- now I know :) things are never as simple as one wishes they were...

Oh well, maybe someday we'll get x86 stuff into EOMA68... that *would* be
huge, IMO -- basically every standard PC (and Mac, now) runs x86... but I
think I understand why it's not in the cards, yet.

(I hate to ask, because of how dead-dog-slow their stuff is -- but what
about VIA? Their Esther-core Eden ULV CPU is 3.5w @ 1GHz... of course then
you stuff in the chipset and the RAM and the everything else, and you're
probably way over budget, but I thought I'd mention it.)

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <
manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2015-05-02 12:33 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
>
>> On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 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 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.
>>
>
> Speaking of openness/FSF-endorsability, and having into account that the
> current
> focus is to go ahead with what is already planned like the A20, with which
> I
> fully agree (so please don't take this as a demand, just as showing
> interest) --
> would it be feasible in the near future to have OpenRISC or RISC-V (or
> RISC-V-based lowrisc, when ready)?
>
> Almost none of the disadvantages cited for Intel or NVIDIA SoCs apply
> (NDAs,
> binary blobs, power issues).  Everything is fully open in the case of those
> processors, and the toolchains are based on the usual GNU/Linux ones (GNU
> GCC,
> glibc, etc) and mostly ready (they could use some help with upstreaming,
> but
> that's another issue).  Unless there is a problem with finding factories
> able to
> build them, I don't know if there is any disadvantage compared to ICubeCorp
> IC3128 and Ingenic JZ4775?
>
> In the case of OpenRISC, there is even a Debian port half-ready [1]. I
> guess
> that Ingenic's will already work with the Debian mips/mipsel port, but I
> think
> that for ICubeCorp's all of the software distribution would have to be
> created
> from scratch.
>
> [1]
> https://people.debian.org/~mafm/posts/2015/20150421_about-the-debian-gnulinux-port-for-openrisc-or1k/
>
>
> Cheers.
> --
> Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook at lists.phcomp.co.uk
> http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook
> Send large attachments to arm-netbook at files.phcomp.co.uk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/attachments/20150502/980ff33e/attachment.html>