[Arm-netbook] The future of EOMA-68

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 8:32 PM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:

> Moreover, the RISC-V architecture on which lowRISC is based has David
> Patterson on board, who was the originator of Berkeley RISC which was
> developed further into SPARC, so we're not talking about a group of pundits
> waiting for other people to do the work. Indeed, there's a RISC-V core that
> has supposedly been "proven" on/for various manufacturing processes, so those
> people aren't messing around.

 (1) the goal is clearly stated as "to produce a working core that may
be used by anybody".

 (2) in order to restrict the amount of work that is to be done, they
are *not* going to add any kind of "accelerated" instructions.  no
SIMD, no special decoder instructions, no video acceleration
instructions, no 3D acceleration instructions - nothing.

in other words they're going to spend $USD 5m to produce a chip that
contains *NO* VPU, *NO* GPU, no hardware acceleration of any kind.

now, when they say "yeah sure anybody may use the resultant core we
design", that's completely and utterly useless because it's the
*spending $USD 5m* that's the primary barrier!!

 with $USD 10m, i can - right now - go and contact ICubeCorp, and
re-activate the plans that were set up 2 years ago to produce a
mass-volume SoC that would be *far more commercially viable* than what
the RISC-V team are attempting to do.  at least ICubeCorp's processor
design has been made by someone who worked for ATI, NVIDIA _and_ AMD
in their 3D / VPU division.

 you want a SoC that doesn't have any kind of accelerated video or
graphics? go get one of the TI beaglebone ARM Cortex A8s for goodness
sake.  or go get the latest dual-core ARM Cortex A5 form ATMEL, even
the Zync 7030 would be better as at least you could use the FPGA to
do... *something*.

 honestly, then, unless someone has beat some sense into them, the
RISC-V project is pretty much guaranteed to be yet another "Open
Flop", where money is poured into yet another expensive lesson.

 kinda annoying, but there you go.

l.