[Arm-netbook] crowdfunding page is live -- and different CPUs for the future

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi all,

2016-06-30 16:25 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
>On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 3:33 PM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>> On Wednesday 29. June 2016 20.35.04 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>>>
>>> the page is now live, and runs till the 26th august.  please do help
>>> push that out to as many people as you can, blog about it, etc. we
>>> have thinkpenguin writing about it, liliputing is doing an article,
>>> i'll create a slashdot article, i'll be in touch with wired later
>>> today and so on.
>>>
>>> https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
>>
>> Congratulations on getting this far!

+1!  Congrats, Luke!


>> I'm inclined to pledge for the Micro-Desktop and EOMA68-A20, but I'd be very
>> interested in getting other cards as well, if the ones that were planned
>> (jz4775, IC1T) made it onto the bill. The possibility of experimenting with
>> different architectures, having a common platform in which to do it, is a
>> considerable strength of the EOMA68 concept.
>
> the ic1t i haven't heard back from them in a while, but the jz4775
>looks achievable - i just have to find time to sort out the boot
>process.

(just IMHO)

MIPS it's a more realistic possibility, but I am not sure if IC1T is a
very good option, if it has no foothold in the market yet, has zero
distributions supporting it, and it doesn't offer clear advantages in
other areas (??).  I wouldn't mind at all to get one of those, but I am
not sure if many people will follow... so would be bad in terms of
effectiveness.


If it's for something more experimental like perhaps the IC1T would be,
I'd consider the possibility of exploring RISC-V [1] based designs like
the recently launched SiFive ones [2].

The development is more in-line with FOSS (even if some aspects are not
100% perfect), hopefully there will be no need for blobs or NDAs or
problems for booting.  And with 64-bits, it is well prepared to be
usable for several decades to come [3].


[1] https://riscv.org/

[2] https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/

[3] 32-bits is problematic even nowadays, e.g. Debian having problems to
    build some of the biggest applications due to lack of memory.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>