[Arm-netbook] Some Pine64 Experiences (via Planet Debian)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On 10/11/16, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:

> Meanwhile, significant international partners should be doing their part,
> too:
> I noticed that Imagination had managed to prise the jz4780 SoC programming
> manual out of Ingenic for public dissemination around their Creator CI20

right.  ingenic are an extremely small team: they simply haven't got
time to mess about with "support" issues for people who aren't
directly paying them.  the amazing thing is that ingenic fully
recognise this and just dump the entire source (albeit of really quite
old kernels and u-boot but at least it works) directly onto their FTP
server.

i really really like ingenic, it's just that they've gone too
specialist (and are sticking with ultra-low-power single and dual
core), and their attempts to do 4-way or above SMP obviously didn't
work out as well as they'd hoped (we had rumours of a jz4790 quad-core
SMP design a couple years back, which never panned out).

now, here's the thing: what i might do is see if i can go meet them,
and point them in the direction of RISC-V, particularly the work being
done by the lowRISC team.  they could either learn from that (and make
themselves a decent SMP design) ooorr..... they could make a really
decent RISC-V SoC, using some of the interface hard macros that
they've already got.

l.