[Arm-netbook] Libre RISC-V RV64GC SoC

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 2:25 PM, mike.valk at gmail.com
<mike.valk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2017-12-29 6:48 GMT+01:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>:
>> On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 9:56 PM, Bill Kontos <vkontogpls at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If this goes
>>> well it will go down in history as one of those famous conversations
>>> in the early days of tech we read about.
>>
>>  yehyeh!
>
> I think so too. And India is very keen on becoming the next
> China/Taiwan/Etc. Which I think is a good thing.

 hell yes.  i was very surprised to find, here, that the prices in
Shenzhen for commodity equipment are hardly any different from USA
prices [EU different as the support of the socialist system aka
"welfare state" is extremely burdensome and has to be paid for by
vastly higher prices].

 and the cost of living is... becoming higher than london.  the hostel
i stayed at was unusual, $5 / day to live in a 10-bed room and it was
*full of chinese people*.

> 2D: Skip. AMD and Vivante already do so, NVIDIA will too IIRC. The 2D
> accelerators were mostly for windowing systems now replaced by
> composting systems, including MS Windows, and other means, Androids
> SurfaceFlinger, etc. The missing functions are now done on 3D or CPU.

 yyeah which i'm not keen on (critically relying on 3D) - that means
you *have* to have OpenGL.  plus if using ORSOC Graphics Accelerator
it would actually be necessary to rip those features *out* of it.

 ORSOC GPU is smart, it has scalable vector font support, z-buffer
support, 3D polygon display and much more.   really cool.


> VPU: That would require also licenses from the format owners. That's
> going to be difficult. And the new, open, video formats are not ready.
> Daala, Thor, NETVC, AV1.

 this is actually a really good case for using the primitives e.g.
here *not* hard-coded engines:
 https://opencores.org/project,video_systems


> Something generic to offload parts of the decoding/encoding would be
> the best bet I guess. Avoids licenses, single format isolation. IIRC
> most codecs share techniques. I might be talking jibberisch, or it
> might be to impractical.

 no if you can do e.g. CABAC decode, or DCT, or Huffman encode.decode,
you have the building blocks and things get really quick.... *without*
running into patents.


> 3D. Wasn't there a PoC from some students in the open macro's? Perhaps
> those guys can be hired to refine their work?

 can you point me towards it with some clues?

l.