[Arm-netbook] Various projects somewhat related to the EOMA initiative

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

There doesn't seem to be much EOMA68 news any more, but I was reminded of some 
of the ideas brought up in the context of the initiative by a few products or 
projects that came to my attention recently.

One interesting product is the Mixtile Blade 3 which just about met its 
funding goal on Crowd Supply:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/mixtile-limited/mixtile-blade-3

The interesting idea that this implements is the ability to daisy-chain the 
boards using PCI Express, and there is also a cluster box that provides a 
switched PCI Express bus. In the context of EOMA68 or similar efforts there 
was this idea:

https://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/cluster_server/

The Mixtile Blade 3 uses the Rockchip RK3588, which has also been introduced 
in products from PINE64:

https://www.pine64.org/2022/03/15/march-update-introducing-the-quartzpro64/

Another notable development from PINE64 is an impending introduction of a 
RISC-V-based product (these having started to emerge from various other 
places, often based on the Allwinner D1):

https://www.pine64.org/2022/06/28/june-update-who-likes-risc-v/

>From the choice of GPU technology, it seems like this might be the basis of 
the SoC being used:

https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-and-andes-jointly-validate-gpu-with-risc-v-cpu-ip/

ImgTec have now started to work on Free Software drivers for various products, 
as I understand it, although I doubt that older products will be supported, 
and the firmware will most likely remain non-free. I would love to be proved 
wrong, though. It's a shame ImgTec didn't have the same level of ambition and 
pragmatism when they owned MIPS.

On that topic, David posted news of an interesting project on the Tinkerphones 
mailing list:

https://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/community/2022-June/002206.html

To summarise, someone has been pursuing the development of a featurephone 
using the Ingenic X1000E:

http://www.ingenic.com.cn/en/?product/id/9.html

That SoC has a relatively small amount of on-board RAM (64MB, which counts as 
small these days), but it could run a very modest Linux distribution. Unlike 
earlier Ingenic SoCs, but like the JZ4780, it has a hardware floating-point 
arithmetic unit. And it also has the different on-chip peripherals for easy 
integration into portable devices. Relevant EOMA-related ideas include the 
following:

https://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/games_console/
https://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/hybrid_phone/
https://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/pocket_qwerty_computer/
https://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/zipit_refit/

I haven't spent or pledged any money towards any of these initiatives, but for 
anyone wondering whether some of the EOMA-related ideas were ever taken up in 
some sense, I thought they might be of interest.

Paul