Hey Luke, hope you and your and fam are doing well ;) We haven't heard
anything from you in a while, and would be great to have an status update
or something similar :P
--
Felix
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…
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
