[Arm-netbook] The future of EOMA-68

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 4:07 PM, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
<manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2015-05-02 12:33 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
>>
>> On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Another consideration is openness. Are either of these technologies
>>> sufficiently open? Nvidia have traditionally had a bad reputation for
>>> this,
>>> perhaps only courting openness when they've struggled to attract
>>> customers, as
>>> I remember being the case with their SoCs: I think the summary was that
>>> they
>>> promised a lot and delivered comparatively little, and the customers all
>>> switched their future designs to other SoCs in disgust.
>>
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> that and the fact that the IC3128 and the JZ4775 are FSF-Endorseable
>> means that there are people willing to buy them irrespective of the
>> slightly lower performance.  the JZ4775 CPU Card will come with 2gb of
>> RAM, so the fact that it's only a 1ghz single-core MIPS will be less
>> of an issue.
>
>
> Speaking of openness/FSF-endorsability, and having into account that the
> current
> focus is to go ahead with what is already planned like the A20, with which I
> fully agree (so please don't take this as a demand, just as showing
> interest) --
> would it be feasible in the near future to have OpenRISC or RISC-V (or
> RISC-V-based lowrisc, when ready)?

 if they're any good, such that people want to buy enough of them,
thus justifying the outlay of expenditure on the PCB development and
assembly, then yes, of course.


> Almost none of the disadvantages cited for Intel or NVIDIA SoCs apply (NDAs,
> binary blobs, power issues).  Everything is fully open in the case of those
> processors, and the toolchains are based on the usual GNU/Linux ones (GNU
> GCC,
> glibc, etc) and mostly ready (they could use some help with upstreaming, but
> that's another issue).  Unless there is a problem with finding factories
> able to
> build them, I don't know if there is any disadvantage compared to ICubeCorp
> IC3128 and Ingenic JZ4775?
>
> In the case of OpenRISC, there is even a Debian port half-ready [1].

 cool!

 the only problem being: they've designed OpenRISC with not
long-enough pipelines.  it's *going* to stall above a certain speed,
and that speed really isn't going to be very much.  certainly not
enough to be commercially competitive.

> I guess
> that Ingenic's will already work with the Debian mips/mipsel port,

 yes.

> but I think
> that for ICubeCorp's all of the software distribution would have to be
> created
> from scratch.

 correct.