Luke, I just want to poke in here and thank you for mentioning something -- I myself was thinking of poking you on the subject of Intel's Bay Trail stuff -- now I know :) things are never as simple as one wishes they were...

Oh well, maybe someday we'll get x86 stuff into EOMA68... that *would* be huge, IMO -- basically every standard PC (and Mac, now) runs x86... but I think I understand why it's not in the cards, yet.

(I hate to ask, because of how dead-dog-slow their stuff is -- but what about VIA? Their Esther-core Eden ULV CPU is 3.5w @ 1GHz... of course then you stuff in the chipset and the RAM and the everything else, and you're probably way over budget, but I thought I'd mention it.)

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo@gmail.com> wrote:

2015-05-02 12:33 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Paul Boddie <paul@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)?

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]. I guess
that Ingenic's will already work with the Debian mips/mipsel port, but I think
that for ICubeCorp's all of the software distribution would have to be created
from scratch.

[1] https://people.debian.org/~mafm/posts/2015/20150421_about-the-debian-gnulinux-port-for-openrisc-or1k/

Cheers.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo@gmail.com>

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