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