41–50 of 158 posts
The big problem with these small and cheap systems is that you can't connect NVMe drives to them and you pay a huge performance penalty.
Is there a reason for a dearth of PCIe connectivity on these small SoCs? Is it difficult to implement? Perhaps a pincount issue? The big problem with these small and cheap systems is that you can't connect NVMe drives to them and you pay a huge performance penalty.
You wouldn't get very much performance anyway, as you only want many PCIe links in order to get bandwidth through them which you're unlikely to do on an anaemic CPU.
to-wit: you wouldn't get good NVMe performance even if you had the pinouts and the CPU had 4x Lanes of PCIe anyway.
Couple of observations here; - RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. - The assertion you can’t buy UMPCs in 2024 is patently false. GPD and a whole host of manufacturers make em. - A non mobile optimised blog in this day and age? That was a chore to read on the go.
> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. Only assuming development progress happens linearly. In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. It took years to even get to the point to have RISC-V SoCs and now we are seeing the first laptop products. The pace will accelerate, especially with the promise of RISC-V being a cheaper platform to build hardware on than ARM a…
Their point was that ARM is also progressing exponentially.
First tests of RISC-V laptop reveal a number of software and hardware issues, but show a path to freedom.
RISC-V in a laptop was unthinkable just a few years ago, now it's a reality (at least a prototype) and performance is underwhelming, just like it has been for ARM before.
For a true "freedom machine" I would be perfectly fine with a performance trade-off but it's also not a given that the gap will be so wide forever.
This is an excellent step and to show that it's functioning is huge.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. Only assuming development progress happens linearly. In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. It took years to even get to the point to have RISC-V SoCs and now we are seeing the first laptop products. The pace will accelerate, especially with the promise of RISC-V being a cheaper platform to build hardware on than ARM a…
> In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. Their point was that ARM is also progressing exponentially.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, best products are always in the future :-) Oasis looks very capable and juicy, looking forward to get my hands on it.
Same. This seems to be the SoC and board I have been waiting a long time for. Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement. It should be fun to play with it this summer, and further down the line it will become my home server, replacing an old atom board that's considerably weaker. That's mostly enabled by the builtin I/O (pcie slots, sata ports...).
MilkV Oasis with SG2380 would be the end-game for majority of developers, but they are definitely loosing money if they keep starting price at 120 USD. They don't have it frozen (they changed the SoC specification some weeks ago) thus I wouldn't be surprised to see this slip into 2025. I wouldn't be surprised if this outperforms MilkV Pioneer.
My question: is it bootable into Linux without the use of any binary blobs? That is, can it be booted essentially equivalent to a librebooted system?
It's very likely that there's a blob for the SDRAM controller. Something like this: https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/arch/riscv/dts/...
First tests of RISC-V laptop reveal a number of software and hardware issues, but show a path to freedom.
Free how? Just because RISC-V is an open ISA doesn't mean that the silicon is open. None of the manufacturers release the full design of the SoC. Many RISC-V SoCs are still relying on blobs.
Most (all?) current available RISC-V SoCs are designed and produced in China. So I wouldn't be so sure about a SoC designed by Alibaba to be free of blobs, license violations, patent infringement or even hardware backdoors.