Allwinner D1s/F133 RISC-V Processor Integrates 64MB DDR2

Post by qwerty456127 » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 11:55 AM UTC

rollcat wrote: post #50

qwerty456127 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This chip looks similar to the F1C100s that was used in the $3 Linux business card Yet, performance-wise it probably should be capable of running Windows 98. If only people still were writing bloat-free software today...

Some of the bloat is institutional, or maybe we should say, "civilisational"? Supporting TLS, modern hardware, media codecs, and so on - this puts a lower bound on the size of a "full" desktop OS, before you even consider a web browser. The next question is what kind of software do you need to get useful work done - not everyone writes code; if you want to edit audio, video, photos, do CAD, etc sometimes you simply n…

I'm not sure how much horsepower or anything do TLS require but until very recently there were Win98 drivers capable of supporting almost-modern hardware. Codecs never were a problem on Windows 98 (thanks to the K-lite Codec Pack) and this CPU even has hardware h264 supposedly. Editing audio (besides ultra-professional many-channel ultra high fidelity) never was a problem on Windows 98 either (there was SoundForge). Editing video comfortably still requires highest-end PCs. AutoCAD worked nicely on Windows 98 too. Most of the people apparently only need Office (which was Okay since Windows 3.x), a messenger, a PDF&picture viewer, a media player and a browser. The browser running today websites probably is the heaviest thing of these. Chrome on my Raspberry PI 4 still struggles on many websites (YouTube is the worst, also the most needed there). When I say Windows 98 I generally imagine a 233-500 Mhz Pentium 1-2 CPU with 64-512 MB RAM generally (in fact the 64 MB of RAM in this title is exactly what caught my attention: I immediately recalled the days when I had a 64MB PC and was perfectly happy with it, and I still don't need anything it couldn't easily do those days).

Thank you for the link by the way.

> If you don't have an old computer, don't worry! You can still use your regularly computer and create a virtual machine with low specs, you would still be more comfortable with a good screen, disk access and a not too old CPU but you can participate.

Not really fair. Disk access always is a game changer. Migrating my Core 2 Duo laptop from 1 TB HDD to a 512 GB SSD made it feel like a totally new PC. I didn't try Windows 98 in a VM but Windows XP feels way faster in a VirtualBox than on bare hardware on the same PC (I believe that's because of caching, simple virtual hardware stack probably also contributes to lightning-fast booting).

Post by foxfluff » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

bradfa wrote: post #47

gautamcgoel wrote: post #20

Can someone explain why this uses DDR2 instead of a more modern DDR4?

There's a bunch of reasons, here's a few I've heard or thought of myself: * DDR2 is generally 1.8V. There's probably already a need for 1.8V logic within this SOC, so the power rail is "free." DDR3, DDR3L, and all the variants of DDR4 use a lower voltage. No one wants another power supply rail just to power some internal-to-the-SOC memory if they don't have to. * DDR2 is easily available in single die x16 (data bus w…

Fwiw Allwinner/Sochip do sell a CPU with 128MB of DDR3 in the package (S3). You do need to provide 1.5V supply for the DRAM.

Re: Allwinner D1s/F133 RISC-V Processor Integrates 64MB DDR2

Re: Allwinner D1s/F133 RISC-V Processor Integrates 64MB DDR2