[ale] Really cool new hardware

[Jim Kinney]

All true. Spark and Power are (mostly,?)dead and no longer produced outside of industrial gear.

I guess my real enthusiasm is for the "designed for Linux" aspect. 

I don't play games so I'm not sure what runs all the consoles now. I also don't have any beagle toys yet. My electronic skills are really rusty and never were design oriented. I designed and built only one power supply and it was strange, variable current 0-5A at one pin pair, variable voltage 0-1000V on another pin pair, one pin common between the two. Basically a variac driven tube. The 0.5 F capacitor was fun.

On January 17, 2021 11:12:55 AM EST, Solomon Peachy <pizza at shaftnet.org> wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 08:26:18AM -0500, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
>> A fully open source cpu design is a game changer.
>
>Is it really?  SPARC, and POWER have all had fully open ISAs and core 
>designs since 2005 and 2013, respectively.
>
>As someone who has done low-level hacking on various architectures over
>
>the years, the actual CPU core/ISA makes very little difference; most
>of 
>the headaches are in the rest of the system[-on-chip].
>
>RISC-V might be fully open from an ISA perspective, but that doesn't 
>mean that any given SoC built on it has an open source CPU core, or
>that 
>any of the various controllers (DMA, display, audio, I2S/I2C/SPI, etc) 
>or accelerators (video codecs, crypto engines) are open source or even 
>have documentation available without three-deep NDAs.
>
>Meanwhile, from the perspective of someone writing software, the 
>underlying CPU architecture rarely matters if you're not doing
>low-level 
>OS/compiler hackery or trying to hand-optimize performance-critical
>code 
>that can't be run on a GPU or more specialized accelerator.
>
>> I was quite surprised to see fedora is ready to go on riscV. It's 
>> usually Debian or Ubuntu that's first on the ground for new gear.
>
>https://sifivetechsymposium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Fedora_on_RISC-V_SiFive_BJ_2019.pdf
>
>TL;DR: Fedora has a very strong "upstream first" mentality, and Red 
>Hatters contribute heavily to all of the upstream projects that needed 
>work to enable RISC-V and used Fedora's tooling to work out the kinks.
>
>...meanwhile, has Ubuntu _ever_ preceeded Debian when it comes to 
>architecture/platform support?
>
>(I don't mean "here's a pre-built image you can put on an SD card to 
> boot board X and you have to use our special snowflake kernel and 
> bootloader with binary blobs which preclude getting security updates 
> from the distribution")
>
> - Solomon
>-- 
>Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
>                                     @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
>High Springs, FL                      speachy (freenode)

-- 
Computers amplify human error
Super computers are really cool
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