In case it wasn't clear to anyone: this is a product very early in the planning phase, to the extent that many of the features are unspecified (no processor has been chosen, they aren't even certain on whether it'll be RISC-V or ARM), underspecified to the point of being unintelligible ("detachable USB gender-changer dongle"), or outright ridiculous (SSH-based communications between the keyboard and CPU).
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a product here. This does not have the smell of success on it.
Like seriously what would an ssh client running on the keyboard even achieve? Maybe they’re thinking of encrypting it. But keyloggers running at the OS level don’t care. Or is this to force people to only use their keyboards? Or maybe it’ll just add a billion to their SPAC buyout.
Another thing that doesn't seem to line up with reality is the idea that they might convince Nvidia to make their stuff FOSS enough to be included in this project.
I assumed that when I read the words riscv and laptop, but then I saw nlnet was backing the project. I wonder what they are hoping to get out of the project.
> While being versatile and robust it also follows CERN OSHL, GNU-GPL, FOSS, EOMA, ISA and even CC guidelines
This is almost the most concerning part. They're treating FOSS like it's some kind of standard. It's not. FOSS just means software that is free and open source. Something is, or isn't FOSS. You don't follow some standard to deliver a FOSS product. I also couldn't find a single reference to CERN OSHL anywhere online other than on their website. The closest thing I could find was Out-of-school-hours learning... again, if that's what they meant this is doomed.
This may sound insane, but machine learning in the power button may be a thing already. Fingerprinter readers (often built into the power button) have moved from “match on host” to “match on chip”, and it’s possible some of them use ML-based matching.
Yes. While it sounds impressive, it seems more like a fantasy jumble of every desirable feature they can think of than an actual plan.
"Keyboard is QUERTY". How do you misspell "QWERTY"? Yet I'm hoping they did.
They seem to be hoping for a Pixel Qi style screen (but self-developed?), but describe its reflective mode as: "A non-reflective - a button driven backlight “off” monochrome mode for very low-power use in sunlight"
Confusion between trackpoint and trackball: "track-point ball"
> While NVIDIA would be technically possibly the best performance choice, issues arise with general attitude towards FOSS compatibilty.
In any case we look and listen into NVIDIA and CUDA options, accelerating totally open documentation from NVIDIA's side.
Also the NVIDIA's Jetson IoT and AI platform is researched for a compatibility with RISC-V architecture, ISA and FOSS
Uh, surely they don't mean the retro ISA bus, right? :D
On a more serious note if I could build a big (dGPU oriented) open laptop I would put an MXM slot in there, so that existing Radeon cards could be used.
There's another level of WTF in that paragraph. "NVIDIA Jetson" is a marketing name used for a series of Tegra development boards. Tegra is an ARM SoC in and of itself. It isn't a discrete graphics solution.
What, exactly, is unintelligible about a "detachable USB gender-changer dongle"? A gender-changing adapter is one that has either a male connector at both ends or a female connector at both ends. They're used in damned near anything involving plugs and cables - or hoses, for that matter. It's not a mystery marketing term or anything. In this case, it would be female at both ends, providing a degree of physical security when not in place (as both the USB device to be plugged in and the dongle-less computer would have male connectors), and, as described, would also act as a security dongle when attached (the USB port needs to see the dongle and have it password-activated in order to use the USB port, so a simple passthru gender-changer won't give access).
Can libreboot target any ARM SoCs? It seems like u-boot with a verified boot path is not a common configuration, while the coreboot ecosystem has a number of security oriented payloads.
I think it's fair to point out libreboot is a fork off coreboot, and while libreboot is basically a dead project at this point, coreboot development continues. Chromebooks tend to use coreboot natively, and on some chromebooks, you can recompile and reflash coreboot, sometimes with no binary blobs.
Google makes this (reflashing the firmware) surprisingly easy in many cases, although there are often many caveats to running linux/alternative firmware on chromebooks, to the point it's kind of hard to recommend buying one for this purpose.
No. Libreboot lacks support for any of the hardware under consideration by this project.
Libreboot is essentially a dead project. It only supports a limited number of Penryn-era (roughly 2007-2010) Intel laptops, and -- strangely -- the RK3288C-based Chromebook C210.
I'd happily buy a RISC-V laptop, but I think it's too early, mobile phones and servers will come first. Also the artist rendering is ugly, I would expect an ultra-light laptop from a low power architecture.
I want to see how it competes with Apple's M1 processor in speed (especially that the web page writes that it's a fast laptop) and power utilization.
RISC-V has a huge effort behind it to run all available open source software. Even though there’s a MIPS Android port, it just doesn’t have the amount of backing that RISC-V is getting from hundreds of companies (basically all big companies)
I'd expect less activity around the MIPS port because it is, by and large, already fully functional and a first class citizen of Android, while RISC-V is still being fully bootstrapped.
Further, software like Chrome/Chromium and V8 already have functioning MIPS ports, which will be (a lot of) additional work not currently being performed for RISC-V.
Compared to RISC-V, almost everything in the Linux ecosystem should already "just work" on MIPS. I think it's fair to ask why there wouldn't be more development of MIPS, which is effectively a Chinese owned ISA at this point, since it's more mature than RISC-V, if not as "exciting".
To quote Elon Musk: ,,The most entertaining outcome is the most likely''.
I see just the opposite when I look around Reddit: MIPS is dying. Google Play services is not updated on it, and I don't see why people would port new games on it.
You need neural networks running efficiently to run all the face swap algorithms (V in RISC-V was for vector support originally), GPUs supported (again a RISC-V GPU ISA extension is in development), JIT acceleration (J extension). If it's not exciting for developers, it won't win for consumer devices.
I bought a ridiculously cheap Android tablet from AliExpress many years ago, and didn’t even know that Android on MIPS was a thing. Until I received the tablet in the mail and learned that it had a MIPS ISA CPU. Many apps on Google Play would not install on the device, because they were for ARM only. Things may have changed since then idk, I haven’t used Android in many years. But the experience at the time was, well... The tablet ended up in a drawer and has been sitting there since.
I should add though, regardless of whether app compatibility is a problem or not still that app compatibility was not the main reason for relegating the tablet to sit in a drawer.
The main reason was battery life. Not surprising given how cheap it was. And it was really slow. But those two things aren’t meant as a knock on MIPS. They obviously put in the cheapest CPU and the lowest capacity cheapest battery to make the tablet as cheap as it was. Just adding this to explain why I ended up not using the tablet for anything at all.
Basically Android is all about ARM nowadays, the only place where alternative CPUs matter is running on Chromebooks using Intel CPUs, and even there Google has a ARM JIT for dynamic translation for APKs that are ARM only.
MIPS and Intel CPUs on Android phones and tablets are dead.
They sell a $280 Windows 10 Pro laptop in India that is not slow at all and has an ethernet port/hdmi port etc. I've found it much more useful than my $5k macbook pro 16
From the description it sounds like this will effectively be an SBC in a laptop case. Is anyone aware of such a thing? I would certainly be keen on a laptop "enclosure" for an SBC.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadI wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a product here. This does not have the smell of success on it.
Another thing that doesn't seem to line up with reality is the idea that they might convince Nvidia to make their stuff FOSS enough to be included in this project.
This is almost the most concerning part. They're treating FOSS like it's some kind of standard. It's not. FOSS just means software that is free and open source. Something is, or isn't FOSS. You don't follow some standard to deliver a FOSS product. I also couldn't find a single reference to CERN OSHL anywhere online other than on their website. The closest thing I could find was Out-of-school-hours learning... again, if that's what they meant this is doomed.
There's no "Source" in the name.
"We're putting blockchain technology in the trackpad"
"Machine learning in the power button"
https://xkcd.com/451/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator
"Keyboard is QUERTY". How do you misspell "QWERTY"? Yet I'm hoping they did.
They seem to be hoping for a Pixel Qi style screen (but self-developed?), but describe its reflective mode as: "A non-reflective - a button driven backlight “off” monochrome mode for very low-power use in sunlight"
Confusion between trackpoint and trackball: "track-point ball"
> While NVIDIA would be technically possibly the best performance choice, issues arise with general attitude towards FOSS compatibilty. In any case we look and listen into NVIDIA and CUDA options, accelerating totally open documentation from NVIDIA's side. Also the NVIDIA's Jetson IoT and AI platform is researched for a compatibility with RISC-V architecture, ISA and FOSS
Uh, surely they don't mean the retro ISA bus, right? :D
On a more serious note if I could build a big (dGPU oriented) open laptop I would put an MXM slot in there, so that existing Radeon cards could be used.
The irony is strong.
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210205204013/https://balthazar...
Can it possibly be be used with Libreboot? It would be nice to have some newly manufactured hardware in laptop form that Libreboot can use.
https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html
Google makes this (reflashing the firmware) surprisingly easy in many cases, although there are often many caveats to running linux/alternative firmware on chromebooks, to the point it's kind of hard to recommend buying one for this purpose.
No. Libreboot lacks support for any of the hardware under consideration by this project.
Libreboot is essentially a dead project. It only supports a limited number of Penryn-era (roughly 2007-2010) Intel laptops, and -- strangely -- the RK3288C-based Chromebook C210.
https://www.coreboot.org/users.html
The projects are related, at least.
I want to see how it competes with Apple's M1 processor in speed (especially that the web page writes that it's a fast laptop) and power utilization.
For phone/desktop/laptop a rough spot would be the GPU. And possibly perf/watt.
The M1 meanwhile most likely has billions of dollars of development behind it.
For Chinese phones I don't see any better architecture right now, as they can't depend on ARM forever, it's too risky for them.
Further, software like Chrome/Chromium and V8 already have functioning MIPS ports, which will be (a lot of) additional work not currently being performed for RISC-V.
Compared to RISC-V, almost everything in the Linux ecosystem should already "just work" on MIPS. I think it's fair to ask why there wouldn't be more development of MIPS, which is effectively a Chinese owned ISA at this point, since it's more mature than RISC-V, if not as "exciting".
I see just the opposite when I look around Reddit: MIPS is dying. Google Play services is not updated on it, and I don't see why people would port new games on it.
You need neural networks running efficiently to run all the face swap algorithms (V in RISC-V was for vector support originally), GPUs supported (again a RISC-V GPU ISA extension is in development), JIT acceleration (J extension). If it's not exciting for developers, it won't win for consumer devices.
I should add though, regardless of whether app compatibility is a problem or not still that app compatibility was not the main reason for relegating the tablet to sit in a drawer.
The main reason was battery life. Not surprising given how cheap it was. And it was really slow. But those two things aren’t meant as a knock on MIPS. They obviously put in the cheapest CPU and the lowest capacity cheapest battery to make the tablet as cheap as it was. Just adding this to explain why I ended up not using the tablet for anything at all.
MIPS and Intel CPUs on Android phones and tablets are dead.
https://www.zhihu.com/question/414069789
That's a goal, not a specification. The project hasn't chosen a processor. They aren't even sure it'll be RISC-V.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/100...
The MNT Reform 2 [0] already exists, shares common goals, and is entirely compatible with a future risc-v SoM with its modular design.
[0] https://mntmn.com/reform
Also, looking at some of the details, might this be the output of a vaporware hoax generator?
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this.
EDIT: found a bunch here, but they feel a bit clunky to my eyes: https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/the-best-raspberry-pi...