Source?
RISC-V libre SBC when?
Jayden Turner
Kevin Rivera
What about nanomachines (talking 15 years into the future at least) that print the circuit on a pre-made silicon die?
Oliver Miller
3D printers can already print silicon now.
Anthony Lewis
Yes, but they can't print the circuits on it. There's more to a microprocessor than the silicon die.
Hudson Jackson
When we have the dictatorship of the proletariat
Easton Peterson
This
Sebastian Hughes
Already had it, but the Bolsheviks said it wasn't kosher enough then lost 20 million because of Russia's mongol genes.
Brody Kelly
You know it really doesn't matter what architecture is used. If you don't want backdoors we need individual components to be open source and then some manufacturer to slap that together on a board.
Also the removal of secure boot and all of those "trusted execution" engines they slap into the cpus.
Also coreboot by default.
x86 is horrendously complicated and I don't agree with making the cpu complex so the compiler can be simple, because what we ended up with is both are extremely complex.
ARM could easily beat RISCV right now by open sourcing their gpu hardware and booting process.
But they won't because if they ever allowed Linux to get good open source drivers then they wouldn't be able to license out so many shitty sbc's with broken firmware just so you and I can buy one in the hopes it will be mainlined enough when it invariably isn't. All we're left with now is the raspberry pi, which is woefully under-powered .
It's somewhat ironic to me that people are trying to push everything into SaaS and Cloud based computing that they still feel the need to run power hogging x86 with their 500w PSUs. Wouldn't we only need thin clients? The fact that our web stack is so broken that SaaS literally requires a super computer to churn through all that shitty js code means we haven't arrived at the future and in general almost no one knows what they're doing as far as manufacturers go.
Intel doesn't know what it's doing, they tried to pimp the architecture so hard for speed they got bit in the ass with security problems.
AMD is the same.
ARM won't get it's head out of it's ass and take advantage of the situation for the desktop market.
RISC-V is taking forever and doesn't really offer anything over being "clean"
POWER is expensive as fuck
All the others are pretty much dead.
Software is causing the problem.
The shift to tablets/phones on crufty towers of android and ios stacks is causing the problem.
The philosophy of compilers and CISC is causing the problem.
The false shift to SaaS is causing the problem.
In other words, we're completely fucked at the moment.
Zachary Stewart
Not all of the ARM boards require a blob to boot. Check here for starters. It appears to be outdated (not updated since 2015), and there's more boards than listed that don't require blobs.
fsf.org
The GPU is only a concern if you need a GPU. I don't. I don't even use a GPU on x86, everything is done in software framebuffer, since I use the wsfb X server in OpenBSD. There are security reasons for this (not just lack of drivers), as mentioned in this talk (here they mention Vesa X server rather than wsfb, but it's almost the same thing).
youtube.com
And of course you don't need GPU on a server or firewall, or other such things that a lot of ARM SBCs end up being used for.
Julian Sanchez
Simple observation of the effect of these laws on the CPU industry.