‘From the schematic and PCB to the chipset,’ all built from scratch. Design uses an FPGA for the chipset, bring your own i486.
      • ☂️-@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        i like what risc-v is supposed to do but it is still some ways out though.

      • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        24·
        15 days ago

        I have very mixed feelings about RISC-V since the non-profit organization moved their headquarters to Switzerland after taking a bunch of US tax dollars and grants to develop it at UC Berkeley.

        • alessandro@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          11·
          14 days ago

          It’s an open source platform: if an american company makes and arm device, they need to pay tax to a British company. RiscV require not to pay IP tax to any foreign country.

          Also, it’s not like “they move”: stuck there in the US, they would simply shut it down. So I don’t see how your tax money went in better use.

      • ☂️-@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        i was aware of coreboot and opensil, but i figure they are not ready for something like this yet?

        they would solve the hardest part. nowadays everything lives under pci express and a lot is orchestrated by the cpu/pch, which is the responsibility of… firmware to initialize. deciphering and reverse engineering this process would not be trivial at all.

        i know some smaller controllers have firmware baked in, and some are on an outside flash chip that may or may not be able to be read and copied. some may have good documentation available and even reference implementations you might see repeated on different boards. some others might be easy to obtain. memory is about signal integrity, not firmware.

        but yeah, i don’t think it would be easy (or possible at all) to have firmware be all open. i would bet there are clauses in some of their licensing officially forbidding us of all of this.

  • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    12·
    16 days ago

    This looks really cool, but I have immediate concerns about the lack of ZIF socket for something designed to take 30 year old chips.