4 ms·

"This board is cool." What exactly is cool about this board?

by Annatar 8y ago

rwmj 8y ago
It's all open source.
- ddevault 8y ago
  It's also surprisingly nice. 8G of DDR4 EEC RAM, 4 surprisingly fast CPU cores, and a gigabit ethernet port - it all adds up to a really pleasant board to work with.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    That is nice, though at $999, expectations would be pretty high.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      Well, it's the also first RISC-V CPU available to the general public. I expect prices to come down in the future, but I was definitely surprised with the quality of the "first" CPU.
      - Annatar 8y ago
        That CPU has one of the worst instruction sets ever: the mnemonics are even worse than intel, which was hereto considered the stupidest up until this point. That's an achievement. They will have to be hidden by compilers because they're otherwise complicated and a pain in the ass to program.
    - zmix 8y ago
      That's because it's brand new tech. I assume, that the Chinese, who came up with Arduino boards, that cost USD1.99 will also create knock-offs of these and prices will fall extremley.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    8 GB is what I have in my 11 year old workstation, and in this day and age when 128 GB is pretty tight, it's a miniscule amount. Server hardware now has 3 TB of maximum memory. Are you aware of the fact Sun Microsystems machines had 4 * 10 Gb... ten years ago? None of this answers my question: when Amiga came out, it had the CustomChips and they enabled the system to wipe the floor with the competition because the hardware could do things nobody else could in that price segment. What features, other than standard P. C. bucket hardware capability does this board have that would qualify it as "cool" (the CPU with the terribly retarded mnemonics does empathically not count as "cool")? Will we please stop with swooning over and pandering to trends and fashions and start looking at hardware critically rather than ideologically?
- Annatar 8y ago
  So what? What does that have to do with hardware?
  - rwmj 8y ago
    The hardware is open source too ...
    - Annatar 8y ago
      As far as I can tell, this hardware doesn't bring anything revolutionary in terms of capability. The hardware should stand on its own merit, like for example the Commodore Amiga did, or the SGI hardware did, not on the merit of some arbitrary ideology.

"This board is cool." What exactly is cool about this board?

rwmj 8y ago

It's all open source.

ddevault 8y ago
It's also surprisingly nice. 8G of DDR4 EEC RAM, 4 surprisingly fast CPU cores, and a gigabit ethernet port - it all adds up to a really pleasant board to work with.
- tyingq 8y ago
  That is nice, though at $999, expectations would be pretty high.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Well, it's the also first RISC-V CPU available to the general public. I expect prices to come down in the future, but I was definitely surprised with the quality of the "first" CPU.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      That CPU has one of the worst instruction sets ever: the mnemonics are even worse than intel, which was hereto considered the stupidest up until this point. That's an achievement. They will have to be hidden by compilers because they're otherwise complicated and a pain in the ass to program.
  - zmix 8y ago
    That's because it's brand new tech. I assume, that the Chinese, who came up with Arduino boards, that cost USD1.99 will also create knock-offs of these and prices will fall extremley.
- Annatar 8y ago
  8 GB is what I have in my 11 year old workstation, and in this day and age when 128 GB is pretty tight, it's a miniscule amount. Server hardware now has 3 TB of maximum memory. Are you aware of the fact Sun Microsystems machines had 4 * 10 Gb... ten years ago? None of this answers my question: when Amiga came out, it had the CustomChips and they enabled the system to wipe the floor with the competition because the hardware could do things nobody else could in that price segment. What features, other than standard P. C. bucket hardware capability does this board have that would qualify it as "cool" (the CPU with the terribly retarded mnemonics does empathically not count as "cool")? Will we please stop with swooning over and pandering to trends and fashions and start looking at hardware critically rather than ideologically?
Annatar 8y ago
So what? What does that have to do with hardware?
- rwmj 8y ago
  The hardware is open source too ...
  - Annatar 8y ago
    As far as I can tell, this hardware doesn't bring anything revolutionary in terms of capability. The hardware should stand on its own merit, like for example the Commodore Amiga did, or the SGI hardware did, not on the merit of some arbitrary ideology.