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Upcoming RISC-V laptop promises free silicon upgrades
- jfkimmes 4y agoCompletely off-topic, but: TIL arstechnica has ""vim keybindings"" (j/k) for navigating their comments. It's always fascinating when my muscle memory discovers all the places where j/k works for scrolling.
- sylware 4y ago"arm secure" ... why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean: remove this arm stuff, don't forget to allow ppl to remove physicaly and easily the bluetooth and wifi modules. And now, time to write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...), coze compilers (aka backdoor injectors, or absurd and grotesque bloats) should become, finally, useless (well some hardware vendor drivers will be provided as gcc/linux C dialect...)
- uhhhhuhyes 4y agoalways interesting how i've lived 30 years of life, 10 of which as a reasonably successful backend server/"business logic" developer, and the above comment still sounds like alien language to me :)
- pca006132 4y agoHe probably wants to use assembly to write everything? No idea either.
- sylware 4y agoIf risc-v is successful, no need of those backdoor injectors which are compilers anymore (and absurd and grotesque bloats). Just write risc-v assembly without abusing the macro preprocessor.
- imtringued 4y agoWhy would that be easier than just forking GCC and checking for backdoors?
- RF_Savage 4y agoAnd then we get to the fun of trusting trust. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- pca006132 4y agoYou can bootstrap it with a very simple implementation of a C compiler written in assembly, if you really want to.
- sylware 4y agoA decade ago, some geniuses at the gcc steering committee decided to switch gcc from a simple C dialect to c++. Now you need at least a c++98 compiler to compile gcc (then linux). It is probably one of the biggest mistakes done in the open software, ever. Why, well we all know the abysmal gap in complexity between simple C and c++.
- sylware 4y ago
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago> why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems. > write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...) You want https://terralang.org/ https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?
- trasz 4y agoFirmware often decreases the quality of life. See Intel remote management/backdoor mechanism for example.
- pca006132 4y agoThey can probably implement something similar directly in the silicon. It doesn't have to be software.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago> Firmware often decreases the quality of life. See Intel remote management/backdoor mechanism for example. IME is a bad example here. That's an entire upgradeable MINIX OS embedded in your system - if it was really firmware, Intel would not be able to update it, or you be able to neuter it.
- sylware 4y agoIt depends on the context: GPUs are probably the most complex chips out there, and if you want to them to be ready to render at power on, they probably need firmware (which you would be able to update to fix "bugs") or we end up like what we have now, namely massive drivers locked-in with the gcc C kernel dialect, only there to expose a few 2^n bytes ring buffers (3D/dma/compute/irq/video_encode/video_decode) with their hardware doorbells. if risc-v is a success we don't need anything except a risc-v assembler: then the main pitfall would be the abuse of the macro preprocessor.
- drKarl 4y agoSounds great except it doesn't give much information about performance, and the little it says it sounds like it will have performance equivalent to Intel or AMD 20 years ago...
- skyeto 4y ago> "The laptop also has a questionable focus on NFTs, promising 100 of them to the first pre-orders, claiming to be "Web3-friendly,"" Besides not publishing pricing or detailed specs this close to the planned shipping date, this rings so many alarm bells.
- leeter 4y agoThe fact this isn't coming from SciFive or Pinebook makes me suspicious as well, as does the massive lack of details. I can't find anything really on this OEM which is not promising. In this case they'd probably have been better off going kickstarter IMO just to get their names out there and have at least a pretend ounce of accountability.
- NoblePublius 4y agoRISC architecture is going to change everything
- paskozdilar 4y agoYeah. RISC is good.
- jeffalyanak 4y agoI'm glad someone got the reference.
- DustinBrett 4y agoOk good it's been posted, I can leave happy.
- HeckFeck 4y agoSeeing as you're posting from the 1980s, would you mind buying a few stocks for me? I'm not born yet but we'll split the difference when I am ;)
- rbanffy 4y agoIt was fun for a while because it didn’t. It’s fun again because, in the end, it’s doing just that.
- philipswood 4y agoDon't tell anyone, but I hear the internet is going to be big.
- chrsw 4y agoI tried to grok what "free silicon upgrades" means and the closest I can get is the SoM package is user upgradable. The actual SoM replacement or upgrade module will cost money but you don't need to buy another laptop or pay someone else to do the upgrade for you. Doesn't really fit my definition of "free" but it's my best guess at what's being announced here. My initial thought was this laptop is somehow FPGA based and new designs can be loaded with near zero cost to the user at the moment of upgrading. But after reading the article, I don't think that's at all what they're implying.
- rjsw 4y agoPine64 had planned to allow upgrading for their laptops but found it too hard to get the thermal design to work.
- chrsw 4y agoI think the MNT Reform project is heading in this direction. But many people don't want to lug around a laptop that looks like it's straight out of the early 00s.
- black_puppydog 4y agothen on the other hand, some people do! :)
- otter-rock 4y agoThank you for pointing this out. I think most people assume that companies are just being greedy when they solder previously socketed parts, for example. I'm not saying it's never a factor. But it also solves real engineering problems. Modern technology often requires tighter integration. We accept integrated circuits because we're accustomed to them. But then people flip out when they see what's effectively a naked module because it looks like a greedy version of the old thing.
- ZiiS 4y agoYou would never simultainiusly develop 28nm and 12nm for the same application???
- ZiiS 4y agoie upto 2012 A10 vs from 2018 Ryzen 2000. Both still useful nodes but only one of them can be taken seriously in a laptop.
- skywal_l 4y ago> There's also an Arm SecurCore SC300 security enclave Is it me or is one of the main RISC-V advantage is that it's free of mandatory backdoors ? Why would you need this enclave ?
- jeroenhd 4y agoTrusted execution environments can serve all kinds of useful purposes. Secrets management (TPM/tokens/etc.) is a very common use case, as is DRM (though I don't expect too working DRM on a RISCV system). If the chip can be disabled or if its firmware can be controlled with custom signatures (i.e. a ROM managed through an open boot mechanism such as coreboot) then I don't see any problems with such a core, even in a fully FOSS system. It's unlikely that this freedom will actually be given to customers, but I don't see any theoretical problems here.
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- danielEM 4y agoI think Chinese need badly some open source architecture to "catch up" on the market. Maybe they don't even realize that, but most probably that is their biggest chance to start to exist in a tech world independently. But if I'm to predict the future - they'll fail as their biggest issue now is that over past 10-15 years they "learned" well how to be "greedy" and are looking for short term maximized profits.