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It wasn't supposed to happen like this. The burden to support the 0.7.1 should be on those that pushed it into general availability instead of expected the rest

by crest 3y ago

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. The burden to support the 0.7.1 should be on those that pushed it into general availability instead of expected the rest of community to develop a code generator + optimiser for an overcome draft and maintain package repos etc. targeting only one vendors CPU core.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
That is fair. Hopefully the # of pre-1.0 V units out there gets dwarfed quickly by a wave of new machines in the next couple years. Do you happen to know if the Pioneer board's CPU is socketed? I can't tell from the pictures, but it seems like might just be soldered on, which is a bummer. Because the hope would be that it could be upgraded later if/when SOPHON brings out a new chip, but I suspect that isn't going to be possible.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  It's soldered. Socketed is a lot more expensive. There's also no point as the SoC is worth vastly more than the motherboard, so you'd probably pay 80% as much for a new CPU as for a new motherboard with CPU. The RAM is socketed, so you can reuse that.
brucehoult 3y ago
Agreed that THead and/or their customers should have been much faster off the mark with toolchain support (they're doing it now), but there is another equally vital aspect -- the upstream software maintainers have to agree in principle to accept patches. This agreement has been either withheld or else slow to come, with such weak reasons as "we don't support draft specs", intended to mean "specs that are never implemented in hardware". Mass production of chips with a "draft spec" make it not a draft at all in this sense -- it's effectively a custom extension, which patches SHOULD be accepted for. It's just a custom extension that happens to be 95% source code and binary compatible with the official extension.
NewJazz 3y ago
To be fair, THead released the cores as open source cores. Firms then just picked them up and put them in their SoC AIUI.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  Absolutely not. For a start, every SoC containing a C906 or C910 core has at least one core implementing the V extension. THead's V extension implementations are optional (and extra cost) and are not part of the open-sourced cores on github.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    Oh. Didn't know they were an add-on with additional cost. That is interesting.

by crest 3y ago

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

That is fair. Hopefully the # of pre-1.0 V units out there gets dwarfed quickly by a wave of new machines in the next couple years. Do you happen to know if the Pioneer board's CPU is socketed? I can't tell from the pictures, but it seems like might just be soldered on, which is a bummer. Because the hope would be that it could be upgraded later if/when SOPHON brings out a new chip, but I suspect that isn't going to be possible.

brucehoult 3y ago
It's soldered. Socketed is a lot more expensive. There's also no point as the SoC is worth vastly more than the motherboard, so you'd probably pay 80% as much for a new CPU as for a new motherboard with CPU. The RAM is socketed, so you can reuse that.

brucehoult 3y ago

Agreed that THead and/or their customers should have been much faster off the mark with toolchain support (they're doing it now), but there is another equally vital aspect -- the upstream software maintainers have to agree in principle to accept patches. This agreement has been either withheld or else slow to come, with such weak reasons as "we don't support draft specs", intended to mean "specs that are never implemented in hardware". Mass production of chips with a "draft spec" make it not a draft at all in this sense -- it's effectively a custom extension, which patches SHOULD be accepted for. It's just a custom extension that happens to be 95% source code and binary compatible with the official extension.

NewJazz 3y ago

To be fair, THead released the cores as open source cores. Firms then just picked them up and put them in their SoC AIUI.

brucehoult 3y ago
Absolutely not. For a start, every SoC containing a C906 or C910 core has at least one core implementing the V extension. THead's V extension implementations are optional (and extra cost) and are not part of the open-sourced cores on github.
- NewJazz 3y ago
  Oh. Didn't know they were an add-on with additional cost. That is interesting.