we don't have a lot of choice at the moment, from a practical and self-funding perspective which retains 100% control and thus can remain true to its ethical business roots. i outline a SMALL selection of the dozens of processors evaluated over the past five years, here:
since then i've been alerted to 2 more processors... but anyway the point is: out of all the ones on that list, the A20 is by far and above the most "ethical" one - irony that, given allwinner's background - that we can GAIN ACCESS to, that is also capable of running 1080p60 video so that people can go "ehhh.... yeahh okay, i could put up with that for a year whilst these guys figure out the next Computer Card".
now, there's been a lot of discussion and evaluation on various other forums including phoronix and reddit about RISC-V, i was going to do a separate update about it, but basically, RISC-V is not ready for prime-time.
or, more specifically, the people doing SoCs based around RISC-V haven't yet put something together that would match the minimum functional requirements of EOMA68. those requirements are quite modest, including 18-pin RGB/TTL @ 1366x768, SD/MMC, I2C, SPI, UART, PWM GPIO, EINT GPIO and 2 USB interfaces... but they still haven't actually managed that. the closest team that has is the lowRisc team.
now, on top of that, we need operating systems. it's no good trying to think you're going to raise $1m on crowdfunding selling 10,000 computers if the only OSes available are based on "linux from scratch" or "buildroot" for embedded computers. you need debian, you need android, you need chromeos, you need arch, parabola, gentoo - everybody needs to get on board.
once you become aware of these things you start to realise that RISC-V based SoCs and required OSes are at least 3 to 8 years out, so it would be much much better to start with something like MIPS64 for now.
if you know of a way to raise between $5m and $10m i can start that process NOW and have a chip ready in about 18 to 24 months. i've been through the process back in 2012 (google "Towards an FSF Endorseable Processor slashdot") so know what needs to get done.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/pic...
since then i've been alerted to 2 more processors... but anyway the point is: out of all the ones on that list, the A20 is by far and above the most "ethical" one - irony that, given allwinner's background - that we can GAIN ACCESS to, that is also capable of running 1080p60 video so that people can go "ehhh.... yeahh okay, i could put up with that for a year whilst these guys figure out the next Computer Card".
now, there's been a lot of discussion and evaluation on various other forums including phoronix and reddit about RISC-V, i was going to do a separate update about it, but basically, RISC-V is not ready for prime-time.
or, more specifically, the people doing SoCs based around RISC-V haven't yet put something together that would match the minimum functional requirements of EOMA68. those requirements are quite modest, including 18-pin RGB/TTL @ 1366x768, SD/MMC, I2C, SPI, UART, PWM GPIO, EINT GPIO and 2 USB interfaces... but they still haven't actually managed that. the closest team that has is the lowRisc team.
now, on top of that, we need operating systems. it's no good trying to think you're going to raise $1m on crowdfunding selling 10,000 computers if the only OSes available are based on "linux from scratch" or "buildroot" for embedded computers. you need debian, you need android, you need chromeos, you need arch, parabola, gentoo - everybody needs to get on board.
once you become aware of these things you start to realise that RISC-V based SoCs and required OSes are at least 3 to 8 years out, so it would be much much better to start with something like MIPS64 for now.
if you know of a way to raise between $5m and $10m i can start that process NOW and have a chip ready in about 18 to 24 months. i've been through the process back in 2012 (google "Towards an FSF Endorseable Processor slashdot") so know what needs to get done.