This RISC-V cyberdeck is not for you 

Im a layman, whats the appeal to RISC V for those purposes

@@bingus549RISC-V is an open standard. It isn't closed down proprietary garbage like all other CPU instruction sets.

@@Nov1706 it is also (supposedly) way more efficient, or at least has the possibility of being way more efficient, than even ARM

@@bingus549 it's open source, which should decrease their price significantly over ARM and x86. It's very modular which means SOCs can have a lot of accelerators. Development on it would definitely be better as it's an open platform. Finally it also should be more efficient than ARM.

​@@Nov1706 RiscV may be an open ISA, but that doesn't make it inherently better, or indeed ultimately cheaper to buy or lease chip designs. The ISA is free to use, but companies designing actual CPUs around that ISA can charge what they like for their designs. Calling other ISAs "garbage" because they are proprietary is ridiculous. Performance, efficiency, price and availability are what sells chips, plus the availability of good documentation, professional support and suitable development tools. Despite what you think, licensing the ISA is only a small part of the overall cost of designing and manufacturing CPUs.

It'll probably be more usable in 2 years

ahh yes, tale as old, probably even older than the G-book

Wife: I want some new clothes, shoes, and I need to get my hair done lol

Would feel bad for a grandmother buying this lol

🙏

I too am very pro-subtitle. TY Mr. Geerling.

It would be helpful if you wrote to them

Nerd alert

@@petermuller161in a RISC-V video? say it isn't so!

I think it probably doesnt use Grub as a bootloader. And this param is not for a bootloader, but for a kernel, which in most cases is passed to "him".

No GRUB on RISC-V; just uboot and other minimal BLs. :)

as someone who used them in primary school, i do not wish to return to that era of plastic or performance, but a modern netbook? hell yeah. translation: middle school

I recently got myself a used GPD Win Max 2 and that feels like the right mix of netbook size to power.

My first bought laptop was a Lenovo S10-3 around Christmas of 2008 or 2009 or so. I loved it, sadly the hinge broke and when I left it at my mom's home, she thought it was broken and got rid of it :( Not that I could do much with its 32bit Atom CPU now anyway but you know, I really liked that form factor.

@@xymaryai8283 That's not a fair comparison to be honest, the school units had the minimum memory required and always had the slowest storage available. not to mention the processors usually was the lower cache models as well.

GPD mini 3 is also an option or a used mini 1/2

:)

yup the good 'ol TrackPoint

More like thinkpad CHUB

You mean reused thinkpad nubb.

IBM Trackpoints are great. If this netbook had a real Trackpoint and a mechanical keyboard then it would be a great typewriter.

it was really good for the time compared to what ibm was making at the time

​@@belstar1128It was good in some areas, but not great in others. The colour pallete was dire, and whilst SID was very flexible, it only had 3 channels. The sub 1MHz CPU, the incredibly slow I/O and the unforgivable lack of graphics and sound commands in the supplied BASIC weren't great either. What made it incredibly popular was the aggressive pricing that Jack Tramiel unleashed, causing a price war, plus it was in production for over a decade, still being sold despite being obsolete.

@@another3997 yeah but the competition had 4 colors and no sound

*laughs in Sinclair Spectrum*

​​@@another3997I'd say, as someone born post-commedore, I think it's strength came in the combination of user accessibility (price and easy hardware manipulation), and unique hardware (like the SID). IBM seemed relatively locked down, and didn't encourage experimenting. Although the C64 kinda needed it...But hey, the Elite looked beautiful on it.

Ah, don't you love it how even the simplest appliances are probably running some code that wasn't well-tested and now requires reboots or the 'IT love tap' to get them working again? :D

Sometimes I have to unplug the microwave to get it to stop beeping.

It's probably a safety feature. Your spinner likely has a worn tooth in the geartrain, or belt. The magnetron checks for the platform spinning; if it's not working, it won't turn on. Next time, try to manually spin it. Just an inch of rotation will likely get you past the worn part, and it should work normally.

i have to reboot my washing machine 😂😂😂

The door interlock on ours is a bit worn and does this - a hardware rather than firmware issue. We're at the point of automatically giving the door a wiggle each time we press the go button and it is ok then.

yes, that would be the main use for a cyberdeck-style device, though i can imagine some other specific scenarios where a little computer like this would be useful or even crucial to have. Cyberdecks in general are not for everyone.

I mean, there's absolutely no reason why RISC-V CPUs can't have stuff similar to Intel ME. RISC-V mught make that situation better indirectly by introducing more competition to the market (incentivising OEMs to listen to 'niche' needs such as privacy and openness), but actual RISC-V processor designs can absolutely be closed and can include all sorts of custom additions.

How would it leverage AI and LLMs?

@@valkhorn Well at this point I don't see how since it is a general purpose CPU without any direct specific advantage there that I know of. But future cores or packages rather, could incorporate hardware specific to the type of computations used by for example LLM's like paralellized stream processors etc. A general purpose CPU core is roughly equivalent to any other for those purposes, what you really need is a massive amount of much simpler cores like you have in GPU's. Like your CUDA cores for example. Where you make a dent is when you have thousands of cores that can run the same calculation for the same problem but where one or more variables change, so you can evaluate the score of the outcome for millions of possible inputs and select the top score from them, if that makes sense. It's not something a traditional CPU is good at, regardless of it's microarchitecture or instruction set. The calculation is relatively speaking simple, but the variability of the inputs and thus outputs is far too great to precalculate it and use an n-dim matrix to simply use lookups. It could be done but the advantage isn't there since you'd have to recalculate every step anyway. Not sure if I'm making sense, but AI of the type like LLMs mostly would benefit from hardware that has a crazy amount of relatively simple cores since you in a sense 'brute force' approach every problem. There isn't a single 'correct' output that you can finess your way to, you throw everything at the computational wall, and pick what sticks the best.

Where can I buy this shirt? I’ve found others similar in style, but this is nicer than any of the other designs.

Still using c3k

I had a Sharp Zaurus, which I liked, although it was useless as it was a development unit with only half the RAM of the final released version. Still have it, and it still boots the original Linux it came with.

32MB? 64MB? Enough for 2.6.24 + text console

Note. I somehow compiled gnat (ADA), and added ada to gcc, which I daily use on my pxa PDA. Gcc v4.1.2 is small enough to run more than decently.

Eh... in this case I didn't get into it in the video... but there's still a lot that doesn't easily work on here. I couldn't install Ansible because of some Python library incompatibilities, and some media tools wouldn't compile either and weren't available in package repos. So I basically had to give up running a few tools that I can build on Arm or x86

@@JeffGeerling Doesn't Box64 run on RISC-V? Could try it even if it would be comically slow.

that would be such a cool time period to exist in.

Check out the MNT Pocket Reform. Hopefully they start shipping soon. It's more expensive, but it's a completely open platform, down to every part but maybe the base silicon for some of the chips a small company just can't make!

@@JeffGeerling The problem with things like the MNT Reform - and I have a lot of respect for MNT - is that they provide weird keyboards that don't have a space bar and even try and pitch that as an advantage. There's another open hardware laptop - the Balthazar Personal Computing Device - that has a similarly undesirable keyboard (and also happens to use RISC-V). I mean, space bar technology is not rocket science, but people try and reinvent the most mundane things in the least practical ways for no really good reason. So this device, by using something that is probably an off-the-shelf part, is actually doing the right thing: focusing on the elements where they can differentiate sensibly, as opposed to trying to reinvent everything poorly.

True, but Doom is the better benchmark for the more wild hardware I touch-Crysis usually involves some sort of Windows-ish stuff, and that makes it an order of magnitude harder :)

This exact laptop with a Intel Celeron CPU and Windows 11 can be found on Aliexpress and Amazon for about $250-300. The only difference with this model seems to be the CPU swap and the kinda sloppy addition of a ethernet jack.

You can also find GPD even smaller than this which has a ton of ports including serial.

@@Atomhaz Yeah, the serial port is a real plus to get a console terminal connection on a UNIX server...

😂

I would say, if you have the money, you can take the RISC.

Which projects?

Might want to look up the milkV oasis

God bless.

You should replace the battery, assuming you need the portability.

​@@elu9780 I might do eventually, and at least sell it on to a new home, or maybe give it to my nephew when he is older, throw some games and educational stuff on it for him. I'm intent on making my own DIY tablet to replace my current Android tablet, the netbook, and e-reader all in one. Folding dual-screen one, color one side, e-ink the other. My project for the year now. Going to be fun to make.

​@@elu9780at least you can do that with older hardware.

And it's still fun today :)

Twm or nanoX, or no x11 at all.

Somewhat-see the keyboard discussion... it can be a bit painful to use the punctuation on this layout. If you use it enough, you can probably train your fingers to hit the period, forward slash, and apostrophe okay, but even with decent use for a couple weeks, I still can't hit those three keys all the time. A couple placements were odd at first (like Tab and Backspace), but I got used to them.

Honestly the other tiny laptops that were mentioned would be way better in terms of efficiency. (I wonder if there are any AMD ones because power efficiency) That would be really nice though. I currently use A-Shell on my phone when I need to ssh into my server wihtout pulling out my entire laptop and that is a chore.

honestly a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and termux would probably be a better option. especially with battery life

That's what I use my 9-inch EeePC for. It's really not powerful enough for much else, barely browsing on its own nowadays. Then again, I have a much more versatile Thinkpad, and since I can just as well run SSH from that, the Eee doesn't get much use any more.

Better a portable, larger screen, A nice keyboard, and a cheap pi SBC or the pi400. I saw a nice mod where they put a mechanical keyboard on the 400

If you want to run Linux don't get one. The display does not work. There is an issue open on the freedesktop gitlab "screen not working on Intel N100 Alder Lake" should help you find it.

Unfortunately needs an external mic; and I couldn't get Bluetooth working either. I don't think the headphone jack has an input.

They still fit from college days too lol

It'd only be better if the bottom of the display slid forward until it was flat, making it basically a chonky tablet with a slide out keyboard

It's fun in the early cycles of product development seeing how they'll play with different form factors. Even if one or two of them don't work out or don't generate enough sales, it's good to keep engineers working on more fun designs than just the standard 'expected' designs!

​@@JeffGeerlingtrue you have to look at it as more of a proof of concept then a full fledged PC. Would be interesting to see what different OS you could get running on it to see if you could expand the software library.

The bit I wonder is how much better that chip will run with further code and compiler optimisations for RiscV - something we are still seeing improvements in now with Arm as a desktop platform. I'd not want to stake money on it, but I'd not be surprised if it will become a perfectly good RiscV netbook eventually.

@@foldionepapyrus3441 that could be a good set of tests to run it thru as well. 👍

@@rmcdudmk212 Linux, Linux, and then also Linux. Oh, and don't forget Linux.

Got my chuckle of the day!

Techno Tim! He just released some 'dark mode' stuff, it's a comfy shirt.

That's a good question; I haven't tried it, so I'm not sure.

@@JeffGeerling yea, laptops are also the annoying ones. Don't deny I am pretty excited to get an i3-N305 laptop but it seems like many vendors like Lenovo aren't interested in making one (without it being horribly feeling) with only 8GB RAM

But can it run Crysis? ...no, not at this time :D

@@JeffGeerling I dare you to get "Undertale" running on it. 😅

@@Praxibetel-Ix It does run (Tyr)Quake.

Have you seen those super small arrow keys?

OG doom actually had mouse support, it was just that nobody used it bc they weren't used to it...

@@joendter also it was disabled by default

the developers literally said it was ideally played with a mouse. It was only disabled because mice and mouse gaming weren't really prevalent enough for it to make intuitive sense to most players. But yes, Doom had it and, if you ask the developers, that's how it was always meant to be played. Edit: "Can you confirm Doom was meant to be played with a mouse?" John Romero : "Absolutely, Doom was absolutely designed to be played with a mouse, even Wolfenstein was designed to be played with a mouse"

Doom original DID have mouse support. And it was the best way to play it, even though many people at the time didn't take gaming with a mouse seriously.

They had a couple pushbuttons inside the M.2 slot port, so I don't know-I didn't want to jab any sharp object in there :)

This basically is. Not a laptop for use

I bought it from Techno Tim! He just released that shirt (and some other merch with the same graphic). Very comfy.

This is why I'm particularly dubious of people who like to fence sit and say "no no no, it's still at least over a decade or two out". Less than 5 years ago it was a non-consideration; something you found once on a wikipedia rabbit hole and literally never thought about again. Now we're already seeing some pretty competent desktop dev boxes, box64 can run some x86_64 applications, and it's a decently popular topic for techies to at least know about in passing. I mean the original BTC whitepaper was released in 2008, and a decade and a half later basically everyone knows roughly what BTC is and it's become a topic of serious political discourse on a national scale. Granted I wish most of the people partaking in that "serious political discourse" had a bit of a less rough understanding of it, but the point is in a decade and a half it went from absolute inception of radically new concept with zero institutional backing released anonymously, to international scale influence. Meanwhile Risc-V has quite a lot of backing, is in an excellent position due to governments doing government shit, is developing at a breakneck pace, has a good few technical advantages to it's credit, and is already seeing some niche real-world adoption. If Risc-V today is even roughly comparable to BTC just 5 or so years after it's initial inception, I'd find it really hard to buy we're still more than a decade out from massive waves being made.

This was running Debian 12 Bookworm on the 5.10 kernel compiled for RISC-V. There are a few other distros with some support, but I tend to stick to the distro that comes with the board, because the vendors usually have a lot of band-aids included to make sure their hardware works better. Right now Sipeed even advises not running apt upgrade, because doing so could upgrade some packages that break things on the Lichee Console 4A!

​@@JeffGeerling makes it a sitting target for malware that is discovered that exploits flaws in any of the packages that come with it. I hope at the very least there are security updates, and that I can alter the config to only apply those... and if course that they are tested and mended if they are broken in this platform.