Idk, sounds too risky.
Musebook
China
This feels like another Chinese rip off. The Chinese government want to replace the west with in home stolen ideas.
I mean, they’ve seen what you’ve done with that gunpowder thing …
An ancient empire after all. They learn
Stolen ideas? Riscv is open source and a laptop is not exactly some unique intellectual property. You’re just showing your xenophobia here.
Especially since calling a laptop “<some>book” is hardly a civilization-level achievement, hardly even an idea, it’s fashion and I approve of Chinese treating trademarks like this.
I think trademarks and patents should die. We’d see a better world without them, and very quickly.
Star Treks prime directive always stated two criteria - warp tech and calling non-stationary computing devices books. Having invented actual books with pages isn’t necessary.
Can it run doom?
Looks too much of a cheap copy would like to see something from lenovo for exampleBased on the spec, it should even be able to run Quake 3 Arena.
Im quite surprised that this wasnt pine64 bringing this out.
They just casually throw it into things like the pinecil, which people actually do hack on.
And yes, they do have RISC-V SBCs: Star64 and Ox64. And if you want something a bit more complete, there’s the PineTab-V.
Can anyone explain the significance of this? I’m pretty technology-literate, but I am not seeing a big advantage of this over a Linux machine? Genuinely curious.
This still runs Linux, or whatever else you want to run, it just has a RISC-V CPU instead of an x86 or ARM one
This will give you a basic understanding. Sorry for the YouTube link. It’s from the channel called Explaining Computers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Ps0JFsyX2fU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
RISC-V is a CPU architecture, like AMD64 or ARM. You can run Linux on it.
RISC-V is a set of instructions implementable to processors that do not need licensing fees and controlling restrictions imposed. Due to its reduced instruction set; it uses less power in general but is harder to write compilers that work on it.
Having it more popularised opens up the doors for more enthausists to enter developing with it.
Due to its reduced instruction set; it uses less power in general
If that is true I don’t think it can be attributed to it being RISC
Harder to write compilers for RISC? I would argue that CISC is much harder to design a compiler for.
That being said there’s a lack of standardized vector/streaming instructions in out-of-the-box RISC-V that may hurt performance, but compiler design wise it’s much easier to write a functional compiler than for the nightmare that is x86.
RISC-V is an open source chip design. As of today, it’s still worse than x86 (a CISC—“complex instruction set” design) and ARM (a proprietary RISC—“reduced instruction set” design) but if history is any indication, open source will end up overtaking them in the same way that, for instance, 98% of supercomputers today run highly customized versions of Linux.
There’s also some political connotations surrounding it because some countries don’t want high-end chip designs to be available to their perceived competitors (whether for protectionism reasons or military reasons) but it doesn’t matter.
More info for anyone who wants it:
Linux, being open, can already run on RISC-V while Windows ARM laptops are only really coming out now. Not sure if they have plans for RISC-V. Apple has long used ARM in phones and now their M chip laptops. Reduced instruction sets tend to have better battery life and (originally) worse performance so were ideal for mobile but over time, Intel/AMD (desktops/laptops) and ARM (basically all mobile chips) have borrowed ideas from each other. So, Apple’s ARM chips can be powerful and Intel/AMD chips can be power efficient if that’s the goal.
So, the main advantage of RISC-V is that there’s no royalties or, in some cases, the baggage of aging designs that need backwards compatibility. RISC-I was originally designed as a teaching tool for universities that didn’t want to pay royalties for student toy models and wasn’t really a corporate thing. RISC-V is (the fifth version as the Roman numeral V implies), got good enough to be useful in the real world. And now there’s a consortium of companies funding it and hoping to one day not have pay royalties to make chips.
So, there’s a lot of momentum behind RISC-V. It could easily be the primary architecture someday or, if nothing else, reduce the royalty rates of the other architectures.
One of the implications is the development and popularization of the RISC-V architecture, which is open and can open the market for more competition and less monopolies, among other things.
I assume you are familiar with what CPU architecture is. The famous one is x86 and ARM. This is just another one of those called RISC-V.
The significance is mostly political. US and allies have been trying to sanction China technologically. They even tried to block export of RISC-V, but since it is open source, they can just get fucked. Now, China can only get sub par GPU and limited CPU. Pushing for RISC-V means China is aiming to further develop it to be as capable as the CPU being sanctioned effectively making the sanction useless and even furthering Chinese manufacturing capabilities in the process.
The big advantage is that this is technically more standardized and free. Unlike ARM which require license, RISC-V doesn’t so anyone can make their own CPU and get the software support already in place. Hopefully more CPU manufacturers will be created from the advancement of RISC-V making more fierce competition.
“Please allow our machine to upload your development work directly to our servers in Schenzhen.”
I wonder if it’s possible to get a post about technology coming out of China without a “hurr durr they r spy!!1” comment. I don’t see the same every time there’s an article on a new Intel processor, for example.
Because China is not a normal country and all of its industry is controlled by the state. It desperately wants the world to forget that its the kind of country that runs over its citizens with tanks, forced labor and has hundreds of concentration camps, but it would be kind of silly to go along with that when it has not changed from that course.
Their long-term plan is to slow boil global opinion through a mass social engineering projects and propaganda into accepting that it’s ok and normal for a government to operate in the way that the CCP does.
As long as the CCP is in power anything it does should should be observed about with a healthy dose of suspicion.
You got them mixed with Israel. From malicious spyware and surveillance to running over civilians with tanks.
Israel is quite bad, yes, and the genocide is horrible, but I’d argue China is illustrative of what comes after democracy fails in a place and it has passed through the stage that Israel is currently in.
China is a totalitarian state where information is so tightly controlled and the people so thoroughly decieved (or enslaved) that industrialized genocide is carried out at a scale unseen since the Nazis without the general population knowing or even caring.
That kind of “civilized” totalitarianism in which dissent is quite literally not possible is the terminus of any form of facism. When Orwell talked about a boot stamping on a human face forever, that’s what China is.
So no, as bad as Israel is and as much as they need to be confronted and are untrustworthy, China is far worse.
Israel and China are both authoritarian shitholes, but China is much worse. Boycott both of them, as well as all the other authoritarian shitholes on this planet
Meanwhile the US has successfully made people forget about the revelations that Edward Snowden made.
Yeah, the post is about a new RISC-V laptop and someone came in with "butwhatabout china!!’
That’s not whataboutism.
You sound like a tankie. I bet you think the Tik Tok ban is unfair, while staying quiet on any of the dozen+ western companies and platforms that are outright blocked in China.
Yeah but whatabout the 30 million people Mao killed
Tank man was not ran over.
The difference is that the CCP has a lot of control over Chinese companies operations.
In the US, the companies have a lot of control over the US government.
Ok that’s an oversimplification, but it sounded good
https://news.yahoo.com/google-facebook-cooperated-nsa-prism-145643099.html
It’s not a better situation.
Incentives vs direct board control Google and Facebook can and have said no before.
Very nice tool for usage and development!
Can we please have some RISC-V chips that aren’t made in China?
This has massive implications in tech and politics and im excited.
finding RISC-V packages in standard repositories might prove problematic.
Gentoo would be ideal.
