Wife: "Why'd you buy that?" Me: "Jeff Geerling said it wasn't for me!" Wife: "What will you do with it?" Me: "Donate it to Goodwill two years from now!"
The fact that a RISC V chip is running a desktop environment and a chromium based browser is really promising. I am really getting excited to get real usable phones and laptops using RISC V.
@@BB-848-VAC 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.
If they wanted it to boot sideways (the display is already sideways, so, horizontal), all they have to do is add a boot param to Grub: fbcon=rotate:(INT) Where INT can be: 0 - Normal rotation 1 - Rotate clockwise 2 - Rotate upside down 3 - Rotate counter-clockwise
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
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.
I have a commodore c64. It also suffers from being bad at almost everything. But I still love it. I can hold it and say, "I remember back in the day......" That is why I still want this thing.
@@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.
@@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.
To be fair, we should consider the name of the thing when judging its usefulness. It’s called „console“ and I‘d assume that it works perfectly fine for that usecase: ssh into a headless server.
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 had to reboot my microwave to get it working this morning :/ Trying to use it, the timer counted down the seconds but the spinny thing inside and magnetron didn't work. Turned it off at the wall, back on again, and it was fine.
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
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.
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.
I'm a developer and I am interested in experimenting with RISC-V. As a free software enthusiast, I think RISC-V is the future of computing because it's a radically open platform free of any proprietary blobs like Intel ME or AMD PSP. I believe individuals should have total control over their hardware, and RISC-V could deliver that. But I'm not going to purchase this because I just don't have the money or the need for it at the moment. Still, very promising, I'm very happy to see some real desktop applications running on RISC-V and in a few years, I think there will be a RISC-V device for me.
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.
@@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.
I've commented on these little Lichee SoCs before on your videos, and once again, I'm glad to see it getting to the point where we can have full-build dev machines. I imagine in a half-a-decade's time, we'll see this sitting beside ARM in the low-end market where value-add comes from off-die peripherals within the SoC. Maybe in 10 years it'll be good enough to run a tablet or phone. Exciting times!
My love of handheld Linux devices dates back to Sharp's Zaurus. Its actual utility was somewhat limited but just the fact that I could noodle on the command line with a PDA was tons of fun. So of course I bought into the Asus Eee PC line starting with the 701 and a couple of models afterwards. Great little machines.
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.
You’re only interacting with the RISC-V ISA if you’re coding in assembly. Otherwise the experience is similar to running a semi-jank Linux on another system on a chip board like oDroid or Tinkerboard
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
It's important to note I think that this "laptop" is basically a laptop shell on a Lichee Pi LM4A which is roughly a RISC-V equivalent of a Raspberry Pi Compute Module. As you rightly pointed out, it's far from an actual laptop.
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.
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.
As an old IT support engineer, I was drooling over that form factor as a data center server field support box... (and I personally luv "da' nubbin")... ;-) Too bad that the guts and mechanical design quality seem to blow chunks... And, the "old-school" question was always, "Will it play Crysis?" ;-P
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.
I have a Lichee Pi 4A (with the same SoC as this console), and one thing that’s interesting about the SoC is the integrated 4 TOPS NPU. That’s enough for doing, say, object recognition on a surveillance feed. There’s a few examples on the wiki, so it’s not an undocumented gimmick like in other SBCs.
It may not be very good, but the form factor is good, and hopefully it will lead the way to a fully open platform existing in the future. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if every chip and board that went into the computer you're using was open?
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.
I used an Eee PC in college too. The screen size was terrible, but I swapped in an aftermarket battery and could get 6-8 hours of runtime, enough to carry it in my backpack all day without the charger
Looks like it shipped with xfce? Whatever distro they adapted for this, I would have preferred something like Sway for an effectively no-mouse UI, and it would feel faster, and be possible to get more use out of the touchscreen.
i wish more pc manufacturers would make that form factor! the only really compelling mini laptop (with typeable keys) is the gpd win max 2. all the 13-17" laptops are too big imo; keep the devices small and if you want a big screen, just line out into an external monitor.
The main reason a developer would get this would be Operating System development, specifically ensuring that things run well on a fully integrated system. Part of the issue for power optimisation is we don't have decades of research that's directly applicable for the most efficient cores. Hell, most RISC-V chips are built on decades old 128-32nm tech that simply can't compete in terms of power efficiency but it massively brings the cost down while working out the kinks. As a kernel development machine I can see this being fairly popular as a development platform that isn't just a bare board.
If it had consistently been in that slot between the RPI-4 and RPI-5 or even sitting at the RPI-5 level through all of the capabilities it would have been a very popular device, especially amongst the amateur radio community running digital modes.
ARM: collects license fees for every ARM processor. 230B made so far. With that, they re-invest in improving the ARM architecture to the needs and wants of the market. How does RISC-V evolve the design to overcome ARM?
I picked it up a couple of months ago, and I get a lot of compliments on it...for some reason. It's a bit disheartening to have to tell people "It's not worth the price at the performance", but I know why I got it, and I enjoy it! Performance wise, I've been comparing it to late 2000s computers (similar boot times, and "hardware" grunt). The touch screen..works, the nub brings me pain, but, surprisingly, I like the keyboard. Can't type with it normally very well, but it fits in my hands pretty well and my thumbs can reach anywhere (just gotta break the habit of using solely the left shift, lol). It also struggles with software compatibility, but running with Linux typically I have gotten use to that... Over all, it's a fun little device that I can't recomend to anyone, but I will be playing with for years to come (especially since the risc-v module is replaceable).
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.
I was very surprised that this cyberdeck runs SuperTux Kart in a decent way. Years ago, this was my benchmark when I was going to test a Linux distribution on my laptops.
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.
I, too, love my little netbook. It is still going... well not strong, the battery in it is hard dying, charge can go from 70% down to single digits in an instant. Yeah. I'm glad to see RISC-V going places though, the more the better so it can get tested for various form factors. Still a long way to go for it to be competitive with other architectures. At the rate it is going, we may very well see the very first cases of optical computing coming out of the labs with some recent advances in that arena. Computing hardware in general is at an exciting time right now. Kinda wish I went down that route, but I went the software direction.
@@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.
It is funny, I just watched a video about the C920 RISC-V CPU today (Milk-V Pioneer system). If I am not wrong the new C930 which according to Milk-V is planned for Q1 2024 will have full Vector support. On the other hand the verilog files for the C910 are available on github, but sadly not for the C920...
Wish you had talked about the operating system. Didn’t even mention what exactly it was. Would be interested to know the state of risc V compatible operating systems
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.
I'm still very excited for the future of RISC-V if you look at the speed which development is being adopted and the change in performance year-by-year it's technically improving faster than both ARM and X86 have in the past 10 years within just 4.
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.
Mostly the 'Open ISA' - Arm cores are licensed by Arm, so chip makers have to pay licensing fees per chip, or pay for a design license like Apple has. For RISC-V, a chip maker can build on an open core design if they want, and save on that licensing. Like I mentioned in the video, chip design has a LOT more to it than just the core/licensing though, so it's not a huge saving proportionally. However, there's also freedom in being able to control architecture or customize cores more easily. Though that can also lead to fragmentation, where something that works on *these* RISC-V boards doesn't work the same on *those*...
risc is just a type of cpu/chip that has a "small" set of instructions. there are various risc architectures like arm, mips, sparc, risc-v, power8(?) etc. yes, arm and risc-v are both risc type cpus, but their instruction sets are different, so no compatibility is possible.
@@rmcdudmk212 No. In the 80's a bunch of companies started designing their own microprocessors for the 16bit generation (after having used Intel, Motorola and MOS products or multi-chip CPU boards prior). The processor design efforts were mostly based on RISC research coming out of american universities. SPARK and MIPS came out directly from that research. ARM was developed by Acorn computers, IBM designed PowerPC, DEC made the Alpha, Apple adopted PPC but also helped ARM, SPARK and MIPS were used by everybody that couldn't make their own platform. x86 won out basically because of crap and random business decisions, software devs being lazy bums, marketing and Intel's fabrication advances. RISC V is the fifth generation of RISC architectures from Berkeley, and they made it a simple, modular and free standard. It's well documented and there are lots of open source tools around it. The architecture is well suited for commercial application for everything from microcontrollers to supercomputers.
@@JeffGeerling "Though that can also lead to fragmentation, where something that works on these RISC-V boards doesn't work the same on *those*..." Well, didn't that happen on ARM, too? I mean, the Raspberry Pi only had Raspbian because Debian wasn't going to support the obsolete architecture version that Broadcom were using. The situation might be a bit better on ARM now, but for a long time the same thing was being noted by x86(-64) advocates about ARM.
The "shell" (incl. screen etc) is basically "off-the-shelf". I have a similar looking unit (w/o an Ethernet port) that I bought a year ago. It has a Intel Celeron J4105, 12GB of RAM, 120GB SSD. It's decent unit, for a "laptop" that portable, but it has its quirks. It came with Win11 (unlicensed, but with custom drivers. I've since bought a license), and I've also installed Ubuntu (tried some other distros, but Ubuntu had the least issues). The "little red riding hood mouse" (as the listing calls it) is fine, but the "mouse buttons" are stupid, they are basically just keys: left is "keycode 84"/0xffb5 (according to xev, produces a 5, works as a lclick in Win), and right is the "[context] menu" key (incl. in Win), meaning that you can't "right click" on anything (and no left click in Ubuntu). And of course, I had to change the orientation of the screen. (I also haven't gotten sound to work in Ubuntu)
I wonder if this little thing is free-software enough to be acceptable for the FSF to recommend, given that the RISC-V processors don't require proprietary blobs to my knowledge
My main interest in RISC-V is finding out when and if it manages to make any devices cheaper. The Esp32 is already cheaper than the RPi Pico W, so if that is due to the microcontroller being cheaper, how far can this trend go?
yep! I expect RISC-V to only catch up after it has thoroughly proven superior in the low end. for now, its ARM's time to shine. we'll have to make the transition again, but not for another decade, maybe half a decade if there are some rapid advances.
In the microcontroller market there is certainly a segment of it where cents matter, an RISC-V helps take a few cents off due to a lack of arm license. Although there is still a way to mess this up by licensing a RISC-V core from some vendor
You expect cheaper for the consumer? Heh. Cheaper for them. They will bombard you with influencers telling you why it's the greatest thing on earth. They will save money. We won't.
@@monkev1199 licensing silicon designs is very likely to happen for small companies, designing silicon is very hard. but hopefully SiFive or similar companies keep improving and open sourcing their designs
I agree that RISC-V isn't for consumers yet. When someone says something is for developers, they probably mean at the hardware/architecture dev level. I'm impressed at how fast compiler technology has adapted to a real instruction set that didn't even exist a decade ago. Drivers are the Achilles heel for a new CPU architecture, so I'd wager the type of person who would be interested in something like this would be: Compiler devs, OS devs, driver devs, and maybe application devs. It's most definitely not for the end user. Slow hardware is actually advantageous too for some devs. In some cases, a dev literally needs to watch each frame draw on the screen, potentially pixel by pixel to debug issues.
This chassis or similar is being used by lots of cheap tiny laptops. Theres loads of cheap x86 versions. If it had a serial port, it would be handy little terminal. Whats the battery like on it? I suspect its pretty bad based on flops/watt score.
7:38 "I was worried I'd have to compile it from source" You were feared about waiting for hours to compile DOOM(and possibly other dependencies), right? 😊
I've used a lot of Pis and have to say that there was a very significant improvement in responsiveness with the Pi 5 over the Pi 4 (even with both using NVME storage), Risk V needs to be at least on par with a Pi 5 for a usable desktop experience especially as low end x86 PCs really have come a long way. I recently got a N97 mini PC for about $200 that is great for web browsing/watching videos (even 4K) and is very low power. The graphics is not up to playing modern games but for almost anything else I can't tell the difference between it and my main system.
We'll see where RISC-V stands, when the Milk-V Oasis gets released (second half of this year). 12 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores and a dedicated NPU on a Mini-ITX board, expected to start at around $120. Add 64GB of memory, and they even claim "effortlessly runs large-scale LLMs like LLaMA-65B".
So, I've actually got one of those P8 aliexpress netbooks he shows. It's very nice and has a great size (wanted something to go in my small camera bag). The problem is there is actually a bug on Linux where the internal display won't work on boot. There is work being done and I tried to post a link but it looks like my comment got removed. Wanted to post it here to shine a light on the driver issue plaguing the P8 N100 machine. I like the P8 (I may get the RISC-V unit just to contribute there as well). I also find it odd that this unit and the P8 have some of the same quirks. Charging seems unreliable on USBC when completely off (will only work with some chargers while off but seems to work with everything while on). Power button must be held for 5 seconds to turn on. Display is wired for portrait mode layouts. Also, the keyboard is very similar. Since the link isn't posting, you may use the following as a search term: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* hback porch < 16 pixels - Internal 800x1280 screen not working on Intel N100 Alder Lake based notebook (DSI) in KMS
I mean, Intel (and China) are investing heavy into Risc-V. It's maturing quite fast but the huge issue is software support at a user level. *Looks at Windows on ARM* AS more and more development kits come out like this I feel we will see better and better support. It's hard to move hardware in the proper direction for a user environment use case without seeing where optimization needs to happen to help push software.
Could the little pokey hole be a battery reset ? Lenovo has those on their thinkpads underside, since the battery is now not removable and when you need to do a complete REAL power off/reboot you can't disconnect the battery anymore.. which i had to.
Jeff, thanks for the sharing. Fair comments on the risc-v performance. However, as the manufacture already mentioned that this is a developer machine and not an end user machine. I would like to see you have some contents related to software development. i.e. What os it can be run on? What tool chain it is using? Or maybe download something from git and build the software so as to show us how long does it compiles. etc
It still has an ethernet port, which instantly makes it better than nearly all other current notebooks. Also I like it's thickness, opposed to the flimsy standard that notebooks sadly have to adhere to nowadays .. It could have one or two more USB-ports, though .. The tiny hole loks like a protected reset button to me. And maybe they stripped the screws intentionally, to prevent you from checking it from inside? xD
I just bought a Milk-V with an expansion board. (The expansion board is kind of like the carrier board for a compute module) I spent less than $30 Canadian so it's a very cheap way to try Risc-V. It might even be able to play Doom. I know that people have gotten retro console games to work on it. These little things are pretty interesting. There more powerful than a microcontroller but less powerful than a single board computer.
The Intel versions of notebooks with this form factor are terrific. Most come with Windows and Office pre loaded and ready to run out of the box. Something of a bargain and unique in terms of portability.
This little thing is using an older core design, produced at an old production node to keep it cheap. Higher end RiscV cores are going to be in accelerators though. Not sbc.
I have a small urge to get one and overclock it. Small, but it is there. Though I can be patient and wait for the other devices to release first and for some more software improvements to land in various things.
I'm looking at their RISC-V Android tablet dev kit. Slow AF is fine for testing my Android platform work, and should remind me quickly when my library is doing too much work.
I just purchased a Chuwi Minibook X 2-in-1 (with a touch screen) with the intent to install Linux on it. If you install Linux on it, it does the same thing your Lichee Console A4 does - boot up in a side ways format - actually it's rotated counter-clockwise 45 degrees...... and navigating with the touchpad is hell - because the cursor doesn't move in the way you gesture either. You have to get a linux distro that allows you to rotate the screen and lock it in that orientation. There's supposed to be some instructions out there from the advanced Linux tinkerers to add instructions to the Linux boot loader (GRUB) to get the boot up scrolling text vertical again.
I'm tempted to buy this just to encourage the further development of the hardware. It's just about affordable for my circumstances to spend the money as a kind of "patreon" vote of confidence in Risc. But anyone who buys in that basis should not matter complain that it's rubbish. Everything starts out rubbish...
Still use an EEE PC for DJing, the idea of a small form factor laptop that's cheaply-replaceable enough to not get extremely annoyed when someone spills their beer over it is a niche use case but a handy one. RISC V evangelists always seem to gloss over the fact that ARM got rapidly popular because it filled a niche that wasn't already filled, it let people build devices they couldn't before. RISC V is trying to DISPLACE an existing technology, which is a completely different form of market capture, you need to be significantly better on multiple fronts just to overcome inertia and the process is slow. It can't "do another ARM" and takeover the world in a couple of years, because the conditions are completely different: it doesn't matter HOW good RISC V gets, it will never let you build something you can't already build with ARM, the best it can ever hope for (and hasn't reached yet) is being able to improve the process.
Mechanic here! This mechanic isn't very well legally-versed, unfortunately. But it doesn't sound like he's a bad mechanic by the facts. Camshaft position sensor correlation codes, on a VVT engine, can be a sign of engine damage or timing chain damage. Pull valve cover off and inspect in order to advise the customer. I suspect the mechanic replaced the timing chain and discovered that it did not fix the timing issues that the car came in with. Deciding to fix it for free would theoretically fulfill the contract signed between customer and mechanic. But of course, it turned into a project. It's a rabbit hole, and he fell in it. To suggest that the mechanic caused these problems though, that's absurd. The damages are caused by neglect, by the customer. Should the mechanic have a strong conscience for justice, he would refuse to pay and file an appeal. I'd be pissed too. But seriously, this mechanic needs an attorney ASAP. You can't let a judgement linger like he is. How much does it cost to secure an attorney? Is it cheaper to pay off small claims? Does the mechanic just have to eat the cost of an impatient customer and an ignorant judge?
Wife: "Why'd you buy that?"
Me: "Jeff Geerling said it wasn't for me!"
Wife: "What will you do with it?"
Me: "Donate it to Goodwill two years from now!"
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
🙏
The fact that a RISC V chip is running a desktop environment and a chromium based browser is really promising. I am really getting excited to get real usable phones and laptops using RISC V.
Im a layman, whats the appeal to RISC V for those purposes
@@BB-848-VACRISC-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
@@BB-848-VAC 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.
I really like that you add proper subtitles to your videos, it's a nice touch
I too am very pro-subtitle. TY Mr. Geerling.
If they wanted it to boot sideways (the display is already sideways, so, horizontal), all they have to do is add a boot param to Grub: fbcon=rotate:(INT)
Where INT can be:
0 - Normal rotation
1 - Rotate clockwise
2 - Rotate upside down
3 - Rotate counter-clockwise
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. :)
I used a netbook in graduate school. It would be awesome if they made a comeback.
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
I have a commodore c64. It also suffers from being bad at almost everything. But I still love it. I can hold it and say, "I remember back in the day......"
That is why I still want this thing.
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.
To be fair, we should consider the name of the thing when judging its usefulness. It’s called „console“ and I‘d assume that it works perfectly fine for that usecase: ssh into a headless server.
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 had to reboot my microwave to get it working this morning :/ Trying to use it, the timer counted down the seconds but the spinny thing inside and magnetron didn't work. Turned it off at the wall, back on again, and it was fine.
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.
I'm a developer and I am interested in experimenting with RISC-V. As a free software enthusiast, I think RISC-V is the future of computing because it's a radically open platform free of any proprietary blobs like Intel ME or AMD PSP. I believe individuals should have total control over their hardware, and RISC-V could deliver that. But I'm not going to purchase this because I just don't have the money or the need for it at the moment. Still, very promising, I'm very happy to see some real desktop applications running on RISC-V and in a few years, I think there will be a RISC-V device for me.
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.
China's ban on AMD and Intel for some of the Chinese government contracts will give a big rise to a lot RISC-V chips coming out of China
I've commented on these little Lichee SoCs before on your videos, and once again, I'm glad to see it getting to the point where we can have full-build dev machines. I imagine in a half-a-decade's time, we'll see this sitting beside ARM in the low-end market where value-add comes from off-die peripherals within the SoC. Maybe in 10 years it'll be good enough to run a tablet or phone. Exciting times!
I'm glad it exists. Thanks for showing it off Jeff!
My love of handheld Linux devices dates back to Sharp's Zaurus. Its actual utility was somewhat limited but just the fact that I could noodle on the command line with a PDA was tons of fun. So of course I bought into the Asus Eee PC line starting with the 701 and a couple of models afterwards. Great little machines.
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.
I ❤ Dark Mode even more when Jeff wears it
Where can I buy this shirt? I’ve found others similar in style, but this is nicer than any of the other designs.
You’re only interacting with the RISC-V ISA if you’re coding in assembly. Otherwise the experience is similar to running a semi-jank Linux on another system on a chip board like oDroid or Tinkerboard
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.
Let's not start calling small, netbook sized laptops "cyberdecks". Cyberdecks are cobbled together home made nerd-ware.
This basically is. Not a laptop for use
If you knew how to manufacture this you wouldn't have this opinion
Wasn't the original concept of a cyberdeck just a laptop lmao
Wouldn't it be a junk deck if it's just a bunch of random parts with no real level of somewhat professional reproduce able manufacturing?
I'm still waiting for a fairlight excallibur
We need more palmtops like this again. PLEASE. If you can make gaming handhelds, you sure as hell can make tiny laptops too.
It's important to note I think that this "laptop" is basically a laptop shell on a Lichee Pi LM4A which is roughly a RISC-V equivalent of a Raspberry Pi Compute Module. As you rightly pointed out, it's far from an actual laptop.
What if all I need is an ssh terminal because I have to log in somewhere while on the road? This sounds like a better option than a tablet.
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
Used to have a Dell Mini 9 that i really liked, wish they'd respin a modern version of that.
As an old IT support engineer, I was drooling over that form factor as a data center server field support box... (and I personally luv "da' nubbin")... ;-)
Too bad that the guts and mechanical design quality seem to blow chunks...
And, the "old-school" question was always, "Will it play Crysis?" ;-P
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 want this for devkit purposes. I would love to see if any of my projects would run on RISC-V…
I would say, if you have the money, you can take the RISC.
Which projects?
Might want to look up the milkV oasis
I have a Lichee Pi 4A (with the same SoC as this console), and one thing that’s interesting about the SoC is the integrated 4 TOPS NPU. That’s enough for doing, say, object recognition on a surveillance feed. There’s a few examples on the wiki, so it’s not an undocumented gimmick like in other SBCs.
I don't care i want it. Ive been waiting for the risc-v cpu module for my MNT reform forever!
It may not be very good, but the form factor is good, and hopefully it will lead the way to a fully open platform existing in the future. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if every chip and board that went into the computer you're using was open?
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.
I used an Eee PC in college too. The screen size was terrible, but I swapped in an aftermarket battery and could get 6-8 hours of runtime, enough to carry it in my backpack all day without the charger
As someone wanting to move more towards open firmware and ideally hardware... its really good to see this.
Very nice little devkit! It was amusing to see it run DOOM. :)
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.
Looks like it shipped with xfce? Whatever distro they adapted for this, I would have preferred something like Sway for an effectively no-mouse UI, and it would feel faster, and be possible to get more use out of the touchscreen.
Twm or nanoX, or no x11 at all.
i wish more pc manufacturers would make that form factor! the only really compelling mini laptop (with typeable keys) is the gpd win max 2. all the 13-17" laptops are too big imo; keep the devices small and if you want a big screen, just line out into an external monitor.
The main reason a developer would get this would be Operating System development, specifically ensuring that things run well on a fully integrated system. Part of the issue for power optimisation is we don't have decades of research that's directly applicable for the most efficient cores. Hell, most RISC-V chips are built on decades old 128-32nm tech that simply can't compete in terms of power efficiency but it massively brings the cost down while working out the kinks. As a kernel development machine I can see this being fairly popular as a development platform that isn't just a bare board.
If it had consistently been in that slot between the RPI-4 and RPI-5 or even sitting at the RPI-5 level through all of the capabilities it would have been a very popular device, especially amongst the amateur radio community running digital modes.
There is no doubt that x86 days are numbered. Great processors, but reduced instruction set architectures are the future.
ARM: collects license fees for every ARM processor. 230B made so far. With that, they re-invest in improving the ARM architecture to the needs and wants of the market.
How does RISC-V evolve the design to overcome ARM?
I picked it up a couple of months ago, and I get a lot of compliments on it...for some reason. It's a bit disheartening to have to tell people "It's not worth the price at the performance", but I know why I got it, and I enjoy it!
Performance wise, I've been comparing it to late 2000s computers (similar boot times, and "hardware" grunt). The touch screen..works, the nub brings me pain, but, surprisingly, I like the keyboard. Can't type with it normally very well, but it fits in my hands pretty well and my thumbs can reach anywhere (just gotta break the habit of using solely the left shift, lol). It also struggles with software compatibility, but running with Linux typically I have gotten use to that...
Over all, it's a fun little device that I can't recomend to anyone, but I will be playing with for years to come (especially since the risc-v module is replaceable).
You know, Doom didn't originally have mouse support. You can play that one with just the keys on a single keyboard.
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.
this is the only mini laptop I've seen this size with a camera.
Honestly a big selling point, fun laptop, but with a camera for interviews.
Unfortunately needs an external mic; and I couldn't get Bluetooth working either. I don't think the headphone jack has an input.
1:30 Maybe that hole is a reset switch like on tablets/smartphones?
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 is terrible.. I love it.
I am not sure what makes this a Cyberdeck though. It looks like a Netbook to me
I was very surprised that this cyberdeck runs SuperTux Kart in a decent way. Years ago, this was my benchmark when I was going to test a Linux distribution on my laptops.
And it's still fun today :)
Very cool machine even if it's not the most powerful. It's not the answer to Risc V computing but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
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.
Always nice to hear about RISC V stuff!
I, too, love my little netbook. It is still going... well not strong, the battery in it is hard dying, charge can go from 70% down to single digits in an instant. Yeah.
I'm glad to see RISC-V going places though, the more the better so it can get tested for various form factors.
Still a long way to go for it to be competitive with other architectures. At the rate it is going, we may very well see the very first cases of optical computing coming out of the labs with some recent advances in that arena.
Computing hardware in general is at an exciting time right now. Kinda wish I went down that route, but I went the software direction.
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.
I have literally this exact laptop but with an intel atom. Getting Linux to work on it has been an ordeal
It is funny, I just watched a video about the C920 RISC-V CPU today (Milk-V Pioneer system).
If I am not wrong the new C930 which according to Milk-V is planned for Q1 2024 will have full Vector support.
On the other hand the verilog files for the C910 are available on github, but sadly not for the C920...
Wish you had talked about the operating system. Didn’t even mention what exactly it was. Would be interested to know the state of risc V compatible operating systems
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.
I'm still very excited for the future of RISC-V if you look at the speed which development is being adopted and the change in performance year-by-year it's technically improving faster than both ARM and X86 have in the past 10 years within just 4.
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.
You've convinced me, I'm selling my gaming PC and buying one of these!
Got my chuckle of the day!
Would that on the side be a rest button LoL
Looking forward to the roll-out of 3:21 as your official channel watermark!
Q: why is RISC-V different from ARM? I thought ARM was a RISC processor?
Mostly the 'Open ISA' - Arm cores are licensed by Arm, so chip makers have to pay licensing fees per chip, or pay for a design license like Apple has. For RISC-V, a chip maker can build on an open core design if they want, and save on that licensing. Like I mentioned in the video, chip design has a LOT more to it than just the core/licensing though, so it's not a huge saving proportionally.
However, there's also freedom in being able to control architecture or customize cores more easily. Though that can also lead to fragmentation, where something that works on *these* RISC-V boards doesn't work the same on *those*...
risc is just a type of cpu/chip that has a "small" set of instructions. there are various risc architectures like arm, mips, sparc, risc-v, power8(?) etc. yes, arm and risc-v are both risc type cpus, but their instruction sets are different, so no compatibility is possible.
@@rmcdudmk212 No. In the 80's a bunch of companies started designing their own microprocessors for the 16bit generation (after having used Intel, Motorola and MOS products or multi-chip CPU boards prior). The processor design efforts were mostly based on RISC research coming out of american universities.
SPARK and MIPS came out directly from that research. ARM was developed by Acorn computers, IBM designed PowerPC, DEC made the Alpha, Apple adopted PPC but also helped ARM, SPARK and MIPS were used by everybody that couldn't make their own platform. x86 won out basically because of crap and random business decisions, software devs being lazy bums, marketing and Intel's fabrication advances.
RISC V is the fifth generation of RISC architectures from Berkeley, and they made it a simple, modular and free standard. It's well documented and there are lots of open source tools around it. The architecture is well suited for commercial application for everything from microcontrollers to supercomputers.
You need to pay ARM to make ARM chips, you don't need to do that on RISC-V.
@@JeffGeerling "Though that can also lead to fragmentation, where something that works on these RISC-V boards doesn't work the same on *those*..."
Well, didn't that happen on ARM, too? I mean, the Raspberry Pi only had Raspbian because Debian wasn't going to support the obsolete architecture version that Broadcom were using. The situation might be a bit better on ARM now, but for a long time the same thing was being noted by x86(-64) advocates about ARM.
I loved my eee to. You'd love your input on a good modern eee replacement.
The "shell" (incl. screen etc) is basically "off-the-shelf".
I have a similar looking unit (w/o an Ethernet port) that I bought a year ago.
It has a Intel Celeron J4105, 12GB of RAM, 120GB SSD.
It's decent unit, for a "laptop" that portable, but it has its quirks.
It came with Win11 (unlicensed, but with custom drivers. I've since bought a license), and I've also installed Ubuntu (tried some other distros, but Ubuntu had the least issues).
The "little red riding hood mouse" (as the listing calls it) is fine, but the "mouse buttons" are stupid, they are basically just keys: left is "keycode 84"/0xffb5 (according to xev, produces a 5, works as a lclick in Win), and right is the "[context] menu" key (incl. in Win), meaning that you can't "right click" on anything (and no left click in Ubuntu).
And of course, I had to change the orientation of the screen. (I also haven't gotten sound to work in Ubuntu)
It might be super slow but there's a better chance of it not having a silicon level rootkit installed than an Intel or AMD chip
A reset hole you can put a pin into? 3:41
I wonder if this little thing is free-software enough to be acceptable for the FSF to recommend, given that the RISC-V processors don't require proprietary blobs to my knowledge
My main interest in RISC-V is finding out when and if it manages to make any devices cheaper. The Esp32 is already cheaper than the RPi Pico W, so if that is due to the microcontroller being cheaper, how far can this trend go?
yep! I expect RISC-V to only catch up after it has thoroughly proven superior in the low end. for now, its ARM's time to shine. we'll have to make the transition again, but not for another decade, maybe half a decade if there are some rapid advances.
In the microcontroller market there is certainly a segment of it where cents matter, an RISC-V helps take a few cents off due to a lack of arm license. Although there is still a way to mess this up by licensing a RISC-V core from some vendor
You expect cheaper for the consumer? Heh. Cheaper for them. They will bombard you with influencers telling you why it's the greatest thing on earth. They will save money. We won't.
@@monkev1199 No one says it will be passed along to the consumer.
@@monkev1199 licensing silicon designs is very likely to happen for small companies, designing silicon is very hard. but hopefully SiFive or similar companies keep improving and open sourcing their designs
I agree that RISC-V isn't for consumers yet. When someone says something is for developers, they probably mean at the hardware/architecture dev level. I'm impressed at how fast compiler technology has adapted to a real instruction set that didn't even exist a decade ago. Drivers are the Achilles heel for a new CPU architecture, so I'd wager the type of person who would be interested in something like this would be: Compiler devs, OS devs, driver devs, and maybe application devs. It's most definitely not for the end user. Slow hardware is actually advantageous too for some devs. In some cases, a dev literally needs to watch each frame draw on the screen, potentially pixel by pixel to debug issues.
I saw this a while ago, I'm glad you made a video on it !!!
Always a fun time when the screws come pre-stripped
This chassis or similar is being used by lots of cheap tiny laptops. Theres loads of cheap x86 versions.
If it had a serial port, it would be handy little terminal.
Whats the battery like on it? I suspect its pretty bad based on flops/watt score.
7:38 "I was worried I'd have to compile it from source"
You were feared about waiting for hours to compile DOOM(and possibly other dependencies), right? 😊
I don't know why, but the design form factor appeals to me.
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
When you hold the laptop in your palm it looks like it IS your hand. Like your arm ends with a laptop attachment. Cyber indeed.
10x slower than a N100 is a big ouch.
I've used a lot of Pis and have to say that there was a very significant improvement in responsiveness with the Pi 5 over the Pi 4 (even with both using NVME storage), Risk V needs to be at least on par with a Pi 5 for a usable desktop experience especially as low end x86 PCs really have come a long way. I recently got a N97 mini PC for about $200 that is great for web browsing/watching videos (even 4K) and is very low power. The graphics is not up to playing modern games but for almost anything else I can't tell the difference between it and my main system.
We'll see where RISC-V stands, when the Milk-V Oasis gets released (second half of this year). 12 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores and a dedicated NPU on a Mini-ITX board, expected to start at around $120.
Add 64GB of memory, and they even claim "effortlessly runs large-scale LLMs like LLaMA-65B".
What about the devterm or uconsole from clockworkpi? Both of those have options for risc processors when you purchase them.
I've been following risc-v for a few years, and I don't know if I will ever be able to stop reading it as risc-VEE
I just got their new full laptop I turned it on and logged in,based on this little one. Will play around with it... Haven't yet...
Take away: Don't buy this, you will be examining your life choices.
From what I’ve read RISC-V still needs a lot of ISA optimizations before general use. Glad oems are making progress though.
So, I've actually got one of those P8 aliexpress netbooks he shows. It's very nice and has a great size (wanted something to go in my small camera bag). The problem is there is actually a bug on Linux where the internal display won't work on boot. There is work being done and I tried to post a link but it looks like my comment got removed. Wanted to post it here to shine a light on the driver issue plaguing the P8 N100 machine.
I like the P8 (I may get the RISC-V unit just to contribute there as well). I also find it odd that this unit and the P8 have some of the same quirks. Charging seems unreliable on USBC when completely off (will only work with some chargers while off but seems to work with everything while on). Power button must be held for 5 seconds to turn on. Display is wired for portrait mode layouts. Also, the keyboard is very similar.
Since the link isn't posting, you may use the following as a search term:
i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* hback porch < 16 pixels - Internal 800x1280 screen not working on Intel N100 Alder Lake based notebook (DSI) in KMS
Fitting in the cargo pants is a power move Jeff, love it!!!
The suspense in Jeff's videos is that you can't know if next time he will still be Jeff Geerling, or only "Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling"
I mean, Intel (and China) are investing heavy into Risc-V. It's maturing quite fast but the huge issue is software support at a user level. *Looks at Windows on ARM* AS more and more development kits come out like this I feel we will see better and better support. It's hard to move hardware in the proper direction for a user environment use case without seeing where optimization needs to happen to help push software.
Where can I get that t-shirt??
I bought it from Techno Tim! He just released that shirt (and some other merch with the same graphic). Very comfy.
microSD slot?! This thing's more powerful than my macbook!
That looks exactly like the mini-laptop I got only thing missing is the ethernet port and its running a Intel celeron with windows 10
You don't need mouse to play Doom...
How in the hell did they manage to send you one with all the screws stripped??? Must be intentional
The cargo pants! Those are perfect for this laptop, awesome! :D
They still fit from college days too lol
Could the little pokey hole be a battery reset ?
Lenovo has those on their thinkpads underside, since the battery is now not removable
and when you need to do a complete REAL power off/reboot you can't disconnect the battery anymore.. which i had to.
Jeff, thanks for the sharing. Fair comments on the risc-v performance. However, as the manufacture already mentioned that this is a developer machine and not an end user machine. I would like to see you have some contents related to software development. i.e. What os it can be run on? What tool chain it is using? Or maybe download something from git and build the software so as to show us how long does it compiles. etc
Where did you get the Dark Mode shirt?
Techno Tim! He just released some 'dark mode' stuff, it's a comfy shirt.
It still has an ethernet port, which instantly makes it better than nearly all other current notebooks. Also I like it's thickness, opposed to the flimsy standard that notebooks sadly have to adhere to nowadays .. It could have one or two more USB-ports, though .. The tiny hole loks like a protected reset button to me. And maybe they stripped the screws intentionally, to prevent you from checking it from inside? xD
I just bought a Milk-V with an expansion board. (The expansion board is kind of like the carrier board for a compute module) I spent less than $30 Canadian so it's a very cheap way to try Risc-V. It might even be able to play Doom. I know that people have gotten retro console games to work on it. These little things are pretty interesting. There more powerful than a microcontroller but less powerful than a single board computer.
Hi Jeff ,Whats your thoughts on building a SHTF cyber deck, maybe a video on this matter??
What site did you use to test the webcam?
As an Atom N270 enjoyer, that sounds like a challenge rather than a warning.
The Intel versions of notebooks with this form factor are terrific. Most come with Windows and Office pre loaded and ready to run out of the box. Something of a bargain and unique in terms of portability.
This little thing is using an older core design, produced at an old production node to keep it cheap. Higher end RiscV cores are going to be in accelerators though. Not sbc.
I have a small urge to get one and overclock it. Small, but it is there. Though I can be patient and wait for the other devices to release first and for some more software improvements to land in various things.
@1.47 - you sure that's not a train?
I'm looking at their RISC-V Android tablet dev kit. Slow AF is fine for testing my Android platform work, and should remind me quickly when my library is doing too much work.
What happend when they combine an existing arm design chip with the risc-v Isa? Lets say the design of a snapdragon x combine with the riscv Isa.
I just purchased a Chuwi Minibook X 2-in-1 (with a touch screen) with the intent to install Linux on it. If you install Linux on it, it does the same thing your Lichee Console A4 does - boot up in a side ways format - actually it's rotated counter-clockwise 45 degrees...... and navigating with the touchpad is hell - because the cursor doesn't move in the way you gesture either. You have to get a linux distro that allows you to rotate the screen and lock it in that orientation. There's supposed to be some instructions out there from the advanced Linux tinkerers to add instructions to the Linux boot loader (GRUB) to get the boot up scrolling text vertical again.
I'm tempted to buy this just to encourage the further development of the hardware. It's just about affordable for my circumstances to spend the money as a kind of "patreon" vote of confidence in Risc.
But anyone who buys in that basis should not matter complain that it's rubbish. Everything starts out rubbish...
Still use an EEE PC for DJing, the idea of a small form factor laptop that's cheaply-replaceable enough to not get extremely annoyed when someone spills their beer over it is a niche use case but a handy one.
RISC V evangelists always seem to gloss over the fact that ARM got rapidly popular because it filled a niche that wasn't already filled, it let people build devices they couldn't before. RISC V is trying to DISPLACE an existing technology, which is a completely different form of market capture, you need to be significantly better on multiple fronts just to overcome inertia and the process is slow. It can't "do another ARM" and takeover the world in a couple of years, because the conditions are completely different: it doesn't matter HOW good RISC V gets, it will never let you build something you can't already build with ARM, the best it can ever hope for (and hasn't reached yet) is being able to improve the process.
Mechanic here! This mechanic isn't very well legally-versed, unfortunately.
But it doesn't sound like he's a bad mechanic by the facts.
Camshaft position sensor correlation codes, on a VVT engine, can be a sign of engine damage or timing chain damage. Pull valve cover off and inspect in order to advise the customer.
I suspect the mechanic replaced the timing chain and discovered that it did not fix the timing issues that the car came in with. Deciding to fix it for free would theoretically fulfill the contract signed between customer and mechanic.
But of course, it turned into a project.
It's a rabbit hole, and he fell in it.
To suggest that the mechanic caused these problems though, that's absurd. The damages are caused by neglect, by the customer. Should the mechanic have a strong conscience for justice, he would refuse to pay and file an appeal. I'd be pissed too.
But seriously, this mechanic needs an attorney ASAP. You can't let a judgement linger like he is.
How much does it cost to secure an attorney? Is it cheaper to pay off small claims? Does the mechanic just have to eat the cost of an impatient customer and an ignorant judge?
Where'd you get that dark mode shirt?
From Techno Tim! He just released some dark mode merch