Will RISC make a comeback?

Those boards are cute!

wait seriously? with what, email or phone?

have you done this before? lemme see some proofs pls

they are, the ci20 ought to make a very suitable openbsd board

email. I'm not translating a bunch of Chinese messages to figure out which one said I can do it.

OpenBSD only supports MIPS64, Creator boards are MIPS32.

fug, so they only respond in chinese?

from which website do I get their email from though?

this? : lemote.com/

or this? : zkml.lemote.com/en/about/

Actually I never tried English, I just composed all of my messages in Google Translate. It's the one in Contact Us on lemote.com
[email protected]

>more competition == more competitive products, at least in this consumer sense
nobody in the "consumer sense" takes these niche chips seriously enough to call them competition

nice, thanks for the help. Did you actually managed to purchase one through them though?

I mean, how would payment even be conducted? Do they even respond to people buying their boards for personal use?

not now, but their incubating in their home countries, maybe someday soon when they dominate their own turf, then they will expand outwards

>not now, but their incubating in their home countries, maybe someday soon when they dominate their own turf, then they will expand outwards
nobody in the west will ever buy incompatible chinese domestic processors

>Did you actually managed to purchase one through them though?
I just wanted to know that I could. They even said I could get the mini ITX board with an 8-core Godson 3B processor, something not listed on their site. I don't know how payment would work out, I wasn't really worried about it since I wasn't buying one that moment.
>Do they even respond to people buying their boards for personal use?
Well they did to me.

Until they start making "real", expandable RISC motherboards (I'm thinking of similar mobos as we use in out x86 desktops) only the embedded market, the very slim RISC server market and the /trash/ awaits them.
>RISC processor mobo
>free firmware
>integrated USB, network, SATA, sound etc. the usual
>expandable memory
>PCI and PCI-express expansions slots
>upgradeable CPU
Am I asking for too much?

well most of them run linux, and to be fair at least half will use ARM

Hmmm, nice, I will attempt to make contact, will report back if I get anything.

by expandable you mean allowing for modifications to ram, graphics card etc. right?

>well most of them run linux, and to be fair at least half will use ARM
yeah, exactly, nobody wants that shit

we shall see

It was never really here to begin with in the context that Jow Forums discusses it in, the last time traditional RISC chips were seen as somewhat competitive in the mainstream PC space was the the ACE consortium push for MIPS/NT in the early '90s and this modern batch of niche low-end chips from nameless startups that do nothing but run the same old GPL shit you can run better on any Intel PC have even less to offer traditional PC users than those systems did.

Maybe ARM vendors will continue to make inroads in the ultra-low-end where the only qualifier is being able to run Facebook and SaaS webapps, but "coming back" in PCs? Never. Especially not some no-name mainland Chinese chip that will probably barely gain any traction in a country that needed government intervention to stop people from using pirated Windows XP.

>by expandable you mean allowing for modifications to ram, graphics card etc. right?
Yes, so you can replace and upgrade components like in your desktop.

>he last time traditional RISC chips were seen as somewhat competitive in the mainstream PC space was the the ACE consortium
You seem to be forgetting Macs

Talos II already offers this, of course nobody's buying it because it's quite expensive for just a different sticker to run GNU/Linux on.

Lemote's boards have everything you want aside from maybe replaceable CPUs, I'm not sure if they're socketed or not but I've always assumed they were BGA mounted

What, literally the sole example of a non-Wintel platform to have some sort of mainstream exposure and sizable, but still ultimately minor market share? The one that very nearly went into bankruptcy trying to beat PCs at their own game in the '90s? It's not really a good thing to point at for this discussion. Nobody really cared for PowerPC outside of the Apple and IBM spaces that forced you to use them.

>the last time RISC was competitive was ACE
>well except for Apple, who dwarfed ACE's market share during and well after ACE was obsolete, but they don't count
Fuck off

phytium has these for their FT-1500 series

sunway i'm not too sure, will need to do some more digging

>was ACE
>ACE's market share
I really get the feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about. But those systems never really had any significant marketshare to begin with, I'd really be surprised if they ever breached 1% or even half a percent, being able to outdo them doesn't mean much.

Apple was never at any point a true threat to the core PC market or really considered something to compete with on hardware architecture, they were a niche of their own carried by a loyal customer base who bought into the whole platform, they didn't give a shit about what processor it was running.

>I really get the feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about
I know exactly what you're talking about.
>But those systems never really had any significant marketshare to begin with, I'd really be surprised if they ever breached 1% or even half a percent
Exactly.
>being able to outdo them doesn't mean much.
Irrelevant.
>Apple was never at any point a true threat to the core PC market or really considered something to compete with on hardware architecture
Meanwhile ACE platforms died and Apple carried on. I'd say the one that didn't die and continued to not die long after ACE had died was the more competitive one.

ah, sunway, the company that made the fastest super computer in the world. i don't think they would ever sell this to average consumers, but if you ever manage to ger a thousands of these CPUs, you could build you own super computer for posting on Jow Forums.

Your entire point was that Apple had greater marketshare than those systems, but the reality is that their own marketshare was still paltry and Apple itself was doomed to go the same way had it not have been bailed out and subsequently undergone a massive facelift.

The reason the Mac "doesn't count" in this case is because what kept it alive was not the hardware (non-Mac PowerPC consumer systems were utter flops,) it was the loyal userbase and software that neither those early MIPS/NT systems nor these new ARM, POWER, RISC-V, Chinese or whatever other systems have. It's simply not a valid comparison.

You can justify it anyway you want but PowerPC Macs still outlived ACE by far.
>it was the loyal userbase and software
A hardware platform is nothing without a userbase and software.

What are you even arguing with me about?

That PowerPC Macs existed.

SW400~ series and SW1600~ series seem to be already for sale though, at least in china.

I don't think there's anything disagreeable in that. Just the notion that they were truly competitive or influential in the mainstream space. Outside of the embedded market they pretty much just stuck to the Mac and various low-end IBM products, with some Motorola systems here and there. Never a serious threat to Intel in its core markets worthy of being called proper competition.

>that they were truly competitive or influential in the mainstream space
Like how MIPS and Alpha ACE systems were? Oh wait they weren't.

>Alpha ACE
I'm trying not to be too much of a dick here but you really have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

On the pure hardware level those systems were reasonably competitive, and they ran more generally appealing commercial software than these new and relatively slow chips probably ever will. But, like we both seem to agree on, they were complete failures. Despite having more mainstream exposure, decently competitive performance, more compatibility, and actually offering something that stands out over mainstream PCs.

>I'm trying not to be too much of a dick here but you really have no fucking idea what you're talking about.
No, I do. Do you? ACE was behind ARC, which encompassed MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC platforms.

I can maybe see someone thinking Alpha systems were under this umbrella at first due to DEC's involvement (with their MIPS systems) but PowerPC? Come the fuck on, nigger, you didn't even skim the wiki page. ARC firmware did run on other NT-supported architectures but those were not all ACE systems. The two are not one and the same.

ACE is responsible for ARC, ARC firmware runs on Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC, therefore all are ACE.

No, no, no. It's like calling every PC clone a fucking Compaq, ARC wasn't the entirety of ACE, it was something picked off the corpse of it by members and non-members of the consortium for NT compatibility. ACE was dead by the time half of those systems were even built, none of the non-MIPS ARC systems fall under their umbrella beyond some of them being built by consortium members.

ACE systems with the ARC firmware are mostly MIPS R4000/R4400/R4600-based systems like the Acer PICA or contemporary DECstations.

Non-ACE systems with the ARC firmware are contemporary SGI systems (tweaked ARCS couldn't even boot NT,) DEC Alpha systems (ACE didn't standardize on Alpha) or IBM RS/6000 and PC Power Series (IBM wasn't even a fucking member of ACE)

Good shit. Gotta check those out, ty.

>Acer PICA
I forgot this wasn't actually a full system, Acer's box was the AcerFormula.