Able to upgrade not just the speed but manufacturer of CPU?


And what would you suggest, then? TI has given up on mobile SoCs, Intel is discontinuing the Atom, Freescale is basically gone, Rockchip has no Linux drivers, and Samsung and Qualcomm won't sell to us. You can act all high and mighty about who you should pick to use in your product, but if you let such an entitled attitude eliminate the few options you have left, then you won't be releasing a product.

How about you talk about the facts instead of trying to make suppositions about me?

-God Ginrai

Why don't we wait until it is time to pick a new SoC instead of trying to suggest one before we have the product that includes the one we may eventually want to replace? Who knows what things will be like then.

Having morals is not acting high and mighty. If you were paying attention, my concerns are the opposite of high and mighty, and about doing what is acceptable to everyone. Not sure where you are getting the idea that I think I am entitled to a damn thing, and this sounds like the type of response often found by those that refuse to accept that others want to make things better for all. Know what you are talking about before you try to make a sweeping dismissive comment instead of spitting out nonsense. I would rather have nothing than do something I feel is unacceptably damaging, so I often choose to go with nothing.

You can't talk about the facts of things that are still years away. Everything isn't static. If you have some way to see into the future perhaps you could share it with the rest of us.

I am not making suppositions. You were the one that said to go with AllWinner, knowing that many people find giving them money and using their products for something like the Pyra unacceptable. Perhaps to you it is merely a little gaming handheld. To others there is much more to it. You may not agree or care, but others do.
 
Why don't we wait until it is time to pick a new SoC instead of trying to suggest one before we have the product that includes the one we may eventually want to replace? Who knows what things will be like then.

Having morals is not acting high and mighty. If you were paying attention, my concerns are the opposite of high and mighty, and about doing what is acceptable to everyone. Not sure where you are getting the idea that I think I am entitled to a damn thing, and this sounds like the type of response often found by those that refuse to accept that others want to make things better for all. Know what you are talking about before you try to make a sweeping dismissive comment instead of spitting out nonsense. I would rather have nothing than do something I feel is unacceptably damaging, so I often choose to go with nothing.

You can't talk about the facts of things that are still years away. Everything isn't static. If you have some way to see into the future perhaps you could share it with the rest of us.

I am not making suppositions. You were the one that said to go with AllWinner, knowing that many people find giving them money and using their products for something like the Pyra unacceptable. Perhaps to you it is merely a little gaming handheld. To others there is much more to it. You may not agree or care, but others do.
I would only want to go with AllWinner if there is no other options come upgrade time.
 
Why don't we wait until it is time to pick a new SoC instead of trying to suggest one before we have the product that includes the one we may eventually want to replace? Who knows what things will be like then.

A topic about cpu upgrades is hardly the place to suggest not discussing cpu upgrades. That's basically the same as just asking to close the topic.

Having morals is not acting high and mighty. If you were paying attention, my concerns are the opposite of high and mighty, and about doing what is acceptable to everyone. Not sure where you are getting the idea that I think I am entitled to a damn thing, and this sounds like the type of response often found by those that refuse to accept that others want to make things better for all. Know what you are talking about before you try to make a sweeping dismissive comment instead of spitting out nonsense. I would rather have nothing than do something I feel is unacceptably damaging, so I often choose to go with nothing.

There's a difference between "having morals" and "sticking your nose into the air". You are trying to paint what you are saying as having morals, but what you are requesting would literally leave us with no SoCs to upgrade to. And instead of trying to supply some SoC like I requested you to do in order to prove me wrong, you are trying to sidestep the issue by insisting on your "morality".

You can't talk about the facts of things that are still years away. Everything isn't static. If you have some way to see into the future perhaps you could share it with the rest of us.

You can. It's how you plan for the future. And yes, everything isn't static. Some company may come along with exactly the SoC that we want. But you can't move forward just expecting that to happen. You should be planning on what you can do now, and then adjust your plan as new options become available.

I am not making suppositions. You were the one that said to go with AllWinner, knowing that many people find giving them money and using their products for something like the Pyra unacceptable. Perhaps to you it is merely a little gaming handheld. To others there is much more to it. You may not agree or care, but others do.

You are making suppositions. You have been constantly berating me with the way you have been wording your responses to me, to make it seem like I don't care about the issues that you do. This line in particular is a supposition that it's simply natural that with my values, (which you are arbitrarily defining for yourself) that I would push for AllWinner:

I guess it isn't a surprise that you are pushing for AllWinner, too. I agree with ED about them.

Your comments about whether I agree or care have also shown your unwillingness to accept that I am anything but some degenerate that only cares about the most powerful devices.

-God Ginrai
 
If Pyra itself doesn't violate the GPL I don't care. Pyra would probably not need to care about including binary blobs for the image signal processor, camera, or video encode. While it sucks, I assume that we'd be willing to concede to a lack of easy access to video decode hardware. How much is this even shaping up on OMAP5?

But I have my doubts about how competitive Allwinner will be over the long term. The last SoC they've released that I'm aware of is a super cheap quad Cortex-A53 made on 40nm (so probably terrible efficiency like Raspberry Pi 3...) A80 is the highest end SoC they've released or announced thus far, and it came out about two years ago. Rockchip is more promising, although they haven't announced anything for processes beyond 28nm yet.

I'll agree with you here Exo, Allwinner's offerings aren't worth any consideration at the moment. Their A64 chip (which I have extensively tested using the Pine64) is not anything worth writing home about and their A80 has a quickly aging GPU.

Rockchip's upcoming RK3399 looks promising, and knowing rockchip it will likely be cheap. I'm in the boat of having this conversation 6 months from now, when we'll likely have news on what's next for these Chinese chip companies.
 
@God Ginrai I am pretty sure the topic is about the ability to switch to an SoC by a different manufacturer. If you have any doubts, please scroll to the top of the page and read the title.

ED has said he does not want to use AllWinner. I agree with the his reasons for feeling that way, as I said.

While my nose is in the air, I also don't think it is right for a company providing only one of the components to demand you use only the people they tell you can to design/engineer the device. Since you don't see the problem with that, what if every company selling a part demanded this. There is a chance that there would be no overlap on the approved lists, and the thing would never be made. Back to the real situation: if everyone gives in, more companies may choose this policy, and it could be seen as "how things are" and result in it being nearly impossible for little projects to get off the ground. I will not financially support a company that I see as potentially causing such damage. I will not recommend such a company, and I will warn others away. There is no side stepping. Then again, there is nothing that needs to be side stepped.

Also, there is no immediate need for a new SoC manufacturer. Right now we have one. Why do you insist that a new one needs to be picked right now? Let the Pyra get into at least one end users hands before trying to get moving on a CPU board upgrade. Once that has happened other companies may be willing to work with ED.

So me not being surprised (and stating it) that you would be fine with the use of an SoC from a GPL violator, something that can still be made right, after you already suggested using one from a company that dictates to their customer what they will do with it, something that can't be made right later, was supposition? And berating you? I still don't see it. You said you were ok with the really bad thing, am I supposed to be :eek: super shocked about the thing that is bad but can be fixed? If you feel as I do about these things you wouldn't want to see them in the Pyra.

Sure, I berated you about other things (see the first paragraph in this post). I still don't understand why would you think a background check for firearm purchases is anything like letting a company that makes CPUs tell you who is allowed to design your device. Trust me, if someone wants to shoot up a movie theater or mall or school, a background check isn't going to stop them. While a handful of people may try to blame the company that made the rifle, most people understand that a person makes the decisions about what they do. The thing they used to do it isn't all that important, but this is getting away from the point. No one blames the manufacturer of an SoC for a failed project using it. (There is your comparison, I guess.) When it is a company that has a history of satisfactory products, and the SoC has been used in other successful products, there should be even less concern. Things that cross my mind for why a company would tell you who can make your device (which is no longer all yours, as someone else is now calling the shots) is they get a cut, they are hiding something, and they don't want the business of the little guys (with exceptions that I won't go into because I am tired of talking about this).

Thanks for putting words in my mouth. Since I hadn't even considered that your argument was coming from a desire for a more powerful processor/device, thanks for putting thoughts in my head, too. I thought you wanted as many SoC manufacturers to be considered as possible. This works best when you can assess the situation based on all available information, which we don't yet have. Perhaps you do feel as I do about projects like the Pyra. If so, how about we work toward a better option instead of accepting something we feel is unethical?

Another option: Get with nvidia and find one of their approved people/companies and have them make an upgrade board. If you don't like that idea, contact AllWinner and get all the info you need from them to start working on a CPU board. I am pretty sure in both cases ED will provide you with what you need to design it to work with the Pyra. He has already said he plans to release everything, and that means anyone can make a CPU board with whatever SoC from whichever company will work with them. Then you get to use everything you want to, and ED can stick with hns and not go with an SoC from a company he and many others don't want to support. You can do preorders or a Kickstarter campaign to fund the new board. Everyone gets to be happy, and this pointless back and forth can end.
 
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When purchasing this butter knife, you agree that only you (the purchaser) will use this butter knife. Furthermore you agree to use this butter knife to only spread butter only over bread, that's been sliced by our patented bread cutter.

I have no idea, how we got to having laws supporting such nonesense. Or how stupit concepts like intellectual property got manifested in law either.
 
I don't think I'd ever even considered the problem with nVidia as a moral issue, just a practical one. Am I the only one wondering if there's any practical way to get Nikolaus/Golden Delicious onto nVidia's approved designer's list?

-Neelix
 
I have forgotten most of what I found when I researched it, but I think that intellectual property laws, at least over here, were a bit more tame at first, and were a little more generally beneficial. Over time people took advantage of things, and the ideas behind the laws were twisted into the strangeness they are now. Yeah, not very specific, and I am probably all wrong. If not, it is another example of a seemingly good idea going terribly wrong. Just like DRM. I want to go kick a lawyer.
[doublepost=1463122137,1463121720][/doublepost]
I don't think I'd ever even considered the problem with nVidia as a moral issue, just a practical one. Am I the only one wondering if there's any practical way to get Nikolaus/Golden Delicious onto nVidia's approved designer's list?

-Neelix
No clue, and it brings up something important I was overlooking. If there is a sensible approval process most of what I have a problem with from them would not be as much of a problem.
 
At this point in time, I think Nvidia would give anyone any number of SOCs they wanted. Their SOC business is in bad shape from the looks of it. Each iteration of their Tegra SOCs has seen fewer and fewer uptake. I know they have threatened to get out of the SOC business before, they must be real close to doing that now.

I think the X1 only made it into the Pixel C, and the Shield TV. ie one third party product. Fortunately for them , it was Google with the Pixel C.

For example, JXD had no trouble getting a Tegra K1 for the S192 gaming tablet. Something I'd be surprised if they sold more than 2000 of. They had the thing on pre-order for a while and only got like 100 - 200 preorder after months from memory. Then the shit happened with it, but that's a different story.

IMO, Everyone is free to talk about SOC updates , heck it would be boring if people couldn't do so. However, I do feel there is a very high chance what ever you talk about now wont even be a consideration by the time a replacement board starts to be mapped out.. That probably will be at least 2-3 years away.
 
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How's AMD these days? Don't they have and develop this kitteh line of chips? Puma, Jaguar, or something.
 
Their ARM plans were pushed back, for now there's only a single server CPU family. It's kinda nonsense to consider them before Zen gets released, no matter whether you want to go x86 or ARM.

It's a shame they even canceled their hybrid CPU plans, I'd love to have a powerful x86+ARM hybrid CPU for my desktop machine in the future.
 
How is Rockchip doing with the GPL? a quick duckduckgoing found a few old references (~2010) to the fact that they were also violating the GPL, but nothing more recent.

One of the reasons the Allwinner violations are widely known is that the sunxi project did a great job at documenting everything related to those chips (not to say of actually writing the code to support them).

I would love to see one day a completely open RISC-V (or OpenRISC) SoC in a pyra mainboard, even if performance was bad (say, comparable to the pandora, maybe with a bit more RAM), but I'm definitely not holding my breath for the availability of those.
 
@God Ginrai I am pretty sure the topic is about the ability to switch to an SoC by a different manufacturer. If you have any doubts, please scroll to the top of the page and read the title.

The topic title specifically asks "able to upgrade not just the speed, but manufacturer of CPU?". This means that the OP was interested in upgrading the CPU, and hopefully being able to choose from other manufacturers when doing so.

ED has said he does not want to use AllWinner. I agree with the his reasons for feeling that way, as I said.

I am not denying that ED's reasons exist, nor do I think that they are not worthy of consideration. But for the next SoC, they hold less weight, since TI isn't there to provide us a chip the next time around.

While my nose is in the air, I also don't think it is right for a company providing only one of the components to demand you use only the people they tell you can to design/engineer the device. Since you don't see the problem with that, what if every company selling a part demanded this. There is a chance that there would be no overlap on the approved lists, and the thing would never be made. Back to the real situation: if everyone gives in, more companies may choose this policy, and it could be seen as "how things are" and result in it being nearly impossible for little projects to get off the ground. I will not financially support a company that I see as potentially causing such damage. I will not recommend such a company, and I will warn others away. There is no side stepping. Then again, there is nothing that needs to be side stepped.

nVidia's choice is not a wrong one. (nor is it necessarily right) They do not want their product associated with a possible failure of a device. And seeing as how the product is the SoC, they are in a much better position to stipulate such selling conditions, seeing as how the SoC is the core of a device.

Also, there is no immediate need for a new SoC manufacturer. Right now we have one. Why do you insist that a new one needs to be picked right now? Let the Pyra get into at least one end users hands before trying to get moving on a CPU board upgrade. Once that has happened other companies may be willing to work with ED.

It takes a long time to develop a new product, even if it is just an upgrade CPU board. Even if EvilDragon is not actively developing the CPU upgrade board yet, he should already be considering his options for sourcing the parts he will need for the next product.

So me not being surprised (and stating it) that you would be fine with the use of an SoC from a GPL violator, something that can still be made right, after you already suggested using one from a company that dictates to their customer what they will do with it, something that can't be made right later, was supposition? And berating you? I still don't see it. You said you were ok with the really bad thing, am I supposed to be :eek: super shocked about the thing that is bad but can be fixed? If you feel as I do about these things you wouldn't want to see them in the Pyra.

I said that I understood why nVidia did what they did, and that EvilDragon should consider the options that are actually available to him rather than dismissing them. I do not particularly want either of those SoCs, and would much prefer one of the SoCs that EvilDragon cannot seem to get. (Samsung's, Qualcomm's, etc.) However, more importantly, I do want an upgrade in the future, and if we dismiss what is available to us because we don't completely agree with the companies, then it is unlikely that upgrade will ever happen.

Sure, I berated you about other things (see the first paragraph in this post). I still don't understand why would you think a background check for firearm purchases is anything like letting a company that makes CPUs tell you who is allowed to design your device. Trust me, if someone wants to shoot up a movie theater or mall or school, a background check isn't going to stop them.

The analogy wasn't about stopping people, but about not doing business with people that are likely to ruin their reputation.

While a handful of people may try to blame the company that made the rifle, most people understand that a person makes the decisions about what they do.

That's a load of bullshit and you know it. There are plenty of beliefs that vast majorities will just latch onto because some influential source told them so. ( i.e. the "video game violence causes real violence" issue )

The thing they used to do it isn't all that important, but this is getting away from the point. No one blames the manufacturer of an SoC for a failed project using it. (There is your comparison, I guess.) When it is a company that has a history of satisfactory products, and the SoC has been used in other successful products, there should be even less concern. Things that cross my mind for why a company would tell you who can make your device (which is no longer all yours, as someone else is now calling the shots) is they get a cut, they are hiding something, and they don't want the business of the little guys (with exceptions that I won't go into because I am tired of talking about this).

Even if they don't consciously blame the manufacturer, (which I'm sure some actually do) it is still connected in their minds subconsciously. Every time I hear MIPS, for example, I think of the PSP.

Thanks for putting words in my mouth. Since I hadn't even considered that your argument was coming from a desire for a more powerful processor/device, thanks for putting thoughts in my head, too. I thought you wanted as many SoC manufacturers to be considered as possible. This works best when you can assess the situation based on all available information, which we don't yet have. Perhaps you do feel as I do about projects like the Pyra. If so, how about we work toward a better option instead of accepting something we feel is unethical?

Well, seeing as how your view of me was someone who only thought of the Pyra as "merely a little gaming handheld", how was I supposed to think you thought of my reasons for considering nVidia and AllWinner but as wanting more power?

I do focus on the gaming aspect of these devices, but I do not deny what they can achieve from a computing aspect. I have never been against working towards a better option. I'd even support a FOSS option. But as I said before: How about you suggest some? AFAIK, these options either 1) Do not exist or 2) are not available to ED due to either MOQ or companies not wanting to sell to him. (with the exception of the x86 processors that Grench pushed strongly for)

-God Ginrai
 
I said that I understood why nVidia did what they did, and that EvilDragon should consider the options that are actually available to him rather than dismissing them.

As much as I'd rather stay out of your rather intense discussion with rygD I cannot let this one slip. Considering is different from accepting. ED obviously considered Allwinner and came to the conclusion of not wanting to use their chips.
 
As much as I'd rather stay out of your rather intense discussion with rygD I cannot let this one slip. Considering is different from accepting. ED obviously considered Allwinner and came to the conclusion of not wanting to use their chips.

I realize that. I am not suggesting he didn't. I'm talking about considering options for the CPU upgrade board. He doesn't have another TI chip to consider this time around. This leaves him with Allwinner, nVidia, Rockchip, and maybe Intel (if he can get some Atom SoCs before they are discontinued, I guess) as the only options I am aware of that he has access to. If he dismisses nVidia and Allwinner outright, that only leaves 1 or 2 possible chips to consider, which both have their own problems. (Intel is discontinuing Atom processors, and Rockchip has no Linux support)

-God Ginrai
 
I realize that. I am not suggesting he didn't. I'm talking about considering options for the CPU upgrade board. He doesn't have another TI chip to consider this time around. This leaves him with Allwinner, nVidia, Rockchip, and maybe Intel (if he can get some Atom SoCs before they are discontinued, I guess) as the only options I am aware of that he has access to. If he dismisses nVidia and Allwinner outright, that only leaves 1 or 2 possible chips to consider, which both have their own problems. (Intel is discontinuing Atom processors, and Rockchip has no Linux support)

-God Ginrai

But those are far from the only ARM SoC manufacturers out there. Among others, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, NXP, ST Micro, etc. may be worthy competitors down the line. We simply do not know because the future has yet to happen.
 
I have forgotten most of what I found when I researched it, but I think that intellectual property laws, at least over here, were a bit more tame at first, and were a little more generally beneficial. Over time people took advantage of things, and the ideas behind the laws were twisted into the strangeness they are now. Yeah, not very specific, and I am probably all wrong. If not, it is another example of a seemingly good idea going terribly wrong. Just like DRM. I want to go kick a lawyer.
IP started with copyright. Now I believe that the roots of copyright start with the church fearing their scribes would be put out of work, but eventually it became a universal right that allows you to license things. If you could not exert copyright, everything would be public domain. Even licensing something as GPL applies certain restrictions on the end user, albeit ones designed to avoid restricting other users. After that point it starts to get more questionable, from digital copy protection algorithms, to software patents and full-blown DRM, but even so we're better having the concept of intellectual property than not IMO.
 
@levi If I may. Why? What is it good for other than artificial scarcity - or earning money for practically doing nothing?
 
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