RISC-V laptop announced, comes with NFT

[williamcll]

A company has announced that they will be selling the first RISC-V based laptop. Interestingly for the purpose for crypto and metaverse investments.

Quotes

Quote

The company said in a press release that the hotly anticipated ROMA development platform features an unannounced quad-core RISC-V processor with a companion NPU/GPU for the fastest, seamless RISC-V native software development available. “Native RISC-V compile is a major milestone,” said Mark Himelstein, Chief Technology Officer for RISC-V International. “The ROMA platform will benefit developers who want to test their software running natively on RISC-V. And it should be easy to transfer code developed on this platform to embedded systems.”

“With built-in PoS, NFT, and MetaMask-style wallet, ROMA is born for the Metaverse,” said Yuning Liang, Founder and CEO of Xcalibyte and DeepComputing. “This is the laptop of the future. We will spare no effort to provide the best RISC-V native development experience for developers.” The first 100 customers to pre-order ROMA will receive a unique NFT to mark the birth of the world’s first native RISC-V development platform laptop. And you can have your ROMA personally engraved with your name or company name.

 

My thoughts

Would I really be using a RISC-V laptop just for cryptos? It seems a bit too suspicious considering how cryptos are supposedly banned in the mainland.

 

Sources

https://riscv.org/blog/2022/07/deepcomputing-and-xcalibyte-open-pre-orders-for-first-native-risc-v-development-laptop-quantities-limited-xcalibyte-and-deep-computing/

[svmlegacy]

Is there any word on if the laptop itself (and by extension it's firmware) is open-sourced?

[Mayday793]

This looks really cool and im glad theyre doing it. But this is just like the the surface pro X. it's an interesting product but it is not gonna go anywhere without developer software support. The only reason Apple was able to do something similar was because of their great software team. Though if nobody even makes a risc device, then it can never make it off the ground so i see the necessity . I still think its a decade till we have risc laptops that anybody would actually suggest to their family.

[captain_to_fire]

Inb4 Apple announces their next transition from the ARM ISA to RISC-V...in 10-15 years

[Eigenvektor]

Quote

With built-in PoS, NFT, and MetaMask-style wallet, ROMA is born for the Metaverse

Sounds like someone is desperate to ride that hype train for an otherwise sub-par product

[Arika S]

43 minutes ago, williamcll said:

pre-order ROMA will receive a unique NFT

uuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh~

[Blademaster91]

A RISC-V laptop would be interesting, too bad they're selling it for stupid NFT's and crypto.

[DuckDodgers]

1 hour ago, captain_to_fire said:

Inb4 Apple announces their next transition from the ARM ISA to RISC-V...in 10-15 years

More like jump to their own (proprietary) ISA architecture -- the final migration.

But seriously, in a world of tightly integrated SoC designs, with a dozen of standardized domain specific IPs while the CPU cores are just a small part of the total package, the importance of a particular ISA will become less critical, simply because most of the work will be carried and accelerated outside of the CPU logic.

[Quackers101]

take your RISC at some NFT before going full V

[mr moose]

The NFT is a picture of the laptop you just bought and works as indisputable proof you own not only the laptop you just bought but also the picture of it.   

[porina]

The lack of info on their site is concerning. Feels more like they're selling hype than a physical product. At the least I'd expect detailed specs and a price. IMO given how early RISC-V is in its life, the logical buyer would be developers for the platform, and maybe some rich tech curious. General uses come later.

[hishnash]

2 hours ago, DuckDodgers said:

More like jump to their own (proprietary) ISA architecture -- the final migration.

 

No while apple like to make people (for some reason) think everything they do is proprietary the vast majority of apples core platforms is built on open source (wither from others or contributed to open source by apple). The kernel used by all of apples operating systems is open source, the compiler that apple have put massive amount of effort into is open source. Chrome and chromium would not exist if it was not for webkit (open source). In general the only parts of what apple does that is 100% closed source is UI frameworks everything else they do is open in some way or other and has been like this for years.  

Apple would not see any point in moving to a closed source ISA in fact if apple desired non of the current standard ISAs were fit for purpose if they made a new ISA they would likely open source it as its main implementation would be within LLVM (that is open source) and the people who would be leading the ISA development would be the same team that has been leading the open source LLVM development for the last 20+ years. 

Of course like RISC-V an open-source ISA really does not mean much, in fact after the recent court ruling with  between Google and Oracle with respect to google impmenateing the public interface of Java being legal. There really is no such thing as a closed source ISA given and ISA is just a public specification of what a cpu does when sent given instructions anyone can now implement that.
 

[cmndr]

17 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Inb4 Apple announces their next transition from the ARM ISA to RISC-V...in 10-15 years

VERY unlikely. Lots of friction and the only way I see it happening is if ARM licensing gets MUCH more restrictive.
At this point ISA doesn't matter that much and the only reason Apple migrated was to get away from Intel and to take it in house.

[Forbidden Wafer]

I can already feel the slowdown in x86->arm->RISC-V emulation

[Mel0n.]

Interesting. Too bad it's crypto oriented. Good to see more RISC/ARM stuff on the market though, I'll likely buy one of these non x86 machines as my next laptop since I don't do serious work on laptops.

[BachChain]

It's like they started by putting every tech buzz word they could think of onto a marketing slide and then designed the product around that.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Quad core Risc-V processor with GPU/NPU accelerator = amazing!
NFT metaverse PoS blockchain jumbo mambo = ???????????????????????????????????????????????????

The marketing material suggests to me one of two things:

1. The product is really weak and uncompetitive
2. The product will never ship and is in fact a fraud

[Kisai]

On 7/5/2022 at 10:01 PM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Quad core Risc-V processor with GPU/NPU accelerator = amazing!
NFT metaverse PoS blockchain jumbo mambo = ???????????????????????????????????????????????????

The marketing material suggests to me one of two things:

1. The product is really weak and uncompetitive
2. The product will never ship and is in fact a fraud

More than likely both.

 

If it's one thing that has been consistent about crypto fanboys, it's that the products eventually lose so much value that there's a kind of reverse FOMO. People who bought in last, are now left carrying the worthless bag.

 

Here's the thing, If this is a real product, what is it running?

Quote

• Supports most Linux variant operating systems

So, what "Linux variant" comes on a bootable RISC-V image that supports the "NPU/GPU" of this device?

 

As it is, only the first 100 people to buy it get the NFT. Not that I think that was ever an incentive in the first place.

[porina]

Pricing $3k-5k depending on orders. Give it a few years and maybe others will be affordable as a plaything.

 

[Ultraforce]

On 7/5/2022 at 8:49 PM, Forbidden Wafer said:

I can already feel the slowdown in x86->arm->RISC-V emulation

why would you emulat ARM->RISC-V instead of just x86->RISC-V. If you aren't apple you don't have a good x86 emulator to begin with.

[Arika S]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Pricing $3k-5k depending on orders

How much of that is the Laptop, and how much of it is bloat by the bullshit NFT?

[Forbidden Wafer]

13 hours ago, Ultraforce said:

why would you emulat ARM->RISC-V instead of just x86->RISC-V. If you aren't apple you don't have a good x86 emulator to begin with.

Because that is how things work. Just look at people going OpenCL on Vulkan on Metal, because Apple is retarded not to support Vulkan and deprecated OpenGL (not sure if they removed it already).

[Ultraforce]

1 hour ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Because that is how things work. Just look at people going OpenCL on Vulkan on Metal, because Apple is retarded not to support Vulkan and deprecated OpenGL (not sure if they removed it already).

For Apple if they were to switch to RISC-V I imagine they just wouldn't have x86 support since after MacOS 10.7 Apple stopped supporting the PowerPC to x86 emulation software.

[Vishera]

On 7/5/2022 at 8:05 AM, williamcll said:

With built-in PoS, NFT, and MetaMask-style wallet, ROMA is born for the Metaverse

Most of those marketing points are pretty bad - NFTs are dead,Crypto just crashed hard.

Enjoy your $200K Bored Ape receipt to JPEGs that anyone can download from the internet.

[Vishera]

17 hours ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Because that is how things work. Just look at people going OpenCL on Vulkan on Metal, because Apple is retarded not to support Vulkan and deprecated OpenGL (not sure if they removed it already).

Just like the 40 pin and lightning ports Apple wants 100% control - They are control freaks.

You can also say that the M1 is part of their control freak disorder.