extra_specticles t1_j8d3151 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 12:28 PM

Reply to comment by InevitableAd5222 in Open-Source, RISC-V Laptop Will Be Easy to Make and Upgrade by Avieshek

Yes, the market is POTENTIALLY huge - but without major h/w & OS vendor support it's not going to be massive. The open desktop market has only existed in part due to the fact that (A) the h/w was always open right back to the original IBM PC, and (B) OS/software support for a large number so hardware components. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see it, but I've been in the tech industry for over 40 years and I'm not going to hold my breath.

PI Demand - even then the pi was available (and it's coming back online for Q3 this year) the number of laptops with it? You might think the appeal of such hardware configurations is high, but without mainstream OEM hardware vendors (DELL, LENOVO etc) they will not succeed in the consumer and business markets. What will make it happen is if Windows introduces a version for it. This of course is a possibility - however, Microsoft will need to come up with something like Apple's Rosetta for ARM to enable x86 apps to run. Again this is not something that they can't do - but they've certainly not been able to do it for their ARM Windows yet.

InevitableAd5222 t1_j8dbps6 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 1:50 PM

Ten years after the first Raspberry Pi was shipped in 2012, more than 40 million of the devices have been sold worldwide, creating a market worth in excess of $1 billion, plus more in peripherals

-https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/raspberrypi

extra_specticles t1_j8esig7 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 7:55 PM

The original post is not about SBC it's about modular laptops. No one is saying riscv SBC would not be a big market. The whole thread was about laptops and their marketplace.

[deleted] t1_j8d6zmb wrote on February 13, 2023 at 1:08 PM

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Gschu54 t1_j8drh6h wrote on February 13, 2023 at 3:47 PM

Rpi's and the rest of the single board computers are basically cell phones. They are not really close to being laptops.

Hell I have sbcs with literal cell phone processors and the os that's packaged for it is an AOSP variant, not a native Linux variant.

InevitableAd5222 t1_j8d9ry1 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 1:34 PM

I agree with 90% of that, at least about how applicable to broader market it will be. But look at Arch and Slackware. Tech like RISC-V can exist SOLELY from communities and still end up becoming worth a lot of money. Like RedHat lots of money. Also about Pi: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/raspberrypi (that is a MASSIVE market to any startup founder) Saying that 1 billion usd is failure in consumer market is just not true.

Also asking how many laptops with Pi is not the right question, people wanted it as its own little SOC motherboard not in a laptop. Putting the single board in a laptop kinda defeats the whole tinkering purpose and how would they expose GPIO pins? A laptop for the pi is just a case with a keyboard and built-in monitor, most people in this niche would rather just keep the easier physical access and use external monitor + SSH.