@p
Well, in this case it's rather a good thing — means that it would ship in more or less working condition, more people would get it and there would be a community.
Canonical was behind Toshiba AC100 and it still kinda works — unlike a lot of early ARM machines. With only 512 megabytes of RAM it has very limited use nowadays, but it's still community-supported — I've build Void for it and was able to boot newer Linux kernels with no issues.

@m0xee That's true, but I like the concept of SOMs and the modular builds that are arriving from small manufacturers or getting DIY'd into existence. I think there's a good chance that's where things are going, and that'd be cool.

@p
Agreed, that would be way cooler! But I don't see harm in this coming out either: with niche hardware, availability in different regions might be spotty. This looks like something that could become available even in Russia. And it's not like there are plenty on RISC-V laptops already, it won't spread the community thin, so why not? 🤷

@m0xee

> I don't see harm in this coming out either:

Oh, no, very cool.

> it's not like there are plenty on RISC-V laptops already

You might be surprised: there's a Milky-V that's pin-compatible with the RPi CM-4, so a lot of the places you could plug a CM-4 work. Like this guy got it to work in a Turing Pi 2 (FSE's currently living on a TPi2): https://feldspaten.org/2023/10/27/RISC-V-in-a-Turing-Pi-2/ . There are Pi laptop kits that are basically a CM-4 carrier board with battery/keyboard/screen/battery, right, and I imagine that you could get a MilkyV to run in a lot of them.

> it won't spread the community thin

Oh, I'm not really worried about that kind of thing.

@p @m0xee The cpu looks good. better than arm ones with no support

@dcc @p
TBH if they make it have performance parity with 10 y.o. Intel laptop — I would be perfectly fine with it. It even looks nearly identical to the old HP ProBook I use now — when I'm not using something even older that is 😂
Looks like there would be lots of ARM-based laptops coming with this Snapdragon X SoC, for example: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-on-ARM-is-coming.tuxedo
Plenty of competition in the alternative architecture department 👍

@iska
Yeah, it's the same company, but this one's more decently specced and it supposed to be cheaper despite that 🤭
I couldn't find any hands-on reviews of the old model, so maybe it didn't make it into mass production and they decided to just "upgrade" it this way. Going into mass production would also explain the price drop.
And yes, sure, Reform is cool, but I'd prefer RISC-V over ARM if they are otherwise more or less the same.
@p

@m0xee@social.librem.one @p@fsebugoutzone.org I thought reform had a risc-v module ngl

I was about to mention loongson for being mips and decently fast, but dug a little deeper ​:darkness:​

RISC isn't real anyway, that laptop's cpu has 500 instructions

@iska
I don't know, maybe it's possible to have a RISC-V CPU module for reform as the design is originally modular, although it might require extra work, but all currently available offerings, both for original Reform, and for newer Pocket Reform, are ARM-based:
https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform
https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/pocket-reform
Which isn't bad, like I said, RISC-V is more a personal preference in this case.
@p

@iska
And sure, ARM, which is originally de-abbreviated as Advanced RISC Machine doesn't use limited number of instructions either, I suppose, that would make instruction set extensions impossible.
Modern RISC approach is about having to use a particular set of registers for operations, not having different flavours of the same one for different operands like Intel does, but not about having fewer instructions in principle 🤷
@p

@m0xee @iska Acorn RISC Machines.

@iska @m0xee

> wasn't there already another chinese risc-v laptop a year or two ago?

If you count the DevTerm R-01, then there was one even farther back.

> ...I'd rather keep my thinkpad (or buy the /mnt laptop from mr colgate)

There are a few cool bits but the MNT is not my kind