SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The goal of the EOMA (Embedded Open Modular Architecture) project is to introduce the idea of being ethically responsible about both the ecological and the financial resources required to design, manufacture, acquire and maintain our personal computing devices. The EOMA68 standard is a freely-accessible, royalty-free, unencumbered hardware standard formulated and tested over the last five years around the ultra-simple philosophy of "just plug it in: it will work".
With devices built following this standard, one can upgrade the CPU-card (consisting of CPU, RAM and some local storage) of a device while keeping the same housing (e.g. laptop). One can also use the CPU-card in different devices (e.g. unplug CPU-card from laptop, plug into desktop); or use a replaced/discarded CPU-card from a laptop for NAS storage or a micro-server. There are housings currently available for a laptop (can be 3D-printed in full, or in part to replace parts that break) and a micro-desktop; and there are plans for others like routers or tablets in the future.
There are multiple articles talking about this project and analyzing the hardware, for example from ThinkPenguin, CNXSoft or EngadgetNG. There is also a recent live-streamed video introducing the project.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:57PM
Since lkcl cannot respond to this, I will do my best. If I left anything out, it's because it's outside of my knowledge zone.
I stopped paying attention to the Raspberry Pi after the first one, but if the third one is like the first one, you need that proprietary GPU driver to even boot the thing, making it no better than literally any x86 computer in the market in that regard. (The only thing it's better at is in not having a known backdoor.)
All modern x86 processors (since 2010 for Intel, or since 2013 for AMD) mandate proprietary programs which can act as very powerful backdoors. More info here:
https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme [libreboot.org]
https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp [libreboot.org]
Additionally, computers like the A20 computer card are much more energy-efficient than any x86 computer.
You can use Regal:
https://github.com/p3/regal [github.com]
There may be other compatibility layers available. I would also like to point out that the OpenPandora community has been able to adapt several OpenGL applications to work with OpenGL ES just fine; this is not hypothetical.
Furthermore:
I have personally used a much weaker processor without any hardware acceleration at all, on the OpenPandora. That wasn't even a problem for me. The problem for me on the Pandora, no matter how I used it, has always been its low RAM. I even had people tell me that I couldn't possibly have a decent experience running Tiled with a software implementation of OpenGL, and in reality I had no problems with it at all.
The Libre Tea is not unaccelerated. It is only specifically 3-D that is unaccelerated. 2-D acceleration works, so it's mostly 3-D games, heavy desktops like KDE, and applications that work with 3-D objects (e.g. Blender) which are affected.
It's not about the one processor anyway, though. If this project is successful, upgrades can be made available, at a really cheap price. That's the whole point.
How does a microSD card not "cut it"? A microSD card today can be as much as 256 GB, depending on what you're willing to spend, and with access times which are easily fast enough. The only problem with microSD is that it's flash memory and has all the problems flash memory has (most importantly, it's destined to become useless eventually depending on how often you write to it), but NAND is flash memory, too.
Again, a Raspberry Pi is not an option: you need to run a proprietary program just to boot it. But specifically regarding SATA, lkcl has already explained that SATA was excluded from the standard because requiring SATA would severely limit options for SoCs to use.