Back in the update prior to this most recent one, the team mentioned how it had a bunch of components slated for it that just blew up in price -- especially the TPS56637RPAR switching voltage regulator, which jumped from 3 euros per to 344 euros per -- leading to a 2,064 euro cost for a single board with just the regulators alone. Well, they've cut the expensive parts out wherever they can and are now working on getting this new, cheaper motherboard printed so they can finally actually test the thing in the coming weeks, if all goes well.
Also, owing to the end of GDDR5 production, the production Powerboard Tyche laptops will use GDDR6 memory for their graphics, which may or may not be a nice boost at all.
Personally, I can't wait. The project began in 2014, and just now finally is about to have a tangible, physical object associated with it.
For those unaware, the Powerboard Tyche is a laptop being produced as a joint venture between Acube (the people behind the Sam4x0 line and Minimig), the Power Progress Community (an Italian nonprofit whose goal is to promote open-source hardware), and Slimbook, who provides the case from their old Eclipse laptop that they don't sell anymore.
It uses an NXP Semi QorIQ T2080 for a processor, with four e6500 cores running at 1.8GHz. It's Power ISA 2.07 compatible, which isn't great -- about on par with POWER8, and the T2080 in particular can only really be run in big endian only, but for those of us who still hold on to big endian, this could be interesting, and it's about the only viable option at the present moment until RED Semiconductor brings out the libre-SOC... uh, SOC. Since they've stated they're going to be using GDDR6 MXM3 cards, that pretty much means they'd have to have figured out a way to get amdgpu running on a big-endian system, since I somehow don't imagine they've got a Radeon HD 6950M with GDDR6.
Personally, I really don't like the Eclipse case, but it was their best option considering we're in a bit of an ultrabook craze at the moment. Hopefully for their next revision, they can pack it into a 15" 3:2 laptop or even the Framework chassis.
Git repository is here if you want to check it out.
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