The link makes it seem like crap hardware, and sure 4gb of ram is really crappy. But how does this compare with one of my kid’s Fire tablets? Does anyone have opinions on that?
If your kids software is available in Ubuntu maybe? At a glance I’d wonder how power efficient it would be (my $100 Walmart tablet lasts all week with light usage, I doubt this could compare), and would have to wonder as well on gpu performance. It’s likely not optimized yet so idk I’d trust 800 mhz as enough.
I think the article sums it up best:
RISC-V computing is a promising field but best ploughed by developers, early adopters, and tech enthusiasts at present. RISC-V chip performance is improving, but it’s not “there” for mainstream adoption — yet.
It’d be a ton of fun to tinker with and if you have the money to risk I’d say go for it! But I wouldn’t buy this for a kid unless I had the extra $150 to potentially get them a normal android tablet if this didn’t work as well as hoped.
my $100 Walmart tablet lasts all week with light usage, I doubt this could compare
probably not in a first release, but Android is convulted piece of shit compared to linux desktop environments. Not to mention Google’s and/or OEMs built-in system apps running 24/7 guzzling all your data in the background.
In time, I guess it would beat out in performance and efficiency but lose in the availability of applications, same as desktop linux.
This is really meant to serve as a development platform though, so the price and capabilities probably matter less, and the default settings and such are probably not as tuned as they could be to offer the best performance or battery life.
I don’t even think power management tools in stock Linux take RISCV into account yet lol
