I’m still liking the Atari VCS as a Haiku computer. It’s small, looks neat, and doubles as a game console.
The downsides are:
- No audio (it only has audio over HDMI)
- No Wi-Fi drivers (but Ethernet works fine)
- Not available officially outside the US
Just got a refurbished Thinkpad T480s with Core i7 8th gen 8 cores, 24GB RAM and 256GB NVME disk.
The external HDMI works like a charm, just turn the laptop on with the external monitor connected and close the lid and voilà!
@octoplex if there is a machine I recommend it’s just a Thinkpad with similar specs
Actually if you think about it, this is a perfect opportunity for an hardware enthusiast to design a HaikuBox using RISC-V for instance. All designed from ground up, using compatible hardware. Like the newly spawned new 8 bit projects.
RISC-V CPU design is commonplace and even open-source on GitHub. The tricky part is the GPU, considering all the patents still in effect and that there are few GPU drivers for Haiku yet.
But we don’t need a GPU. If your chip has a simple framebuffer video output that can do VGA or HDMI, that’s all we need.
We are used to the GPU and framebuffer being tightly coupled together on x86 hardware, but for example on ARM this usually isn’t the case: instead the framebuffer reads from RAM, and the GPU renders to that same RAM (or some other place if you want to use it for offscreen things).
However, designing an 8 bit computer is quite simple: only one voltage (5 or 3.3V), can probably put it all on a 2 layers board, at most a few MHz clock. Designing a gigahertz-range machine is another level. The reasonable thing to do would be to pick a system on module (something like this: https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/RV/RV.html) and build a motherboard around it. However, unfortunately these modules all have different pinouts, and there isn’t yet a standard. So once the module becomes unavailable, there is no uhgrade path but redesigning the motherboard for another module…
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You don’t need a GPU to boot the OS, but normal users generally want to do multimedia on their computers, which requires accelerated 3D for a good experience.
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I agree with @x68k about having an integrated GPU. If it can’t compete with a RasPi’s GPU, it can’t compete period. Embedded ARM SoC machines all have some sort of polygon acceleration and most of them support semi-modern shader models as well. My PineBook Pro laptop that I bought for $200 complete is capable of Vulkan 1.0 for a minimal performance level for a modern 64-bit ARM SoC. The Intel iSeries CPUs all have a graphics core but mainly as a diagnostic tool to make sure the real GPU is working right or not. Most laptops that use the integrated framebuffer have some sort of external chip to accelerate the graphics plotting as a supplement.
Given that this is about a high-end dream Haiku “BeBox”, using only a framebuffer sounds borderline off-topic for the conversation altogether.
As one of the persons who write drivers, my dream is a machine with hardware I can write support for in a day or two, and not spend 5-10 years slowly figuring out the details, eventually giving up on parts of the hardware, and starting over with the next machine I get. Then I could spend my time on more fun things!
We just don’t all have the same dreams
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Who says your dream machine has to be a high end super fast computer… 
(I prefer to use small old boxes, & Haiku is as good at making them fly as Linux or BSD. 
)
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I’m looking forward to the ARM and RISC-V ports of Haiku.
At University, we actually had BeBox hardware, which a teacher tried to tell me was “Specialist AV Equipment” until I dropped a lot of BeOS knowledge on them (Avid fan since before Be Inc went bust).
I’m a Linux head, and prior to that had used Windows, DOS and Mac. Be was such a nice system; but often it struggled with real hardware. For now the ARM and RISCV side-lines a lot of “It won’t run on my GPU” as a lot of the hardware doesn’t have X86-level GPU support anyway.
I Would love to see more work on the GPU side, but it’s a specialist area and there isn’t enough funding and bodies to get Haiku or Be back in the day up to compete with the others. That is a shame.
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I hear about plans to publish documentation and drivers source code for GPU used in VisionFive 2. Depending on materials quality and hardware complexity, it may be good target to implement hardware graphics acceleration for Haiku.
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As long as we can both dream, let’s look forward to a standardized instruction set implementation of Vulkan in the same way that the old Voodoo drivers all just used “Glide” drivers from one generation to the next with minor changes.
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My dream: Risc v CPU with FPGA to handle io & display.
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