[Hardware] A portable console without Intel, AMD or ARM is the same as without games?

[FNX Magokiler]

Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, Ayaneo... at this point, no one has any doubt that portable consoles are in the sights of hardware manufacturers, but until now they all have a common denominator: they are based on x86-64 architecture and mostly use Intel or AMD processors, with some cases using ARM. For this reason, today's news is quite strange, since the manufacturer Sipeed has announced its Pichee Pocket A4 portable console that is equipped with a general-purpose RISC-V processor and uses Linux as its operating system.

So much so that the manufacturer itself defines its console as a "RISC-V retro gaming platform with Debian + Android", so you can already imagine what this means: it is not a portable console on which we will be able to play games. the latest games on the market for the simple fact that they will not be compatible, but be careful, because this does not mean that it is a console without games, far from it.

The first RISC-V portable console with Linux arrives
RISC-V is an architecture that, despite having a quite promising future and which we have already talked about at length, does not have much use today beyond micro controllers. For this reason, the fact that the Sipeed Lichee Pocket 4A uses a T-Head TH1520 RISC-V processor is interesting news, especially given the fact that its full specifications are not even known: we know that it has four RISC-V Xuantie C910 cores at 2.5 GHz and that its GPU is an Imagination, but that's as far as we go.

 

 

And we only have to go back to the summer of this year to see the Sipeed Lichee Module 4A on which this portable console is based (a system designed for laptops, by the way). In that case, its integrated graphics card was a Fill 3468M and was offered in configurations with 8 or 16 GB of RAM and between 8 and 128 GB of internal storage, but the curious thing is that it also integrated a 4 TOPS AI coprocessor.

As we said, the RISC-V SoC of this portable console was designed for laptops, so it should be moderately powerful, at least to run retro games as the manufacturer says. The Lichee Pocket 4A has a 7-inch LCD touch screen with 1280 x 720 resolution, it will come with configurations of 8 or 16 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and between 32 and 128 GB of eMMC storage, in addition to of course WiFi, Bluetooth and USB connectivity , all with a weight of only 490 grams, much lighter than the Steam Deck for example. Now, given its hardware, it is possible that it does not have an advanced cooling system or a large battery and that is why it weighs so little.

What games can a Linux/Android console have?
As we mentioned before, the fact that this portable console does not have an x86-64 processor means that it is not compatible with normal PC games. The manufacturer has said that it will use both Linux (Debian in this case) and Android (they have not specified the version), and that limits it to games based on emulators and mobile games.

 

https://hardzone.es/noticias/equipos/consola-portatil-riscv-juegos-linux/