SiFive + Rockchip
Open instruction sets and inexpensive heterogeneous compute reopen old architectural questions.
Historical context
SiFive develops RISC-V processor IP across embedded, edge, consumer, and data-center markets. Rockchip designs SoCs and AI-oriented processors spanning ARM and, in newer products, multi-core RISC-V plus NPUs.
Founder lens
My interest is not brand collecting. It is architectural optionality. When compute becomes modular, inexpensive, power-aware, and heterogeneous, software should be able to decide what deserves a large accelerator and what can stay local and cheap.
What carries into XERXES
Documentary artifact
Small compute, visible constraints
A Raspberry Pi 3: a useful reminder that architecture has memory, thermal, power, and cost consequences.
Keep exploring // human pathways
Continue through adjacent ideas, products, principles, and historical lineages. These pathways preserve the relationships in the underlying knowledge graph while keeping exploration natural for a human reader.
A broad, source-linked systems lineage behind XERXES SI: operating systems, networks, telephone infrastructure, hacker culture, radio, optics, acoustics, biology, security methodology, hardware, workstations, and the physical culture of technical discovery.
CONTINUE →lineage2600 community2600 and earlier phone-phreaking stories sit inside a broader hacker lineage: curiosity about systems, telecommunications literacy, public discussion, community, and the ethical question of what responsible exploration should become.
CONTINUE →lineageAcoustics + sound systemsAcoustics is cross-domain systems engineering: pressure waves become measurements, electrical signals, digital representations, room behavior, interfaces, speech, music, alerts, and subjective experience.
CONTINUE →
lineageBeOSBeOS is preserved as an alternative-systems case study: a multimedia-oriented, multiprocessing desktop that made responsiveness and coherence visible when the personal-computing mainstream was taking other paths.
CONTINUE →