Dig Deeper Community Forum

What are you using?
Which do you prefer and why?

maybe you are chinese and use Zhaoxin
or work for Putin and use Elbrus

or have built you own in your basement.

I'm using both Intel and AMD because I'm from one of the second world countries and CIA isn't my main threat. Though after my government banned some western hardware I started to think about making my own one. I have a couple of ways in mind but probably there is a simpler option. I remember someone here noticed that carbon microphone may be used as transistor. However, it's not the same transistor which is used in CPU but rather the transistor-based amplifier. If you have any option for fabricating a transistor in your basement, please, tell me.

If you also have migration to alternative CPUs in mind, DDG for greenarrays chips. May be partitially useful.

*if you know any option

I use Intel, with the ME disabled. Full coreboot or libreboot where possible, but most boards (especially modern ones) are not supported.
Even with newer stuff you can disable the ME, there are several me_cleaner forks that allow doing this:
https://github.com/MangoKiwiPlumGrape/m ... r_thinkpad


There's some decent companies out there, like System76 and NovaCustom.

The Raptor Computing Talos II would of course be awesome, but even the Blackbird is insanely expensive.
And the whole OpenPOWER thing hasn't seemed to have progressed past POWER9.

If you like PPC news here's a couple of news sites that are cool:
https://www.talospace.com
https://vivapowerpc.eu


A bunch of random links regarding alternative hardware:

hardware:
http://apollo-core.com (Vampire II)
https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform/
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ (might be a project worth supporting?)
https://www.marvell.com/products/infras ... n71xx.html https://www.asacomputers.com/Marvell-Th ... C-TX2.html
https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook/ https://www.exoticsilicon.com/crystal/pinephone_openbsd
https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html
https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX ... E064C08CH/
Honeycomb LX2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

https://www.tpart.net/about-x210ai/

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
https://meshtastic.org/


https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/fs-fp5 (x86)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... ork-laptop

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book (ereader)
https://web.archive.org/web/20201230154 ... index.html (talks about some other hardware)
https://gitlab.com/norris.daniel/chonky-palmtop

https://en.jingos.com/jingpad-a1/

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
http://sunnytechus.com/index.htm
https://hackaday.com/2019/02/11/buildin ... -v-desktop
https://liliputing.com/2020/09/sifive-p ... chips.html

http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/index.html (haiku audio command center 5)
https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Conexant_CX2388x (TV tuner)

microwatt
libreSOC

The main alternatives usually go like:
x86_64/x86: Intel, AMD, VIA
ARM: various, full machines by System76 and others
POWER/PPC: IBM and OpenPOWER, machines by Raptor Computing unless you use pre-2005 Apple hardware, or the dubious Amiga route
RISC-V: still being developed, SiFive, the DC-ROMA and others
SPARC: Fujitsu and Oracle, only available to enterprise requisitions it seems unless you go for really old stuff. There's also OpenSPARC. Seemingly dying.
???: A total homebrew CPU wire rats nest, or that Russian Elbrus thing that was mentioned, probably some other obscure things somewhere

molly wrote: Fri Aug 28, 2026 1:57 pm What are you using?
Which do you prefer and why?

maybe you are chinese and use Zhaoxin
or work for Putin and use Elbrus

or have built you own in your basement.

Hi fed, since you are so eager to know what people use here, i will tell you mine, it's a ga b75m d3h with coreboot with some random i3-3whatever, i choose ivy bridge because it was the cheapest option here, and coreboot has no support for 1st gen boards because of unknown reasons

mia2ndpassword wrote: Sun Sep 06, 2026 8:49 am

molly wrote: Fri Aug 28, 2026 1:57 pm What are you using?
Which do you prefer and why?

maybe you are chinese and use Zhaoxin
or work for Putin and use Elbrus

or have built you own in your basement.

Hi fed, since you are so eager to know what people use here, i will tell you mine, it's a ga b75m d3h with coreboot with some random i3-3whatever, i choose ivy bridge because it was the cheapest option here, and coreboot has no support for 1st gen boards because of unknown reasons

Hi looser, I could not care less what you have or don't have but I can guarantee you don't have a life.

intel is just what i've always come across, for some reason i've barely seen any amd around where i purchase electronics. i think i saw an apple powerpc laptop before an amd thing, must be the market share or something

do you live in a non-western country? amd products are very popular in america and europe

qualia wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 9:32 am do you live in a non-western country? amd products are very popular in america and europe

i see that they're pretty popular now, but since i don't require modern specs (or much of anything for desktops) they've always evaded me. so when i go out to flea markets for decade old tech, it's almost always intel, for good reason i suppose since they had pretty good cpus back then (from core 2 duo). all of the shilled notebook brands on meme sites also used intel

malformed_jill wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 11:08 am i see that they're pretty popular now, but since i don't require modern specs (or much of anything for desktops) they've always evaded me. so when i go out to flea markets for decade old tech, it's almost always intel, for good reason i suppose since they had pretty good cpus back then (from core 2 duo). all of the shilled notebook brands on meme sites also used intel

Yes AMD have come a long way and lots of newer machines have them, they are usually cheaper than intel. My last 2 laptops have AMD and I must say they are good, I prefer them to intel.
I would say 99% of older machines will be intel so not surprising you haven't seen many, back then you had a choice of intel or intel.

molly wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 12:53 pm I would say 99% of older machines will be intel so not surprising you haven't seen many, back then you had a choice of intel or intel.

actually, since posting this, i looked and searched up some stuff about amd cpus, and came across vogons (forum for retro software and hardware) again. it seems before core 2 duo, AMD and intel were actually pretty competitive, in the desktop department, since that's where the market was focused. also, in capitalist fashion, intel paid off manufacturers to block AMD's market access. there were some manufacturers that did amd laptops but those were mostly consumer ones that i subconsciously blacklisted
i also saw that before x86 licensing, there were a lot of clone competitors before it was just AMD vs Intel. the story of x86 actually seems pretty interesting to look into

malformed_jill wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 1:21 pm actually, since posting this, i looked and searched up some stuff about amd cpus, and came across vogons (forum for retro software and hardware) again. it seems before core 2 duo, AMD and intel were actually pretty competitive, in the desktop department, since that's where the market was focused. also, in capitalist fashion, intel paid off manufacturers to block AMD's market access. there were some manufacturers that did amd laptops but those were mostly consumer ones that i subconsciously blacklisted
i also saw that before x86 licensing, there were a lot of clone competitors before it was just AMD vs Intel. the story of x86 actually seems pretty interesting to look into

Maybe in the Americas, but in my region on the ground, 5-10 years ago you would not have seen an AMD consumer PC in the shops.

malformed_jill wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 1:21 pm

molly wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 12:53 pm I would say 99% of older machines will be intel so not surprising you haven't seen many, back then you had a choice of intel or intel.

actually, since posting this, i looked and searched up some stuff about amd cpus, and came across vogons (forum for retro software and hardware) again. it seems before core 2 duo, AMD and intel were actually pretty competitive, in the desktop department, since that's where the market was focused. also, in capitalist fashion, intel paid off manufacturers to block AMD's market access. there were some manufacturers that did amd laptops but those were mostly consumer ones that i subconsciously blacklisted
i also saw that before x86 licensing, there were a lot of clone competitors before it was just AMD vs Intel. the story of x86 actually seems pretty interesting to look into

I can ensure that Intel's counterattack did not worked here, AMD surely had a good market share in the FX days (probably because everybody is poor where i live)