Has there been any movement on this at all? there’s been no further mention of it as far as I can see since the preorders opened and closed and it’s been nearly 8 months since then. Some info/updates would be nice for those of us that did preorder (I preordered a 16gb, sideplates and some battery boards)
There have been a number of posts on the topic on social media. Probably the most relevant to your question is that there is currently a batch of LS1028A modules in production (minute: "The following batches are now in production at PC…" - Mastodon).
Since you say you ordered the 16gb module anyway, that might be of less interest to you, but for others reading the thread it might be interesting to know, that there will be no 8gb variant of the board. According to the product page (MNT Reform LS1028A Processor Module - MNT Research Shop) all orders have been upgraded to 16gb.
MNT has also done a bunch of interesting stuff with the sample boards they have received, such as tinkering with external GPUs (minute: "sketchy prototype of blob-free MNT Reform desktop…" - Mastodon) and playing x86 games (minute: "installed half-life (1998) on MNT Reform with LS1…" - Mastodon).
Hi,
this project has been quite difficult for me to make happen, because of the revisions required to the boards by our partner company RBZ and now that the boards are in production, finding the required parts in the market.
The good news is that I was able to validate 16GB, the GPU usecases and put together a 50x batch which is currently being produced at PCBway. The only remaining hard-to-get part was the processors themselves. Luckily we still had 14x in stock and so the batch is split into a 14x and a 36x part. The first 14 assembled units should arrive here in less than a month, I hope.
For the 36 others I have a preorder (paid) of the chips in with a distributor who have just bumped the shipment from Nov. to Dec. I am still trying to find the chips on the secondary market, but there are risks.
If you send us an email with your order number to support@mntre.com we can figure out which batch you are in.
Also, we have designed (it’s almost done) a new chassis for making full use of LS1028A and other modules in a workstation/server context, which is the 1U Rack Reform.
Best
Lukas
That’s (largely) great news, except the supply issues, sorry to hear MNT are in that position, but thanks both for the update.
I don’t do socials medias which is why I wasn’t aware of any of this. I will definitely take a look at the new chassis when it pops up on the site.