This is something I'm also working on, but using off the shelf hardware for now and working on the OS first[0]. I'm going for something lower spec and portable for now, mostly because there are a fair number of relatively well documented RISC-V processors these days (the single core, 1 GHz C906 CPU inside the SoC probably technically counts as open source!), where it seems feasible to write drivers. I'm not sure it would be a wonderful "full desktop" solution (it's close to the original Pi Zero in terms of performance), but I hope to target larger chips as the OS gets more mature. The i.MX8 they mention in the research paper is actually one of the ones I've considered, it's also used by the MNT Reform (definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it before, and are designing your own larger scale computer!), and the Librem 5 (which I got after many years of waiting, and don't have a ton of use for right now).
I actually would like to eventually play around with treating all the "hardware bits" inside of the computer, like the wifi chip, graphics card, etc., more like a distributed system than black boxes, but this generally comes down to writing a lot of the firmware myself (luckily this is a hobby/research project, so "non viable" solutions are still on the table).
The more immediate goal for me is something portable, and comparable to a palm pilot/blackberry in terms of performance and capabilities. The current hardware will likely have an ESP32C3 for wifi (32-bit RISC-V), the main D1 CPU (64-bit RISC-V), and an RP2040 (32-bit Arm Cortex-M) for keyboard and IO, so I'll be able to test out some of my "network of tiny computers that make one small computer" ideas.
I love this concept and is why my current designs are littered with E-keyed M.2 ports and the only real I/O is on my board are USB-C and a few USB-As. The advantage is that I can supplement built-in peripherals with USB devices until I build them.
I actually would like to eventually play around with treating all the "hardware bits" inside of the computer, like the wifi chip, graphics card, etc., more like a distributed system than black boxes, but this generally comes down to writing a lot of the firmware myself (luckily this is a hobby/research project, so "non viable" solutions are still on the table).
The more immediate goal for me is something portable, and comparable to a palm pilot/blackberry in terms of performance and capabilities. The current hardware will likely have an ESP32C3 for wifi (32-bit RISC-V), the main D1 CPU (64-bit RISC-V), and an RP2040 (32-bit Arm Cortex-M) for keyboard and IO, so I'll be able to test out some of my "network of tiny computers that make one small computer" ideas.
[0]: https://onevariable.com/blog/mnemos-moment-1/