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Comment by eberkund | Hacker News Reader

$49 seems very expensive for something like this. There are similar packages available in the $5-30. What makes this special?

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It is all about the details. Industrial DDR3 with -25C temperature is quite expensive, but it is a requirement for any company building a product that could be used outdoors. Quad-core GHz A53 in such tiny footprint, but really with everything needed onboard. Very motherboard and embedding friendly and with proper software support.

I think I will give some backstory which might be relevant. This product was born out of a need to migrate from Intel Edison in our high precision GPS equipment. We looked long and hard for Edison alternatives but there were none. They were either too big, or too expensive or did not have enough computing power. So we decided to build our own.

Disclosure: I am co-founder of Emlid, the company behind Neutis. Happy to answer any questions.

"Neutis runs modern Linux kernel based on the mainline version. Unlike other modules that are stuck with old legacy kernels without updates, Neutis will get security fixes and new features on time."

You must clarify that. You are on a technical forum and that simply is not acceptable. "Mainline" is 4.16-rc2, there is only one mainline, so you are saying it's shipping with an rc quality kernel that is still in active development?

Or do you mean it comes with an LTS? "Yocto and Debian". Debian does not use mainline kernel, in fact, no linux distro does, ever. What version of debian?

Currently our main focus is on Yocto, since this is what most people would use in production. Right now BSP runs on 4.15 and the processor is well supported in mainline. Since our own product is based on Neutis we put a lot of effort in testing of stability of the system and peripherals.

There is so much work done by the great linux-sunxi community, you can see the mainlining progress for H5 processor here: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Sorry, it is the middle of the night here and I am not ready to confirm on the exact Debian version, but I believe that it has not been decided yet. You can contact us directly and we will get back to you with more info on this.

In the context of ARM devices its understood that it isn't based off a custom fork maintained only by the SOC manufacturer.

It's a 64-bit 4-core ARM. So I expect it to cost a little more than a Raspberry Pi.

This is the identical CPU of a Raspberry Pi 3. 512 MB of RAM with 64 bit is a pain, and that Mali GPU is a proprietary piece of shit. What's the market for a SoM for "makers and hardware startups" that has negligible upstream support.

That's before you consider that they chose a SoC with considerable GPU/VPU capabilities that can only do HDMI or composite, the first you would never use in an embedded application where you have a fixed display, the latter you would never use, ever.

> 512 MB of RAM with 64 bit is a pain

That's an odd statement. How are those two things related?

You can still run 32-bit binaries (including thumb-2) under 64-bit OS in 32-bit execution state -- as long as kernel is configured to use 4kB pages. So your usermode binaries don't need to be bigger.

Or you can take advantage of higher performing 64-bit mode.

(Unrelated, but my pet peeve, one thing a lot of people get wrong: 32-bit ARM (Aarch32 and most ARMv7) supports 1 TB of physical RAM and 64-bit IIRC 16 TB. Not sure where the idea 32-bit ARM could only support 4 GB comes from.)

It's not identical to the RPi 3. Raspberry Pi is using a Broadcom chip, this one is an Allwinner H5. They are similar, but at least the H5 has far better support in mainline Linux.

Still Mali, though. Which I totally agree is crap. And no drivers for other display types.

We were talking about the CPUs, and these are pretty identical. Both use quad ARM Cortex A53, the H5 has 100 MHz more top clock rate and is probably manufactured in a more modern process, but real-world performance isn't going to be much different.

Performance wise they are very similar, but you mentioned upstream support. That is actually a major point of differentiation between the two.

Well, yes, the Raspberry Pi has much better upstream support. The biggest obvious issue being the Mali.

I mean upstream support in the Linux kernel. The Allwinner chip is supported by the mainline kernel, the one in the Raspberry Pi is not. To me that's a big plus in its favor.

Also in terms of support by the creators, if they're serious about the 10 year commitment then I'd say actually that is better than Raspberry Pi. Mindshare in the maker community isn't that important to someone doing serious embedded hardware development for production as long as the company behind it is solid. Which kinda sucks, I wish there was more incentive for chipmakers like Broadcom to be more open but...

No offence, but I think you haven't been keeping up-to-date. The RPi is fully supported by the mainline kernel, most significantly, there is a full atomic DRM kernel driver for the VC4 GPU and corresponding Mesa userland, maintained by someone with transistor-level access to hardware documentation.

I have great appreciation for the work Maxime Ripard et al. have been doing on mainline support for the various Allwinner chips, hence why I kicked in a few bucks for their kickstarter on reverse-engineering the Allwinner VPU:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-s...

But lets not kid ourselves, none of this was Allwinners doing and they could not give a fuck about mainline Linux.

Wow you're right, not sure how I missed that. Guess I just got too used to all those years of Broadcom chips being giant clusterfucks of patches and old kernels.

> but at least the H5 has far better support in mainline Linux

Could you elaborate on this?

My experience has been that the BCM2710 (and the RPi 3 board, in general) has had better (and earlier) support in mainline than the Allwinner H5. A client of mine is shipping a product based on the RPi3 after evaluating both (including building their own H5 based board), because support for H5 on mainline was poor and lagging compared to the RPi3.

Mali 450 just won't die. Atleast it is not the Mali 400.

> 512 MB of RAM with 64 bit is a pain

Hence why all extant Raspberry Pi 3s have a full GiB of RAM.

true but its smaller than say a pi3 and has extended temp ranges

Marketing & a very pretty website</cynical>

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