> https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte...
The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally.
I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.
There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching.
I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.
I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.
The dominant player in this instance is insisting on using chipsets that are effectively obsolete when compared to the competition.
As a result, the community that they command continues to work on supporting this obsolete hardware, rather than newer hardware.
Network effects exist here just like in many other industries.
If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.
Easily unlockable with WPInternals :)
> only the dead Windows phones
Marvell/SolidRun MACCHIATObin, SoftIron Overdrive, even the old Gigabyte boards with APM X-Gene have both U-Boot and EDK2 (TianoCore) firmwares available. I'm not even talking about big servers (ThunderX) :)
Heck, U-Boot itself can run EFI binaries, with network access for netbooting even — and it's good enough for FreeBSD/aarch64 to not even consider non-EFI booting methods.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/review-clearfog-pro/
Their support is terrible and they only have a 14 day refund window.
if it's an eval board, then do they provide schematics which are typical of other eval board producers?
Having the schematic might aid in getting things working assuming the MAC <-> PHY circuitry supports what you want to do.
To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".
Not leaked, entirely official: http://opensource.rock-chips.com ("Hardware Support" section)
And instead of dumps, they have proper git commits! https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/commits/release-4.4
And lots of upstream linux commits with @rock-chips.com addresses.
Not sure what would be in a "secret 2nd part"… the only thing I can think of that's missing from "Part1" is the display system. But there is a driver in mainline Linux for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
Rockchip has the source of all the things on their GitHub, and a ton of commits in mainline Linux.
If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less).
Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).
(There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works.
BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi.
Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.
That's what x86 was always winning at. Power consumption is higher, however.
At the time, they sold one of the only consumer ARM boards that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers[1].
Hardkernel has also been patching new kernels for their boards, which is a breath of fresh air. Usually, consumer ARM boards, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation's offerings, are tied to single kernel release and, unless you wanted to commit a lot of time to building your own patchsets, they'd never see a kernel update.
[1] http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/20150...
Are you sure? As far as I could tell, they had a single USB 3 controller that had a 2 port hub. One port was connected to gigabit ethernet, while the other was connected to another two port hub which is the two ports on the device. ie all devices connected to USB 3 and the gigabit are sharing the controller and bandwidth. The background is the Exynos chip used was intended for the cell phone market, where there is no need for multiple USB 3 controllers, in addition the existing USB 2 controllers.
Also this whole announcement is really petty... Qualcomm and Apple already have SoCs with scores higher than 9k on geekbench so why does ARM have so much trouble making good cpu cores? They are comparing existing 14nm CPUs with theoretical 7nm CPUs that they haven't even released yet. Of course it's going to perform better. It would be embarrassing if it didn't...
...none of which are CPU-bound, instead relying on either hardware accelerators or the presence of specific SIMD instructions.
Geekbench is pretty good at measuring how well a chip would perform / scale as a web-app server. (Ignoring IO bandwidth, that is. A benchmark that incorporated both would be brilliant.)
Pov-ray is a raytracer. It only runs know he CPU (it has no codepaths to use the GPU).
imagemagick is an command line image manipulation suite that by default uses the CPU to perform operations in images. There is opencl support but it requires either a build option or configuration option for it to be enabled.
My own experience, comparing LAME and flac encoder speeds on an Android device (binaries invoked via a terminal emulator) to a desktop CPU and comparing the actual performance to the geekbench 4 scores showed that gb overrated the Android device by almost 125%.
I guess what I'd really want is a x86 device to get a more PC like experience. I can buy a tablet with battery, touch screen, and Intel Atom X5-Z8300 CPU for less than $90 [0], but there aren't any good cheap x86 alternatives for simple home servers.
You can buy a cheap powerful phone because there's a market for it. The margins are in the scale of the consumer market. However, there isn't as much a market for a generic "beige-box" cheap CPU. It's one of the difficult realizations of being a techie: the kind of undifferentiated, cheap, flexible box we want just doesn't carry itself as a product.
The modding scene might not have the same level of polish as a rpi - there are ROMs for Android/Armbian/CoreElec but you may be at the mercy of building it yourself, e.g. When the wifi module isnt precompiled for your particular no name OEM device.
Rockchip RK3399 boards:
NanoPC-T4, $109 2x A72@2GHz, 4xA53@1.5Ghz 4GB LPDDR3-1866 RAM, 4 lane PCIe M.2 80mm https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&... http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4
RockPro64, $80 2x A72@1.8GHz, 4xA53@1.4Ghz 4GB RAM, 4 lane PCIe full-size slot http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c...
Rock960, ~$99 https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/
HiSilicon Kirin boards:
HiKey960, $239 Kirin 960, 4x A73@2.4GHz 4x A53@1.8GHz, 3GB LPDDR4, TSMC 16nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey9...
HiKey970, $299 Kirin 970, 4x A73@2.36GHz, 4x A53@1.8GHz, 6GB LPDDR4X-1866, PCIe M.2 2260?, TSMC 10nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM
There's also the Socinext 24-core developer box. It's $1200 for a complete system: https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/
Even finding usable images to flash was tough on the RK3399 and near-impossible on the HiKey960. Even then, the HiKey960 image I found was pretty unstable (randomly killed processes due to a mysterious OOM) and was contributed by a _forum user_, not the official vendor (they seem to mainly support Android).
What should be kept in mind is that these are essentially phones-on-a-board that may or may not have been shoehorned properly to run a desktop Linux. That comes with all of the relevant baggage. For example, the HiKey960 board will aggressively thermal throttle given that all that comes with the board is a piddly copper "heatsink" that you _glue_ on the SoC.
Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi is the only board that I've come across that offers a sane GNU/Linux experience in terms of software support. The performance is acceptable if you consider that even these 4xA73 boards would still get smoked by a reasonable desktop CPU.
At the high end, I agree that unless you have something really specific (if you need Jetson for CUDA or high-end imaging), you'd usually be better off w/ x86 - it's nice to have full mainline support and stuff that just works. In the SBC space, for the same price as a HiKey960 you could get an UDOO x86 Advance or an UP Squared, both of which will beat the pants off the HiKey in most aspects.
https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bf...
Fantastic for a $80 board that consumes less than 10W.
Gemini Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
Apollo Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
On the consumer side there might be less, but the Gigabyte Brix, ECS Liva, and the Zotac mini-PC lines seem to be running strong and have a full line of TDPs - Zotac's latest P-series units look pretty great for their size: https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all
> Maximum continuous power: 85W