POP64 Released: Quad-Core Cortex-A53(12nm) 1GB LPDDR4 SiP at 18x16mm | Hacker News Reader

POP64 Released: Quad-Core Cortex-A53(12nm) 1GB LPDDR4 SiP at 18x16mm

shop.popcorncomputer.com

50 pointsgoodburb8 comments

So much fuck yes to this. An affordable ($15) purchasable SiP with sufficient memory for real apps? Heck yes! Some easy mode to Linux computing options are much much appreciated.

We just had some great news from Collabora & PowerVR about Zink powered OpenGL 4.6 conformance, which is huge good news. But for some other gpu. Overall, it feels like there isn't a lot to report on PowerVR Linux support. Will this GE8300 have any support? http://google.com/search?q=site:phoronix.com+powervr

> Overall, it feels like there isn't a lot to report on PowerVR Linux support.

Few weeks ago new version of DRM driver got submitted, but it doesn't look like it would get merged soon. Without that groundwork done, its difficult to see more devices getting supported.

So while it might be in the plans to have all of Rogue family be supported eventually, it might be still years away for any one specific model.

https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20230613144800.52657-1-sar...

Quite a ton of effort here. Looks like a very new ambitious start. Loving it. Hopefully got some Collabora help here too? That'd probably shorten the adoption loop, tapping those deep experts.

The supported chips here are a very short list! 3 chips. Nominally though most Imagination gpus are "Rogue" architecture, same architecture as the first listed chip. Hard to guess how hard adapting future chips will be. Harkening back to 2013 (ge8300 from 2016's Series8XE). Then A series architecture chip mentioned is from 2019, the B series from 2020. Notably very few available implementations of either that I can find.

I could.have sworn I found register level documentation for Rogue yesterday, but it was behind some sign in screen. I hope it really doesn't exist, isn't a figment of my... imagination. I haven't seen what it takes to get access to ARM mali docs, but I expect that's not easy, pretty select. Would be great to see someone else on the scene doing as Good Guy a thing as Intel with making both instruction & register level docs pretty broadly available. Definitely need this more more GPUs!

I absolutely agree. I just hope the Allwinner A133 CPU and the peripherals on this SoC get some mainline Linux love.

Did they actually ship their Popcorn Computer yet? It's been having so many delays...

"When will mine ship?

Our goal is to ship production units by June 2021."

I applaud more accessible and cheap hardware though, but not sure if they can deliver it.

Covid-19, chip scarcity and war killed many businesses; if they managed to stay afloat during the last 3 years it is possible that they're slowly coming back with a less demanding and risky project. I also followed for years the Popcorn Computer hoping it would materialize some day, and today I'm a bit skeptical, but would like to be optimistic: the product is interesting; hopefully boards employing it will appear.

Kinda curious what you guys are excited about using something like this in? It seems like too much or too little computer for all my use cases.

This would be exciting to me if the module is available in quantities for PCB designs manufactured with JLCPCB as it would allow to design low-power low-cost camera-based projects without requiring to slap the whole Raspberry Pi Zero (with all the extra stuff I don't need) on top.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com