Exynos based quad-core developer boards, starting at $69 | Hacker News Reader

Exynos based quad-core developer boards, starting at $69

hardkernel.com

71 pointssharmajai50 comments

Too bad none of these various hobbyist boards come with socs that support gigabit and sata. my $400 512mb single core synology nas is very jealous.

allwinner a10 does support sata and gigabit.

but not all boards have the ports

Interesting. I'd love a link to a board that has either or both Sara or gigabit eth if someone has one handy.

the mele stb series has 10/100 and single sata port:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mele-A2000-TV-box-Allwinner-A...

boxchip/allwinner a10 is just single core though, and the mele series seems only ship at 512mb.

Exactly this. I wonder what the factor is that hinders gigabit ethernet and especially multiple sata ports. My pogoplug actually has an onboard sata port so it should be possible to integrate those without choking the arm board or running up hardware prices.

I think it's simply that most of these devboards are produced by the SoC manufacturers with the idea of popularising/making it easy to develop products for their SoC. So the peripherals you get are the ones the SoC has, and traditionally most of these SoCs are aimed at the mobile space, which doesn't have SATA or ethernet or PCI (ethernet on these devboards is often USB-ethernet). As the A15-based SoCs (eg exynos5) appear I'm hoping to see more SoCs aimed less solidly at the mobile market, and with a wider mix of onboard devices.

It depends on the SoC used. Some will have 1 or 2 SATA controllers on board. This board is based on the Exynos 4412 which I don't think has SATA controllers on board (can't find a full datasheet). This means adding them externally, not big deal right? But, 99% of SATA controllers today are built to talk PCI-Express, and the Exynos SoC doesn't speak PCI-Express! We're screwed...

Basically the same thing happens with gigabit Ethernet (and USB 3.0). Unless the SoC has the controller on-board or has PCI-Express (few do) there really isn't a way to plug the external controller into the SoC. 10/100 Ethernet is slow enough that you can pump its data in and out of the SoC using a SPI port and get most of the speed and many SoCs now have a 10/100 controller and USB 2.0 controllers on board. There is no spec limit to the speed of SPI but its a single ended 2 wire protocol limiting its realistic usage to the several tens of Mbit/sec.

The problem is that there is no commonly accepted, generic, very high speed I/O protocol for embedded devices so if they choose not to implement PCI-Express your left without a way to pump information into and out of the SoC at fast enough speeds to support these new interfaces.

Exynos has one sata according to block diagram I saw and the Arndale board supports it. Ethernet is via USB. Mine hasn't shipped yet though...

Exynos is a brand name of the family, not a single product. The Arndale has the Exynos 5250 SoC (dual-core A15) not the Exynos 4412 (quad core A9) which is used on the board mentioned in this thread.

Ah yes. 4412 does not appear to have sata or ethernet according to this http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

You need to include the numbers when you're talking about these parts :-) Arndale is Exynos5, which has a different CPU and peripheral set to Exynos4 (which is what this board uses).

I don't think gigabit Ethernet is common ( yet ). 10/100 is. The Arnedale board, with an Exynos 5 has sata and 10/100. Samsungs on a push in South Korea with partners. It's happening a little in the US too with TI partnering with Phytec and others.

This som doesn't have sata either.

http://www.phytec.com/products/som/phycore/omap5.html

The chip has sata but no Ethernet so that's connected via USB. Hence not enough bandwidth for gigabit, plus the power consumption is much higher. These socs are designed for tablets and phones so Ethernet is not a priority.

Agreed, this is all too common. Not to mention these supposed developer boards should not have audio, or half of the USB ports on offer. I would actually prefer dual gigabit LAN, as I'd guess most of us would prefer using these boards for headless operation (accessible via a browser for an end user). From what I've seen, most hobbyists aren't planning on making a mobile device, but more something like this:

http://www.marvell.com/solutions/education/cloud-computer-fo...

Not to worry, they are coming. The current SOC vendors are targeting 'phones' and there isn't a market for a sata port and GbE on a phone yet. However Texas Instruments and others have seen the "Chromebook" light (which is so say that its not suicide to make a more general chip using the ARM instruction set architecture) so they are baking new chips as we speak. I'd expect that early next year, or at the latest summer 2013 we'll start seeing samples of the first chips that have these capabilities.

I'm interested too to see what happens there with TI after their decision to refocus on embedded. The Omap5 is an interesting chip as it contains a highly deterministic Cortex-m4 as well as an A15, though so far documentation is hard to find, so I'm not sure how they've tasked it, or how it's plugged into the peripherals. It's not a massive success, and the Imagination GPU is just as closed as the Mali, but its a way forward.

Lots happening.

and the Imagination GPU is just as closed as the Mali

Imagination is much, much worse than Mali. Mali has been pretty much fully reverse engineered (see limadriver.org). Given that libv will finally publish his new Lima driver version with textures support etc, an oss GLES driver for the Mali is pretty close. The remaining difficulty is the shader compiler (especially the vertex ISA is a bit esoteric).

The PowerVR devices on the other hand.. their drivers (and hardware) are very byzantine, layer upon layer of obscure interfaces. Even the kernel drivers are closed/obfuscated. Therefore the reverse engineering project is going very slow. I don't understand how it is a way forward.

Freescale SoCs support gigabit ethernet and SATA, not many others do.

So i.MX6 based boards like the Sabre Lite and Nitrogen6X have both paired with quad core A9, at $200.

There's Pogoplug 4 with those. Amazon seems to have them for $59.

Can someone clear something up for me? Are these chips comparable to the one in the Raspberry Pi? And are these developer boards are vastly more powerful than the Pi?

I'm not trying to start any arguments, i know the real purpose of the Pi and the usefulness of it, especially with the GPIO pins but i was just curious.

That core is considerably faster but I don't know about its graphics if it has any.

These sort of chips have their GPU included as well, don't they? If it's anything like the Mali in the S3, i'd be really really happy.

Wouldn't mind a larger board that exposes a number of pins for GPIO, I2C, SPI etc. from the SoC. I'm using the SoCs at www.gumstix.org with OpenEmbedded Linux for rapid work related prototyping.

Just curious, is this stuff open source? Meaning, I use them for commercial production and I won't be sued for just using these boards(assuming I don't infringe on anything else)? Just curious.

That's not what open source means. But surely they wouldn't be legally able to sell them if the devices were encumbered somehow; the hardware isn't any different than what's in phones you can already buy.

But as far as open source goes: not quite. The Exynos runs linux, but with a driver suite that is partially closed. You'll be able to run whatever versions of whatever distros are supported, and not much else.

Yes, it's built using industry standard stuff. But that's not at all what open source means.

None of the schematics are freely available or reproduceable without permission, nor is the embedded software opensource.

The embedded software does expose 'open' standardized API's so the device works with opensource software.

All I could find at the site (I can read Korean) was a rather ambiguous statement: "Full Schematics will be publically released on 31-January-2013." Nothing explicitly stating that their circuit board design will be placed in public domain. Also no signs of them having done full IP research.

Given that South Korean open source community is still in its infancy, I doubt their schematics will be released like Raspberry Pi guys did.

I see it starting at $89.

This is the one at $69: http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

Make sure you also look at the 5V/2A adapter below if you don't already have one ($9 - not terrible). The unit doesn't power via micro-usb.

Free if you use their credit card number

This is the SOC in the Nexus 10 right? Is someone working on a linux port for the N10?

How's the video acceleration on this? I need to start a blog. I read like 2-3 hours worth of ARM news once or twice a week trying to track down the best HW/SW/price combination for a simple dumb XBMC-upnp frontend.

The Rockchip devices have pretty crap support, though AMLogic released some sources that might help. Allwinner is finally making progress via AW's CedarX, though it's apparently still sufficiently buggy and they're back at the mercy of Allwinner.

I've yet to see much about the Samsung setup though. I love the Exynos and would very happily spend another $100 in an attempt to find the right thing.

That having been said, there are ~$50 versions of the HDMI stick that have powerful Cortex A9s in them that make these look over priced.

No, this is based on Cortex A9 and Mali400. It's the SoC inside all the latest Samsung devices except Nexus 10. If you want the Nexus 10 board (Cortex A15/Mali T604), you can get it here:

http://www.arndaleboard.org

As for XBMC, there are several $100-$200 dual core Cortex A9 Google TV options, or you can get an OUYA:

http://www.ouya.tv

>trying to track down the best HW/SW/price combination for a simple dumb XBMC-upnp frontend.

What's wrong with the Apple TV 2 with XBMC? Does it really need to be cheaper than $100 which includes power supply, and a decent enclosure? I've considered this a solved problem for a while.

>What's wrong with the Apple TV 2 with XBMC? Does it really need to be cheaper than $100 which includes power supply, and a decent enclosure? I've considered this a solved problem for a while.

Apple. Some people have an irrational hatred of apple products plus they like having something they hacked together which doesn't work quite as well as a boxed product while also costing a little bit more.

What a uselessly insulting reply.

>Some people have an irrational hatred of apple products

James Bond is playing on my third Macbook in 3 years, I'm typing on an Apple keyboard and helping my brother shop for an iPad mini.

>they like having something they hacked together

You got me.

>doesn't work quite as well as a boxed product

FUD. Keep telling yourself that while I have access to every Android app, plus everything afforded to me in Linux. At worst, you have to know which one to shop for that has decent support. It is annoying but it doesn't diminish the value of XBMC once it is up and running.

>while also costing a little bit more

FUD. What else can I say, that's just a lie. There are literally dozens of boxes with better specs for much less than the Apple TV.

i don't know anything about apple devices, but my impression was that they assumed you had everything else apple. if i have music on a samba network mount from a linux server, will apple tv play it, for example? also is it upnp - can i push music to it from windows and linux devices? airplay is something else, isn't it?

maybe this apple tv thing is what i have been looking for. but i'm having trouble answering the above from their site.

18pfsmt is talking about hacked AppleTV with XMBC installed, which will break the Apple wall garden and allows all the non-Apple media playing such as upnp, flac, mkv etc.

does it have enough oomph to play 10 GB mkv?

Yes. I can stream large (up to 20gig) x264 mkv files from a machine running ubuntu/samba. It doesn't play HD xvid files though.

Because I can equip my entire house with them for less than it costs to get one or two Apple TVs? Also, honestly, looking through the Wiki, it looks like way more work than it is to `dd` to an SD card, put it in one of these HDMI sticks and plug it into a TV...

Plus, I actually use the Netflix and Pandora apps on my $75 (that was 6 months ago, it's cheaper/faster now) little Android box that I use for XBMC currently.

My point is simple, if the SOC and OEMs would get their act together, we could have a set of distributions and a CI system that could churn out system images for these devices. These cheap Android/Linux combos with Rockchip/AMLogic/etc, can be bought for as low as $30 when buying in bulk (where bulk is as low as 30 pcs). A $30 1.7Ghz dual core computer that can be plugged into any monitor and used immediately? And dual booted between the latest version of Android and Linux?

Yes, I'll take that over Apple TV. :)

>I love the Exynos and would very happily spend another $100 in an attempt to find the right thing.

>A $30 1.7Ghz dual core computer that can be plugged into any monitor

These two statements seem to contradict each other, and the $30 price tag excludes the enclosure and power supply, which add up to another $30. It seems you are comparing the Apple TV to some product that you wish existed, but doesn't. I would certainly buy one if you can link to a comparable complete package for $100 or less because the Apple TV 3 still isn't jailbroken, and I have some friends I'd like to set up.

>I would certainly buy one if you can link to a comparable complete package for $100 or less because the Apple TV 3 still isn't jailbroken

Sorry, you're right. Again, lots of stuff in my head that is based on watching this space. This stuff is a bit of a grab-bag right now. The biggest thing is, there are just so. damn. many. of them. And they're all different enough to make porting a headache. And they're often dumped by their OEM with buggy firmware and a lack of source code to go with it.

So, what I meant was, I'm willing to spend $100 today on something that is well supported by and will support the Linux/Android community for development. I very honestly think that whoever does that first (Pengpod maybe?) will do very well at it.

The MK802 III looks promising, already a Linux port is progress by someone who has the chops. I have the AMLogic box from OvalElephant and it works decently enough. Honestly, the Raspberry Pi is the best bang for your buck currently. You don't get 1080p but the hardware acceleration support is decent.

(Also, the AMLogic M3 that is EVERYWHERE (seriously, you can get it for $30-$50 places if you look) and is likely to benefit from the Pivos software in the future).

I think it's still a few months away from "complete package" in the sense that people think "complete package" with the Apple TV. That having been said, I'm still waiting for someone to do it 100% right.

The current solution set for these requirements is a USB stick device with HDMI out. Takes power from the USB port, can be 'potted' (basically molded into the plastic) and then the HDMI out plugs into the TV (sometimes with an integrated cable.

> This is the SOC in the Nexus 10 right?

Unfortunately no. Nexus 10 has the more powerful Exynos 5250.

Such a blog would be awesome, or even better a comparison site like snapsort.com. There are so many new ones coming out and so much vaporware that it's hard to keep track.

A killer dev board for me would have:

- at least 2 cores - Linux-supported GPU, preferably with open drivers that are being actively developed - Able to run rudimentary linux desktop powerwise)

Nice to haves: - USB powered - HDMI

I don't want to buy a dev board and have to add 10 different addons with cables and junk hanging around it. If a lot of this comes builtin, I'm willing to drop a larger chunk of cash.

These boards' power requirements are exceeding that of common USB ports - these ODROID boards in particular can pull about 6-7 watts alone.

Practically all boards have HDMI, nothing has open GPU drivers and admittedly few have X11 drivers (just OMAP, Tegra, and Raspberry Pi right now I think.)

Dunno what those 10 addons you're talking about are since you have relatively simple requirements outside of working X11 drivers.

Ah, thanks for the info! I mean stuff like how you need a power adaptor, a USB wifi card, USB hub, etc.

We love our first-gen Raspberry Pi running XBMC.

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