linux4kix

The qsfp28 port can be configured as 4x10Gbps or 1x40Gbps, or 4x25Gbps, 2x50Gbps, or 1x100Gbps. They are different signalling standards.

The LX2160a has a 50Gbps crypto accelerator and a 100Gbps compression/decompression accelerator built into the network packet processor to help offload some of the processing. The 16-cores are useful for the high speed packet processing in userspace with DPDK.

There is no backplane for the CPUs no. But they support 10 and 25Gbps networking that can be used for high speed clustering.

The core count and network processing is the same, but the number of SERDES lanes is half. This allowed the SOC's die size to be much smaller. You can fit 4 SOMs in the space of a single CEX7 module.

We are talking with MNT about possibly building around the LX2162a SOM.

We have a growing lineup of SystemReady ES certified hardware that will make good OSS upgrades. New platforms on our LX2162A based SOM will be especially good for this application.

I very much doubt it. Apple's M1 SOC is not a standards base design and the OS is very specialized to their hardware. As far as I know they don't even support external PCIe GPUs on the platform.

We don't make the SOCs, just implement them. The only other available SOC that is N1 is the Ampere Altra and you will not be able to provide a < $1000 system with that. Also the SOC itself is almost as large as the entire CEX7 module. This system was never meant to out perform the latest CPUs on the market. It is a developer tool to fill a niche and help advance the SystemReady ecosystem. We liked the fit because after faster more desktop ready SOCs are available this doesn't become ewaste, but can easily re-purpose into a micro-server or other network development platform.

It is an mITX motherboard, you can use any off the shelf case. The community has done all sorts of interesting builds.

The LX2160a can handle up to 130Gbps of network traffic. That is what it is designed for. You also have the benefit that the Quad SFP+ ports can be configured as a network switch completely offloaded from the CPU. That is what this SOC was designed for after all. :)

Typing this right now a HoneyComb running Fedora 34. RX560 gpu, nvme, 32GB of DDR4 3000 XMP memory. Are there rough edges with Aarch64 on the desktop, sure but without platforms like HC this will never change. There are lots of core OSS devs using HC to help solve these problems. Here is a video presented at the last Linaro Connect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tloLT4EPSpo

You may be interested in our new platforms coming out based on our newly announced LX2162A, https://www.solid-run.com/embedded-networking/nxp-lx2160a-fa...

socketed Arm SOCs are very unlikely because there are so many vendors making them. This works on the x86_64 side because you basically have Intel and AMD and they each have their own manufacturing ecosystem and target sockets. That is why we chose CEX7 since it is a standard that allows the motherboard to be customized to the use case.

No it is not setting records, but we felt that it was capable enough to help crack the existing chicken and egg problem. We could provide a SystemReady Arm platform that could help bridge the divide and provide developers a native Aarch64 platform that wasn't $3000+ HoneyComb has helped bring better Aarch64 support to many OSS projects getting things ready for better SOCs once they become available.

Currently any GPU that supports an in kernel OSS driver will work, so mainly using the amdgpu or nouveau driver. We are working nvidia on some issues regarding using their binary Aarch64 Linux drivers. That is kind of the point of HC, if the platform didn't exist then Nvidia would never be looking at these issues.

Remember the HoneyComb is a 30 Watt machine.

The HoneyComb boards are fitted with a uBMC. This is a stateless MC that can be connected to a BMC concentrator gateway.

Don't forget about our Marvell series of boards :) While HoneyComb is our flagship for SystemsReady ES certification, We will also have our Armada 8040 and CN913x based products that will also be fully supported UEFI + ACPI systems.

Porting is not necessarily the issue. As Linus pointed out earlier in the year, platforms that aren't native to the developer generally have issues that fall through the cracks. I recommend you look up the series of posts that CloudFlare did when reviewing the Qualcomm server. There are many obvious optimizations that are just not done because currently all the ARM hardware is targeted at small embedded applications. I have run into many others since I started running benchmarks on the HoneyComb.

Absolutely. The HoneyComb is targeted as a developer workstation / desktop. The ClearFog CX LX2K is the higher end board aimed at networking and edge compute applications. We are collaborating with most the major distributions making sure we will have the board fully supported as soon as possible.

Whatever developers want to use it for. It has storage, highspeed networking, 16-cores all in a 32W TDP. We are excited to see what uses the community and our customers come up with for it.

The COM Express 7 module, has SPI-NOR for booting, a second SPI for UEFI secure variable storage, and eMMC for an embedded or recovery OS. Other than that you can boot your distro from eMMC, USB, Sata, or NVME.

Coreboot isn't immediately on our radar. We have both u-boot and EDK2 running, although EDK2 needs more work.

Mainline support for the SOC is already making it into mainline and we can boot a mainline kernel with limited functionality. Getting anything into mainline is a process, but we hope to have everything supported by the end of the year.

The PCIe slot is actually 8x. Right now we are targeting AMD Polaris based GPUs for support, just because their power consumption fits well with this SOC. AMD just announced their PRO 3200, which is really a match made in heaven. I just wish they had include SR-IOV on that model so you could get VM acceleration as well.

As for Xavier it is a good platform, but you in many benchmarks the HoneyComb LX2K is way out in front. Then adding in the 10Gbps networking and storage.

SolidRun CSA here. The SOC by itself will run with a fully OSS firmware, either u-boot or edk2. We are working on SBSA compliance and hope to have that ready for the production run of SOCs. While the entire device can be run with fully OSS firmware there will be some missing functionality. There are some configuration pieces for SERDES lanes that is handled by the microcode in the SOC. There is a binary firmware that is needed for the high speed networking. We are still discussing with NXP how this will evolve going forward.

For a management interface we have integrated what we call a micro-BMC. It is an STM MC, that is wired up to power up/down, thermals, and can reflash the SPI-NOR chip for recover and firmware updates out of band. This is a technology we are working on so the BMC can act more as an IoT gateway to handle many boards, vs each board needing to manage security individually. This chip is fully unlocked and open for developers to play around with.

let me know if you want this data in github. Just testing our overclocking bring cpu clock up to 2.4Ghz and DDR to 3200

Also building with gcc 8.2 not I needed to change -march=native to -march=armv8-a+crypto

Min: 0.00111424 bytes read: 631514 Gigabytes/second: 0.566768

Semihalf is maintaining the tree and patches, but I believe the original work done to support using a GPU on the platform was done by Linaro. I could be mis-remembering but I believe that is how things happened.

We are waiting for the final release of the EDK2 tree from NXP. I will refrain from promising anything until that is integrated.

The cores are not overclockable. 2.2Ghz will be the limit.

Sure I will keep an eye on your updates and keep testing.

I would also like to point out that the LX2160 is also a TDP of 32Watts compared to the 125W TDP of the eMag.

Okay I couldn't help myself, waiting for a build to finish.

./parse jsonexamples/twitter.json

Min: 0.00171284 bytes read: 631514 Gigabytes/second: 0.368695

Just tested the Daniel's tests against our 16 Core LX2160 that is still only clocked at 1.9Ghz (will be 2.2Ghz final production). These are our numbers

binarytrees: 37s mandelbrot: 13.6s fasta: 0.9s

I will give your benchmark a run once I have some time.