Orange Pi Is The Latest Raspberry Pi Inspired ARM Board

[CrystalGamma]

So I have had a Cubieboard 2 since a year ago ... and I thought it got outdated by now ... but then I see there there are still boards with Alwinner A20s coming out ...
Unless they get a working FOSS graphics driver, it can't be a good RPi successor IMO.

[cb88]

Lima isn't part of mainline Mesa as there isn't yet a public Mesa/Gallium3D driver and hasn't had any new news in almost two years.

I see ... didn't realize it had gone *that* stagnate. It seems Luc Verhaegen got the shader compiler working enough to run Q3A ... and then it just went silent thats sad.

[andresdju]

So I have had a Cubieboard 2 since a year ago ... and I thought it got outdated by now ... but then I see there there are still boards with Alwinner A20s coming out ...
Unless they get a working FOSS graphics driver, it can't be a good RPi successor IMO.

Why do you think that the RPi has a working FOSS graphics driver? Last time I checked, it was using
the proprietary driver. Allwinner A20 also works with a proprietary driver.

[andresdju]

I see ... didn't realize it had gone *that* stagnate. It seems Luc Verhaegen got the shader compiler working enough to run Q3A ... and then it just went silent thats sad.

Lima driver is usable, and most of the hard work is done. Not bad for a work not paid by ARM and without documentation. You can continue from there.

[andresdju]

The less sucking SoCs about linux support indeed are raspberry pi broadcom SoCs. AmLogic deliberately has an open source linux support site, so I tend to prefer these two options instead of AllWinner and RockChip..

The best open source option in my opinion, both from a hardware design and driver development point of view, is the Freescale i.MX6. It's mostly documented, and there is a fairly complete driver (etnaviv) for the vivante gpu. The videocore driver is not complete, as far as I know, and the last time I checked a proprietary blob was needed to boot the RPi SoC. Last, the bcm SoC is ARMv6, without VFPv3, NEON SIMD, virtualization extensions etc. and not supported by some distributions (like Debian).

[toni]

Do you know if nv plans to release any jetson with 2 hdmi outputs? That would be awesome.

[cantpostanon]

Yes but, is it good enough for OpenELEC?

[Linuxhippy]

Cortex-A7 > Arm11

The pricing comes in higher than the Raspberry Pi boards while packing just a Cortex-A7 processor.

This suggests Cortex-A7 to be inferior to the Raspberry's ARM11, however the Cortex-A7 is more powerful (partly dual-issue) and ARMv7 capable (while ARM11 is ARMv6 only).
However, it is still a quite weak CPU for running Desktop Linux workload.
Cortex-A7 can be thought as a successor of the ARM11: ARM11 -> Cortex-A5 -> Cortex-A7 -> Cortex-A53

I always found ARMs numbering theme confusing at best: ARM9, Cortex-A9, ARMv7, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A15 > Cortex-A17, ....

[Nille]

Why do you think that the RPi has a working FOSS graphics driver? Last time I checked, it was using
the proprietary driver.

Thats not true. The Kernel and Userspace part are OS but there is a huge BLOB that runs inside the VideoCore.

[blackshard]

Thats not true. The Kernel and Userspace part are OS but there is a huge BLOB that runs inside the VideoCore.

Is it the videocore IV own realtime operating system?