The Improv ARM Board Still Isn't Shipping; Riding A Dead Horse?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Improv ARM Board Still Isn't Shipping; Riding A Dead Horse?

Announced last year was an open-source ARM development board running Mer with an aim of supporting X.Org and Wayland based environments and would be powerful enough to run KDE's Plasma Active environment. The Improv is now three months past its original ship-date and there's no indication of the low-end dual-core Cortex-A7 + 1GB RAM hardware shipping anytime soon...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY2NzE

[riklaunim]

And in theory you can run Picuntu on RK3066 or RK3188 Android TV dongles (and tablets?).

[Obscene_CNN]

ARM is crap unless batterylife is a concern

Arm is crap unless battery life is a concern. It was originally designed to be better than a 6502 but less expensive (and less powerful) than a 68000.

why don't we ever see some PTS benchmarks on ARM? (because its a joke)

[Spittie]

Arm is crap unless battery life is a concern. It was originally designed to be better than a 6502 but less expensive (and less powerful) than a 68000.

why don't we ever see some PTS benchmarks on ARM? (because its a joke)

ARM is cheap

[Michael]

why don't we ever see some PTS benchmarks on ARM? (because its a joke)

You do... The Chromebook-A15, the CompuLab Utilite, in the past were a lot of PandaBoard ES benchmarks, etc.... Coming up will be lots of Jetson TK1 benchmarks. I'm just interested in only benchmarking the latest ARM hardware at the time.

[liam]

Arm is crap unless battery life is a concern. It was originally designed to be better than a 6502 but less expensive (and less powerful) than a 68000.

why don't we ever see some PTS benchmarks on ARM? (because its a joke)

Apple's A7 is actually pretty competitive to haswell in performance/watt. The A7 is a slightly cut down version of the upcoming A57 (which will probably be a bit less efficient).
So, no, they've actually come a long ways, and are increasingly encroaching upon the territory of the mid-end server (probably another 2-3 years, IMHO).

[k1l_]

Wasnt Aaron Seigo the one telling Canonical they dont know anything about making and shipping a device, when they promoted the Ubuntu-Edge crowdfunding?

Seems like he was quite quick with judging others.

[wizard69]

These guys are a big joke.

I. Took one look at their web site about a year ago and realized that I wanted nothing to do with these guys. Sad because I'm looking for a good quality ARM board at a cheap price.

The first problem with the web site was the web site itself which was terrible in it organization and clarity. The next problem was the board itself which honestly looked like it was out together with somebody that has ahead full of hair instead of gravy matter. If nothing else a board designed for the low cost market needs approachable low cost I/O solutions. I was extremely perplexed with the avenue they took as I really don't know who they are trying to market to.

In any event better options exist and frankly better technology is just around the corner. In any event if anybody out there wants to try doing an open source board, even closed for that matter, understand the markets and the need for I/O. Most importantly basic I/O shouldn't require plugging into a daughter card. One of the most desirable things about these ARM based boards is that you can economically ship a board with a full blown computer, I/O, power supply and what have you on one board that isn't much bigger than a credit card or two. Future upgrades involve replacing the entire card. Arduino sets a perfect example of how this should work, they have a large number of boards that can plug into many "shields".

[wizard69]

Apple's A7 is actually pretty competitive to haswell in performance/watt. The A7 is a slightly cut down version of the upcoming A57 (which will probably be a bit less efficient).

Until Apple introduces a board that is open enough to test upon we won't know for sure how good the A7 is, however the data seen so far indicates that the chip is far better than many want to believe. As for A7 being cut down, recent info seems to indicate the opposite, A7 looks like an extended version of A57. I'm left with the impression that A7 has cores that are just dying for more bandwidth and with that bandwidth Apple could get very desktop like performance out of the processor.

So, no, they've actually come a long ways, and are increasingly encroaching upon the territory of the mid-end server (probably another 2-3 years, IMHO).

ARM processors are nothing to laugh at if you want both performance and economy with power usage. Currently nothing comes close on economical manufacturing processes. It will be most interesting to see Apple future 14nm ARM chip as they obviously have a lot of potential locked up in A7.

[liam]

Until Apple introduces a board that is open enough to test upon we won't know for sure how good the A7 is, however the data seen so far indicates that the chip is far better than many want to believe. As for A7 being cut down, recent info seems to indicate the opposite, A7 looks like an extended version of A57. I'm left with the impression that A7 has cores that are just dying for more bandwidth and with that bandwidth Apple could get very desktop like performance out of the processor.


ARM processors are nothing to laugh at if you want both performance and economy with power usage. Currently nothing comes close on economical manufacturing processes. It will be most interesting to see Apple future 14nm ARM chip as they obviously have a lot of potential locked up in A7.

The "cut-down" comment was based on the expected use cases for a57 vs a7. The a57 is designed to scale to low end servers and high frequencies thus it probably has a deeper pipeline but larger cache. Also, if they aren't as resource constraints as the designed fur mobile a7 the a57 could provide more opportunities to perform ooo. However, I've been unable to find any detailed info about any a57 this is just speculation but it seems reasonable. Apple is known to build very purpose built devices and deviating from a57 as I suggested would make it less power hungry and smaller.