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How did you come up with these guesses looking at those photos? I love the speculation but there is hardly enough shown derive core series processor.
There are are some interesting ARM processors on the market now that could go into this machine. Most of them built for the “server” industry if you believe the marketing. My problem with that, is a focus on the server world is not sustainable by a processor designer. So I can easily see one of thoose chips slotted into this machine. Or maybe a cut down variant with only 16 cores.
In any event the the issue is how do they live up to their open claims. Frankly I’m not obsessed with totally open hardware the way many are in this forum. What I want is an ARM based machine that doesn’t suck. ARM for low power at idle but plenty of cores to provide a highly usable system for years to come. Frankly this is one reason why I’m hoping for an ARM based Mac Mini, such a platform should be able to do home server duty fine but yet have decent performance. The important thing is to get idle power down so that an always on computer does blow out the electrical bill.
Ive seriously considered going the Orroid route for server duty but I’d prefer a box with multiple SSD storage slots.
It depends on exactly what ARM SoC they choose. However, given the claims of high performance, either they are likely using x86 (in which case no freeing will ever be possible) or a closed high-end ARM device like TX2 (same problem). The price point (to me) strongly hints toward an Intel desktop processor, though an AMD low end processor would be possible as well.
If for some reason they are calling a Chinese cell phone / tablet SoC "high performance", that would be freeable. I highly doubt that is the case here, especially considering the RAM support table they have published.
EDIT: OK, there's a picture of part of the mainboard at https://betanews.com/2018/10/26/syst...-thelio-linux/ Here's my educated guess putting all the pieces together:
Mini-ITX Intel board, 2 DDR4 RAM slots, Core series LGA1151 processor, one PCIe slot, based on similar reference design to the Gigabyte mini-ITX board here:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherbo...WIFI-rev-10#ov
It's possible they have a daugherboard ("riser") that provides additional PCIe slots as well.
Probably the claim to fame bits are in the implementation of the design in KiCAD (hopefully anyway, though I find this a bit dubious given KiCAD's current limitations vs. Allegro or similar) and the "open hardware" backplane bits. This would be a fully closed and locked firmware stack machine if I'm right, which kinda renders the "open hardware" aspects worthless from a practical perspective.
There are are some interesting ARM processors on the market now that could go into this machine. Most of them built for the “server” industry if you believe the marketing. My problem with that, is a focus on the server world is not sustainable by a processor designer. So I can easily see one of thoose chips slotted into this machine. Or maybe a cut down variant with only 16 cores.
In any event the the issue is how do they live up to their open claims. Frankly I’m not obsessed with totally open hardware the way many are in this forum. What I want is an ARM based machine that doesn’t suck. ARM for low power at idle but plenty of cores to provide a highly usable system for years to come. Frankly this is one reason why I’m hoping for an ARM based Mac Mini, such a platform should be able to do home server duty fine but yet have decent performance. The important thing is to get idle power down so that an always on computer does blow out the electrical bill.
Ive seriously considered going the Orroid route for server duty but I’d prefer a box with multiple SSD storage slots.
Originally posted by madscientist159
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It depends on exactly what ARM SoC they choose. However, given the claims of high performance, either they are likely using x86 (in which case no freeing will ever be possible) or a closed high-end ARM device like TX2 (same problem). The price point (to me) strongly hints toward an Intel desktop processor, though an AMD low end processor would be possible as well.
If for some reason they are calling a Chinese cell phone / tablet SoC "high performance", that would be freeable. I highly doubt that is the case here, especially considering the RAM support table they have published.
EDIT: OK, there's a picture of part of the mainboard at https://betanews.com/2018/10/26/syst...-thelio-linux/ Here's my educated guess putting all the pieces together:
Mini-ITX Intel board, 2 DDR4 RAM slots, Core series LGA1151 processor, one PCIe slot, based on similar reference design to the Gigabyte mini-ITX board here:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherbo...WIFI-rev-10#ov
It's possible they have a daugherboard ("riser") that provides additional PCIe slots as well.
Probably the claim to fame bits are in the implementation of the design in KiCAD (hopefully anyway, though I find this a bit dubious given KiCAD's current limitations vs. Allegro or similar) and the "open hardware" backplane bits. This would be a fully closed and locked firmware stack machine if I'm right, which kinda renders the "open hardware" aspects worthless from a practical perspective.
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