The Firefly-RK3399 Looks Like An Interesting 6-Core ARM 64-Bit Developer Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Firefly-RK3399 Looks Like An Interesting 6-Core ARM 64-Bit Developer Board

Our friends at LoveRPI in conjunction with open-source hardware design firm Firefly have been working on a new, higher-end 64-bit ARM development board...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefly-RK3399-Start

[Drago]

How can one market a product as "Open Source" when the GPU driver is closed. Better someone makes board with one of the Snapdragons, where we actually have working driver within Mesa.

[Chewi]

Yeah, that's a big deal for me too. Vivante is another option. I understand that the choice of GPU is largely dictated by the surrounding chipset and there may have been other factors to consider but proprietary graphics drivers are just so bad.

[Nille]

is AMD not a option for a small partnership? i mean, we have drivers for this cards and AMD is also interested in ARM with there gpus. Anothger Option, ok with blob drivers, would be a tegra soc.

This is also a combination what i wish for the next PI generation, because broadcom has no better gpu.

[Space Beer]

For $130 you could buy Kabini or Braswell combo with 4GB of RAM and 60GB SSD, install any OS you like and use it for development, test, media, gaming, industry (machine/robot controller)...

[johnc]

Looks pretty good.

I still have a Jetson here that I've done nothing with. I need to stop being lazy.

[Michael_S]

For $130 you could buy Kabini or Braswell combo with 4GB of RAM and 60GB SSD, install any OS you like and use it for development, test, media, gaming, industry (machine/robot controller)...

I don't know if I could manage the whole thing for $130, but I could come close.

At least for me, this isn't quite good enough. I want a Kodi media player. I ripped my blu rays with MakeMKV to H.264 .mkv files with 28000 kb/s, and no matter how I tried the Nvidia Shield console couldn't play them without pauses and stutters.. As far as I can tell, this is pretty close to that for features and performance.

[DanaG]

Speaking of Qualcomm, I made the mistake of buying an IFC6410 a while ago, and from that, I learned something important: never buy a board that doesn't have a community behind it!

The IFC6410 seems to have been abandoned at Linaro 15.05, and even their Android build doesn't work properly -- the HDMI video output occasionally hangs, with logcat showing something about vsync timing out.

[robclark]

Speaking of Qualcomm, I made the mistake of buying an IFC6410 a while ago, and from that, I learned something important: never buy a board that doesn't have a community behind it!

The IFC6410 seems to have been abandoned at Linaro 15.05, and even their Android build doesn't work properly -- the HDMI video output occasionally hangs, with logcat showing something about vsync timing out.

I can't really comment on android builds (those were always provided by qcom, linaro only hosted them).. but as far as upstream/linux ifc6410 should be supported upstream and is *basically* the same as one of the upcoming 96boards. (Slightly different dtb but otherwise the same.) I did get a report about some gpu hangs, which I suspect is something power mgmt related (same kernel and mesa is fine on other a3xx devices like db410c).. but home for the holidays now and ifc6410 wasn't one of the boards I brought with me so I won't be able to investigate until next week. The ifc6410 is still a board I use fairly regularly, although last month or so I've been a bit pre-occupied w/ a5xx. In worst case, rolling back to the last 4.4 lts linaro kernel should give you something that is working in the short term.

[andrei_me]

Why is that anyone is developing the Lima/Tamil driver? What do Vivante and Adreno GPU have that Mali/Mali T doesn't?

Is it because some unreleased code from @libav?

Why can't some developers do what have been done for the other GPUs?