New Libre-Focused ARM Board Aims To Compete With Raspberry Pi 3, Offers 4K

[pal666]

My 486DX could run C&C Red Alert, Steel Panthers, Civilization, Settlers 2 etc. Most games used 320x200x8b (mode 13h), some 640x480x8b.

4k is 130 times larger than 320x200, and this is without factoring in bit depth, which will make it more than .5k times larger

[pal666]

Nope. 3D isn't required for most embedded projects.

nope. if your embedded project requires 4k, it does require 3d

[pal666]

???

Mali is not "video card" it is "3D accelerator". Mali is 3D only, while 2D components and video decoding works through open drivers support as it is dealt by other parts. For embedded devices 3D can be sacrificed more easily than for a laptop.

first, nobody needs 4k "video card" without "3D accelerator" in 2017
second, contrary to your fantasies, they do mention 3d acceleration, i.e. do false advertising

Key Features

Le Potato is powered by quad 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores along with a ARM Mali-450 GPU with 2 geometry and 3 pixel cores


Industry Standards

• OpenGL ES 2.0

[stefansaraev]

Maybe in (near?) future. There is an effort to implement mesa driver here: https://github.com/yuq?tab=repositories

maybe. maybe not. shall see. I have enough experience with gxbb/gxl, both kernel and userspace to have my doubts.

EDIT: and with allwinner, too

Which part do you find hard to believe? HDR?

there is no opensource amlogic hw video decoder. there will be none in next year or two.

you can't do 4k@60 on those amlogic boards without blobs. I would not even comment on "hdr"

[tweak42]

This has got to be the longest Kickstarter introduction video ever. 37 minutes

They have a good amount of technical details but from a marketing standpoint their presentation video is cringe-worthy disaster. Using a text to speech translator voice over and a bunch of on bench screen tests is a terrible 1st impression.

[jernej]

As for the Raspberry Pi, I'm still hunting for the IRC log I saw it in, but I think christinaa (the developer of the libre firmware) got tired of hacking around some questionable design choices.

You mean this?

[mulenmar]

Yeaaaah... I think I'll continue waiting on the eoma68 project; that uses hardware that is actually capable of running libre, and whose CPU can be 'trusted'.

As for the Raspberry Pi, I'm still hunting for the IRC log I saw it in, but I think christinaa (the developer of the libre firmware) got tired of hacking around some questionable design choices. (Something about the CPU never being intended to use 1GB of memory, and there being BS Broadcom did to cram it in?) The repo hasn't been touched since early April, so I'm not optimistic about its future.

EDIT: Apparently, it's currently possible to boot the linux kernel with her firmware as of January, albeit with some USB/DMA/eMMC-related caveats.

IF you can't wait, try the Beaglebone Black instead.

[Piper]

I've worked for ~6m on a arm only desktop (Compulab's Utilite running Archlinux arm) - no 3d acceleration at first. Only issues I had were playing videos (especially large ones) and playing youtube - libre office, chromium, editing photos worked great. General Linux desktop doesn't benefit from 3d acceleration on arm socs, as those use gles and most things on the desktop were written for gl.

[caligula]

Nope. 3D isn't required for most embedded projects.

Also on the PC, games used to run without any kind of graphics acceleration. My 486DX could run C&C Red Alert, Steel Panthers, Civilization, Settlers 2 etc. Most games used 320x200x8b (mode 13h), some 640x480x8b. It had zero acceleration, it had just a cheap 1MB SVGA clone. The machine ticked at 66 MHz. I don't know about the memory, maybe 33 MHz ? Surely the quad-core ARMs are much faster so I'm not really surprised if they could run normal X just fine with CPU based rendering.

[Nille]

I hope its not a amlogic. i would wish a rockchip based chip like the one in the asus PI clone. because the a arm kernel guy say they pretty well supported by upstream kernels. (ofc the mali gpu is a pain in the ass)