ROCK Pi 4 Is Becoming A Good Arm SBC With Panfrost Graphics & Wayland Support

[edwaleni]

A bit offtopic, but does anyone know why Rockchip is not announcing any new ARM chips? Their RK3288 and RK3399 are getting old (both 28nm chips), while still being some of the best choices, I would like to see some 10 or 7nm products from them.
I know they are building x86 chips since a couple years, but there aint nothing in terms of new products either.

Ok, shouldve googled before, 8nm RK3588 is coming in 2020: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Rockch....419239.0.html
*drool emojies*

Just having the node available is one thing, having the minimum quantities to support the shrink is another.

As I understand it, using this node size has some high setup costs. It was one reason the Pi Foundation was stating that any major changes in the Pi would require a node change which they couldn't afford themselves.

Also supply of 7/10nm fabs is not a commodity. GloFlo won't even invest in it and is staying >20nm for now. That leaves Samsung, Intel and TSMC.

Until fab equipment for those nodes become near commodity, you probably won't see anything like that from Rockchip.

[M@GOid]

This opensource work is being done/financed by who? The manufacturer of the chip, the manufacturer of the ROCK Pi or just the community?

[tuxd3v]

A bit offtopic, but does anyone know why Rockchip is not announcing any new ARM chips? Their RK3288 and RK3399 are getting old (both 28nm chips), while still being some of the best choices, I would like to see some 10 or 7nm products from them.
I know they are building x86 chips since a couple years, but there aint nothing in terms of new products either.

RockChip SoCs are on 28 nm, like many others sbcs around, the next ones will be a lot less than that..

Anyway,
I still don'f find any information regarding AllWinner A300 Socs..

[tuxd3v]

[USER="79906"]The only advantage of Raspberry Pi is there are much more 3rd party accessories to choose.

Is not their only advantage,
They have a very good Stream Lined Software Stack, maybe "the most optimised", in the market..
A lot more Libraries, and such,
Because they are there for quite some time..

But the other players are catching up..
They do still have some blobs, that plagues the ecosystem, but others also have..

[AndyChow]

The RockPro64 was already top choice for NAS builds even without the graphics: http://www.doug-cooper.com/?p=14

Now the PineBOOK Pro... That's something worth looking into.

I bought the original pinebook when it came out, and it's virtually useless because it has a 10000 mAh (I doubt it, but that's what's writen on it) battery that doesn't last for more than a couple of hours, and only has a handful of dubious distros available (none official, all community provided), with very few software.

It's so ridiculous that ARM SoCs can't get their GPU situation in order. There doesn't seem to even be any proprietary drivers, and the open-source ones, you need to rebuild mesa?

Supposedly the Mali driver is available, but no instructions on how to install or use. Try reading this from their forum:

Usage：

Using drm driver not able to coexist with display driver，due to utilize display relate BSP section； Drm driver able to integrate with sunxi_arm_video apply gem during cache and cache refresh，open cache able to increase performance； Drm driver utilize sunxi_tr BSP rotate section，not able to public sharing with sunxi_tr；

That's it! That's the whole information they provide on how to "use" the GPU driver.

I will never buy another Pine product, ever. And I'm pretty much done with ARM. Even how ARM things boot is a major headache, with UART and u-boot, kernel in flash and rootfs in eMMC. No real OS, most packages aren't available. Maybe it's good for some use-case, but I don't feel it's adequate as a general computing platform.

[stikonas]

This opensource work is being done/financed by who? The manufacturer of the chip, the manufacturer of the ROCK Pi or just the community?

Mix of community, rockchip and manufacturers of rockchip devices (not necessarily rock pi, a lot of rk3399 work is common amongst these devices)

[droidhacker]

Better to go with the Rock960. Same board, same schematics, but 96boards instead of the pi shaped horrible horribleness.

[edwaleni]

This opensource work is being done/financed by who? The manufacturer of the chip, the manufacturer of the ROCK Pi or just the community?

It appears much of the work is being done by people associated with Collabora. They are a development consultancy focused on open source solutions.

Since they appear to design software for ARM based streamer boxes, they have expertise in reverse engineering Mali graphics.