HiKey: An 8-Core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 Board For $129 USD, But With One Sad Flaw

[droidhacker]

The 64-bit is hardly a marketing gimmick. That newer arch has significant performance gains.

Yes. When you're doing math on really really really big numbers that nobody normally does.

[torsionbar28]

(Though any half-decent Intel chip could be better when it comes to bang-for-the-buck.)

"intel chip" and "bang for your buck" simply do not go together.

[torsionbar28]

Yes. When you're doing math on really really really big numbers that nobody normally does.

There's more to it than that. 64 bit chips provide more general purpose registers, which benefit application performance all around. There are many benchmarks out there showing the same application performing faster when running in 64 bit mode vs. 32 bit mode on the same machine. When there are more registers, there is less need to write persistent data to memory and then have to read it back just a few instructions later. Function calls are also faster in a 64-bit environment because as many as four arguments at a time can be passed in registers to a function.

[hoohoo]

It's a development board, they aren't unobtainable, just exspensive at $2500 each, since they are limited run and of course buggy, since the point of a dev board is to hammer out the funky bits for the general product release later on.

Well my friend, I was unable to obtain one, and I tried.