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

[phoronix]

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

96Boards, the open hardware specification for ARM boards out of the Linaro Community Board Group, has out their first ARM board certified against their consumer edition standard...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=96Boards-HiKey-8-Core-ARMv8

[Isedonde]

I'd rather get the Raspi 2. Sure, the CPU sucks compared to this eight core chip, but there's only so much you can do with just 1GB of RAM. Maybe some computing use cases are fine with just 1GB, but require all the CPU power they can get, in which case this board might be quite interesting. (Though any half-decent Intel chip could be better when it comes to bang-for-the-buck.)

[Displacer]

Rasppi2 also has free video drivers unlike mali

[cjcox]

Actually 1GB is quite a bit for most applications. Really only a problem if you're going to try to make the thing into a desktop or something like that. With that said, maybe memory is cheap? So maybe 2G is the low bar now?

You have to remember that most all commercial set top/applicance things have less memory in them.

[johnc]

The iPhone and iPad Mini only have 1 GB of RAM.

[uid313]

Cortex-A57

Too bad it only have Cortex-A53 and no cluster of Cortex-A57 with big.LITTLE architecture.

[schmidtbag]

Too bad it only have Cortex-A53 and no cluster of Cortex-A57 with big.LITTLE architecture.

I think I'd prefer 8x A53 cores than 4x A15 and 4x A7 cores.

HiKey seems very impressive overall but the 1GB of RAM is pretty stupid. 2GB would be "adequate" but still a bit on the low side. On ARM, I feel that you should have at least 512MB per-core to have a highly functional system. On x86, I'd say 1.5GB per-core/thread (obviously this changes depending on what you do, but 1.5GB per core is enough for the average task).

[wizard69]

Too bad it only have Cortex-A53 and no cluster of Cortex-A57 with big.LITTLE architecture.

Big.LITTLE is highly overrated. I'd much rather have all cores equal in capability.

[hoohoo]

It needs ethernet. SATA would be nice too. More GPIO would be useful.

Nive try, but it seems like the vendor should have done a survey of what successful prior art has been in the SBC market.

[Ardje]

On x86, I'd say 1.5GB per-core/thread (obviously this changes depending on what you do, but 1.5GB per core is enough for the average task).

I can actually acknowledge that i386 binaries are huge, then amd64 binaries, then armv5 and the smallest is armv7 in non-thumb normal debian binaries.
i386 binaries are about 2x the size of an armv7 on same distribution comparisons.