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

[rdnetto]

Guys, they're called 96 boards for a reason. They are literally releasing 96 boards at this price point, with a defined minimum feature-set and standardized expansion/GPIO headers. This has the potential to be very, very interesting, and the standardization means that Ethernet, SATA, etc. daughterboards shouldn't be long in the making.

[cutterjohn]

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.

But really, do you need more than one or two cores to work with such tiny datasets?

That's the point that we're trying to make, why keep packing these SoCs with more and more cores(granted half of them are usually the extra gimped ARM cores) and still put a paltry 1GB of RAM on them. Even MORE to the point WTF make them 64b at all if you're going to continue doing this? There's no real gain to be had and "64b" features could just as readily be implemented for 32b(but yeah ARM's a fscked arch) especially when you're NOT going to use more than 4GB of RAM in your implementations. It's just silly, more like a hey, everyone else is 64b and damnit we must be as well even though we have no good reason to be so yet or in the forseeable future(the way things are going). They may as well just have extended the address bus, then they could say well we can address more RAM directly even if no one cares/uses it w/o the hassle of implementing a full 64b design. (Is it even a full 64b design yet?)

[uid313]

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

Who said anything about A15 and A7?
I was thinking a cluster of four A53 cores and a cluster of four A57 cores.

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

Oh yeah?
But wouldn't a big.LITTLE architecture consisting of four A53 cores and four A57 cores be better than eight A53 cores?

[duby229]

The only time big.LITTLE makes any sense is if you need to run a multilib with both 32bit arm binaries and 64bit arm binaries. Otherwise if you can go all out 64bit, it doesn't make any sense.

[Kemosabe]

Is it really that hard to build ARM boards with 4GB RAM, Sata, Gigabit ethernet and good GPU drivers?
8 cores are my least desire and without eth/ram it is really hard to imagine what to do with this board.

[Krysto]

1GB is fine unless you want to run Windows on it.

[curaga]

Now we need a cheap Power8 board, then do a bench of armv8 vs power8 vs MIPS warrior.

[johnc]

The only time big.LITTLE makes any sense is if you need to run a multilib with both 32bit arm binaries and 64bit arm binaries. Otherwise if you can go all out 64bit, it doesn't make any sense.

It's only real purpose was for power savings.

[duby229]

It's only real purpose was for power savings.

Well, that makes even more sense. But still, it would have to be big.VeryLITTLE. Todays architectures are getting very good at shutting down unused parts of the die.

[schmidtbag]

Is it really that hard to build ARM boards with 4GB RAM, Sata, Gigabit ethernet and good GPU drivers?
8 cores are my least desire and without eth/ram it is really hard to imagine what to do with this board.

4GB of RAM should be doable, though for most ARM platforms it isn't necessary by any means. There are ARM boards with SATA and gigabit ethernet though. Good GPU drivers... yeah, I'd like that too. The problem with ARM is, to my knowledge, there is no PCIe bus. So yeah, it is actually legitimately hard to add features we take for granted in x86 PCs.

@Krysto
1GB is fine if you're using it strictly as a server with tasks that involve a lot of shared memory. Otherwise, it's pretty lacking for 8 cores. 2GB should be the bare minimum for an 8-core ARM system with a GUI. RAM is cheap these days. I'd rather spend the extra $5-10 on another GB and not have to worry about every little byte.