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

[Kivada]

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.

This is why AMD's ARM 64 bit Cortex A57 SoC is allot more interesting, since it supports PCIe card slots and SATA, too bad the dev board costs $2500...

[curaga]

I checked up on the MIPS warrior. Apparently the top-end cpu beats Sandy Bridge clock for clock:

http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-p5600-cpu-sets-new-performance-record

[Kivada]

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.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/it-begins-amd-announces-its-first-arm-based-server-soc-64bit8core-opteron-a1100

AMD's ARM board has 10GbitE, support for 128Gb of ram, 8x SATA ports and a few PCIe card slots, downside is cost.

[hoohoo]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/i...-opteron-a1100

AMD's ARM board has 10GbitE, support for 128Gb of ram, 8x SATA ports and a few PCIe card slots, downside is cost.

I like that AMD board, and I sure wish AMD would sell it to mere mortals like us not just to corps. I can't even get AMD to talk to me about it when I use my corporate persona - and I work for a fairly big and well known tech driven e-commerce based company.

NV's Jetson board has GigE, one SATA, and a mini-PCIe, so the tech on ARM is not impossible. 32 bit though and correspondingly less expensive.

This vendor needs to work more on the design. Maybe future iterations will be better.

[Kivada]

I like that AMD board, and I sure wish AMD would sell it to mere mortals like us not just to corps. I can't even get AMD to talk to me about it when I use my corporate persona - and I work for a fairly big and well known tech driven e-commerce based company.

NV's Jetson board has GigE, one SATA, and a mini-PCIe, so the tech on ARM is not impossible. 32 bit though and correspondingly less expensive.

This vendor needs to work more on the design. Maybe future iterations will be better.

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.

[duby229]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/i...-opteron-a1100

AMD's ARM board has 10GbitE, support for 128Gb of ram, 8x SATA ports and a few PCIe card slots, downside is cost.

That's the beastiest arm platform around.

[Kivada]

That's the beastiest arm platform around.

Which is why I caint wait for them to release a finalized product, I want a really overkill ARM based home server.

[duby229]

Which is why I caint wait for them to release a finalized product, I want a really overkill ARM based home server.

Cool, It's an example of mindshare at work. . It's just too bad they don't have a line of lower end products to take advantage of their mindshare better.

If AMD could release the beastiest x86 platform around, they could gain mindshare there as well.

[Kivada]

Cool, It's an example of mindshare at work. . It's just too bad they don't have a line of lower end products to take advantage of their mindshare better.

If AMD could release the beastiest x86 platform around, they could gain mindshare there as well.

Yeah, they're planing on lowed end versions once they have a final release, but why bother with low end if it's not for a specialized embedded application but instead for use as something to experiment on and eventually use as a FreeNAS/PLEX box or even try to run some games on it by sticking in a 290x or the like and seeing if the OSS driver are as fast on ARM as they are on x86.

[duby229]

Yeah, they're planing on lowed end versions once they have a final release, but why bother with low end if it's not for a specialized embedded application but instead for use as something to experiment on and eventually use as a FreeNAS/PLEX box or even try to run some games on it by sticking in a 290x or the like and seeing if the OSS driver are as fast on ARM as they are on x86.

Yeah, You might have to knock out th bit of plastic at the back end of the PCIe slot, but it should work fine.