ASUS "Tinker Board" Powered By Rockchip ARM SoC, Supports Debian

[pal666]

Do you write assembler programs?

compiler does that for me nowadays

More registers or not, this chip is alot faster

i was comparing architectures, not some concrete implementations, which could easily differ in clock speed by few times

than any 64bit ARM chip thats available right now for such boards.

first hit on google http://linuxgizmos.com/mediateks-96b...ore-helio-x20/

[pal666]

On the contrary, it matters due to 64-bit pointers memory wastage.

if your app is sensitive for this(i really doubt it), i have good news for you: you can use 32bit app on 64bit cpu. though this "wastage" allows aslr and practical use of mmap

As for the number of registers, only the integer registers have been doubled, leaving the number of FP registers (albeit they're 128-bit) unchanged.

yes, they just doubled simd width

[pal666]

That RK3288 CPU supports LPAE instruction or Large PAE, up to 8 GB adress space per process... just to mention that, in case someone think that everything is the same as 32bit x86, it is not

p from pae means physical, and physical is not address space and not per-process. and x86 also has pae. just to mention...

[pal666]

What to say - buy it and try it, probably works

we know for fact that it does not have opengl driver

[pal666]

And the only blob there is the mali userspace driver, but thats ARMs decision.

no, that's rockchips decision to use mali

[pal666]

A53 based which have far less IPC than the A17.

but far more instructions per watt ?

[t.s.]

no, that's rockchips decision to use mali

If they go with others gpu route, it will add to the price. I vote for ARMv8 (like A57) rather than mali.

*edit plus A57

[tmpdir]

Really? https://github.com/rockchip-linux
Bear in mind that the RK3288 is 2 years old (I got my Board long ago), and there is now Wayland support since a few months, and Vulkan support incoming (Rockchip employees show up in IRC regularly).

And the only blob there is the mali userspace driver, but thats ARMs decision.

Are you saying that mali has actually been updated recently? That would be great news for owners

binairy blob drive would be a no go for me though, every linux update hoping for handsouts... no thanks.

p.s. If I would be in the marked for a home server for simple stuff I probably would be eying solutions like this with enough cpu power and low energy consumption. Its just not that interesting for thinkering without open support for me, really like to be independend and vanilla kernels.

[discordian]

Not uptodate with recent updates on that chip, but are you saying that mali has actually been updated recently? binairy blob drive would be a no go for me though, every linux update hoping for handsouts... no thanks.

The kernel-portion is opensource (DRM driver), so you would`nt need to care for updates breaking (more than any other kernel module thats not mainlined). The fitting userspace driver (X11 and OpenGL) is however a binary blob. If thats a KO for you, I cant blame you, for me its a working compromise.

Its however not as bleak as you made it sound, the userspace library was updated 2 weeks ago: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/li...inux-gnueabihf
Features like Wayland, Vulkan, Hardware 4K decoding are added, years after the chip was introduced.

[discordian]

compiler does that for me nowadays
i was comparing architectures, not some concrete implementations, which could easily differ in clock speed by few times

And unless you deal with assembly, you dont care for such details, but how fast and/or efficient the concrete chips are

first hit on google http://linuxgizmos.com/mediateks-96b...ore-helio-x20/

Ok, I was trying hard to buy a A57/A72 2 months ago, and this one wasn`t available anywhere in Europe. Still not easily available for sure, but seems like they are finally trickling in.