96Boards Officially Launches The HiKey 960 ARM Board

[mulenmar]

This is getting ridiculous; we have more than enough of these ARM toy-boards, with- and without a phone modem, battery, and LCD screen attached.

How hard is it to put an aarch64 CPU on a mini-ATX board, with dual-channel DDR3/4 RAM, a couple PCIe x8/x16 slots, and some PCI slots? Let people buy and install their own audio, Ethernet, and USB 3 controller cards, if you REALLY want to be cheap about it.

It's enough to make me wish the AmigaOne X5000 wasn't so expensive (and limited to USB 2, and using embedded-tech PPC). >_> Or that the EOMA68 project's hardware was out already.

[starshipeleven]

It is still thoughtful and nice for hardware post of odds and ends of stuff like this. I am thankful for all the news on Phoronix even if its something I am not really that interested in. It still can make for interesting conversation and I find other peoples opinions useful/entertaining.

[starshipeleven]

How hard is it to put an aarch64 CPU on a mini-ATX board, with dual-channel DDR3/4 RAM, a couple PCIe x8/x16 slots, and some PCI slots? Let people buy and install their own audio, Ethernet, and USB 3 controller cards, if you REALLY want to be cheap about it.

These things are mostly using SoCs that come from Mobile segment so they aim at small size, high integration, low price and lack of any form of half-serious connectivity. (note the "low price")
It's already great if they have a couple PCIe lines and USB 3.0.

For a semi-decent x86-lookalike with an ARM chip you'd have to look at stuff aimed at networking equipment (router/NAS/firewall) by Marvell and others, and that's usually rather pricey and they don't really have much incentive to help you as they sell well already (Mobile is a far less funny market to be in, if you aren't Qualcomm anyway).

Also with the fact that most higher-end SoCs come in a "main module" that has RAM/MMC/stuff + the actual SoC ready to be mounted on a daughterboard that only expands connectivity (because cost reasons, usually), again means it's even harder to get true PC-like freedom. Here an example http://linuxgizmos.com/com-runs-linu...armada-xp-soc/

I really think the only one that can actually do anything about this is AMD (as they can simply have their x86 mobos work for their ARM chips too and afaik it was in their plans), and I really hope they eventually put their ARM plans in effect after all x86 Ryzen have been released.

[mulenmar]

x86 is meat for strong men and ARM is milk for babes.

If I really truly want be honest I could completely do without modern ARM all together. I find a lot of irritations in wireless stuff and how they have really become a nuisance in our modern day lives of increasing complexity. I have certain protocols that I have implemented to reduce the amount of irritation these mobile things that are up everyones ass all the time.

x86 is milk for babes, with far too few registers. x86_64 FTW! ...if we're going to start with this missing-the-point waste of time.

You're also conflating the CPU architecture used with the product it's used in. (Heck, until early last year, there were Intel Atoms in some phones.) Conflating the two is like complaining about all cars just because the engine in your Geo Metro went out.

[coder]

Your numbers look completely off. Even ARM's own marketing materials for the A73 only cites 2x single thread performance over the A53, and only 30% better multi-thread performance at eight cores. Since th Pi only has 4 cores, lets say maybe 60% better for multi-threaded performance. Source: https://community.arm.com/processors...mobile-designs

According to this, the A73 is > 2.8x as fast per-clock as the A53:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ARMv8-A_cores

When you factor in the clock speed delta, the per-core performance of the HiKey 960's A73s jumps to over 5.6 times the lowly Pi 3. And that's not even considering its A53 cores, that are clocked 50% higher than the Pi. So, even assuming some memory contention, LoveRPi's estimate of 3x is really on the low side.

What hole did you even pull the 10-100 times faster GPU number from? The Pi has an old GPU, to be sure, but big, and as far as I know there are no benchmarks that can give you any comparison points.

The Pi 3's GPU is estimated at 28.8 GFLOPS (although I don't see any OpenCL support, so they might not do you much good), whereas the Mali-G71 MP8 is estimated at 244.8 GFLOPS (http://kyokojap.myweb.hinet.net/gpu_gflops/), yielding an 8.5x speed up. As the GPU of the Pi 1 & 2 only achieved 24 GFLOPS, that would be a 10x speedup.

I agree that 100x seems a bit out there. Maybe on some poorly-written software or something very sensitive to the amount of on-chip storage, you could see a non-linear multiple like that, but it's a bit of a head-scratcher.

[coder]

This is getting ridiculous; we have more than enough of these ARM toy-boards, with- and without a phone modem, battery, and LCD screen attached.

People building robots probably love these boards. If a the latest Nvidia Tegra is too big, expensive, or power-hungry, but you really need some compute horsepower, then this could fit the bill.

How hard is it to put an aarch64 CPU on a mini-ATX board, with dual-channel DDR3/4 RAM, a couple PCIe x8/x16 slots, and some PCI slots? Let people buy and install their own audio, Ethernet, and USB 3 controller cards, if you REALLY want to be cheap about it.

Well, I was waiting for a long time for ARM boards to start shipping in NUC-sized mini-STX form factors. But it still hasn't happened. So, I just replaced the Pi I used as a micro-server with a mini-ITX Apollo Lake board. Mini-ITX is really bigger than I wanted, but I got sold on some of its other benefits and its performance is closer to this thing. Plus, it's still passively cooled.