Allwinner A64 Support Being Worked On For Mainline Kernel

[caligula]

Could you link Orange for $15? I bough one from Alien Express only with case and 1 dolar cable, without charger, card and heatsinks etc.. for $28 buck month ago.

Same alien express shop:

http://www.aliexpress.com/store/prod...448079125.html

I've bought two for $15 a piece. No shipping costs. No import tax, no customs duties. Dirt cheap. Now waiting for mainline support in 2016 or 2017.

[SystemCrasher]

ARM SBC's really aren't a workhorse, if you're putting it under continual stress such that it builds a lot of heat, then you're probably using the wrong equipment. Consider something with active cooling, or add active cooling to the SBC.

Well, it really depends. Quite many people are using Allwinner A20 stuff and somesuch for NAS-like or microserver-like things these days. Because they are cheap, small and relatively low power. As for heat, one can choose between heat and performance - frequencies are adjustable. Things like H3 can be interesting in this regard as well, even if they lack SATA, they told to have 4 independent USB ports not sharing bandwidth. And so, attaching several drives can give one both redundancy, good storage size and acceptable speed as well. Sure, it would be better to have like 4 SATAs, but boards coming with 4 SATAs are nowhere close to $15-30 and much worse in terms of size, power consumption and so on. And you see, with $15 boards one can build whole mini-CDN or something similar. Single $150 board would not beat it :P

And I do not get what's your trouble. If you want android, there're plenty of tablets or tv boxes running it already. Sure, they are not very customizable. But Android is a platform for consumers, it isn't geat for anything else anyway. It usually runs very crippled Linux kernel, its libc is a crap, there is almost no advanced tools and overall it dumbed down quite a lot. If that's not what you want, it is very likely you want to take a look on real Linux instead. Sure, it haves own shortcomings, but at least it does not considers users are idots. Even if your users aren't exactly smart, such approach makes system customization pain in the rear. It's not hard to dumb things down, but really hard to do the opposite thing.

[SystemCrasher]

As long as there isn't even a single reference board available or any non-academic institution behind it,

Well, not sure about RISC V, but OpenRISC got fairly widespread to the date and you can find it in a large numbers of designs. Some ppl created ASICs using it. And do not have to pay royalties "just because they need some auxillary CPU". Some people use it as CPU in their FPGA designs, when they need something smarter than bare hardware. Btw, some Allwinner chips are running "lite" (MMU-less, relatively low clocks) version of OpenRISC core, meant for advanced power/frequency/wakeup management, much like modern GPUs are doing it, etc. So OpenRISC already presents in MILLIONS of chips. Not too bad, eh? There is also 64-bit version of OpenRISC and plenty of on-chip modules. They also integrate with infamous SystemC thing, which seems to be new major trend in IC industry. Actually it starts to look like a fairly decent "IC maker's tool chain". Tee-hee. There is looooong road to go. But it would happen.

And if ARM would continue to be bitches like they are (uhm, yeah, I'm about GPUs, etc) - they can count there will be more and more of demand on solutions without bitching vendors attached. ARM haves good CPU cores. But they are so proprietary minded dealing with them is just a PITA. And it is especially shameful since most of ARM designs are running Linux, so there is simply no excuse for being such an awful proprietary bitches. Speaking for myself, I would gladly switch to something like OpenRISC in my hardware, should there appear some good options. Whatever, I had enough of roadblocks from ARM in regards of 3D graphics in Linux systems and I'm really not fond of it. So if someone wants to displace ARM from their warm place and can provide better terms - they are warmly welcome.

[SystemCrasher]

I can also admit Olimex is developing open hardware board based on this CPU. And best of all: they do it in opensource KiCad CAD program, so you no longer have to pay for wunduz-only CAD stuff to join the fun - now you can use any OS where KiCad runs to do it (though recent versions of KICad require at least some OpenGL for full experience, else their brand new PCB router would not work for you). Finally open hardware made with open software. That's how it supposed to be . Yepp, that's a hint to various half-proprietary Raspberry Pi and somesuch.

[unixfan2001]

Not agree RISK V is the real ISA arm will be dead !

It is real open ISA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD-njD2QKN0

Good artists innovate. Great artists ship.

As long as there isn't even a single reference board available or any non-academic institution behind it, it's essentially vapourware.
Doesn't matter how more efficient it is or whether it's the "real deal", when people can't buy it they'll pick the alternatives instead.

[darkblu]

I need mine for running Android, but the boards work well with Freedreno. Throttling is not apparent, but I haven't paid any attention to it, nor do I care. You'll never get it to the shutdown temperature without blasting the soc with a torch -- reason why it throttles; get (and keep) the chip down at a workload where it can't reach the shutdown temperature. ARM SBC's really aren't a workhorse, if you're putting it under continual stress such that it builds a lot of heat, then you're probably using the wrong equipment. Consider something with active cooling, or add active cooling to the SBC.

Thanks for the info - good that Freedreno works well with this board. Re you 'ARM SBCs aren't a workhorse' - I beg to disagree - there are plenty of use cases for such boards outside of android where they are expected to perform consistently under nominal workloads. So throttling can be a factor. And yes, some SBCs do shutdown under prolonged full loads. Anyways, I know how to actively cool an SBC, I was merely asking for numbers if you had any. A simple 'I don't have any' would have sufficed. Thanks again.

[ruthan]

Orange Pi PC is $15.

So yes, Orange Pi PC is $30 if you include SD cards, charger, usb cables, hdmi cables, wifi dongle, bt dongle, UART TTL dongle, few leds

Raspberry Pi is $30, the board.

Could you link Orange for $15? I bough one from Alien Express only with case and 1 dolar cable, without charger, card and heatsinks etc.. for $28 buck month ago.

[droidhacker]

I've been considering one of those for some time now. How's the GPU support on the 410? And how's the temperature control - much throttling? And what's the shutdown temp of the SoC, and does it get anywhere near it under stress?

I need mine for running Android, but the boards work well with Freedreno. Throttling is not apparent, but I haven't paid any attention to it, nor do I care. You'll never get it to the shutdown temperature without blasting the soc with a torch -- reason why it throttles; get (and keep) the chip down at a workload where it can't reach the shutdown temperature. ARM SBC's really aren't a workhorse, if you're putting it under continual stress such that it builds a lot of heat, then you're probably using the wrong equipment. Consider something with active cooling, or add active cooling to the SBC.

[droidhacker]

Where is written "less powerful" should read "more power efficient". Come on, less than what, specifically? These A53 cores extract as much performance from a Watt as is physically possible currently. Lesser performance per Hertz, greater performance per Watt. You choose your priorities.

One could presume that the comparison is against its runningmate, the A57. Compared to that, it is certainly "less powerful", and possibly more efficient. Not necessarily under all workloads though. How does an A53 perform in terms of efficiency when cranked, compared to an A57 running low-mid?

Your statement is also only relevant when comparing it to other arm64 chips, not against 32bit chips, most particularly like Krait. Krait is both more ENERGY efficient AND more PERFORMANT than A53. But alas, Krait is just 32bit.

[lilos]

Where is written "less powerful" should read "more power efficient". Come on, less than what, specifically? These A53 cores extract as much performance from a Watt as is physically possible currently. Lesser performance per Hertz, greater performance per Watt. You choose your priorities.

Not agree RISK V is the real ISA arm will be dead !

It is real open ISA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD-njD2QKN0