Linaro & Co Are Working On An ARM 24-Core Desktop / Developer Box

[starshipeleven]

Good board for its main target (development board and IoT-swarm-control-station). Kinda expensive (i've seen much worse, like 2.5k for a total crap devboard for a crap SoC), but I assume that it's just because its production runs are tiny.

Linaro is fighting the good battle here.

[starshipeleven]

I don't know which SAS/SATA PCIe controller would work on such a system, since the ROM on those cards requires X86/X86-64 in order to initialize

IBM servers with Power processors can use SAS controllers too, can't speak for sata PCIe cards (that are usually total shit that has issues even on Linux and x86_64).

[starshipeleven]

Will it have an APU or just the CPU?

No onboard GPU, this is a headless system.
You can probably add a GPU on PCIe slots if you want.

[speculatrix]

You can buy a lot of Khadas Vim boards for this kind of money.

[microcode]

My problem with this board is that the CPU is way too weak for anything that is not embedded. Even for specialized servers. The only reasonable thing I can think of this thing to do is to be a GPU deep learning server. The ultra low power cores can help reduce the power consumption. But the board is marked towards desktop and have really limited # of PCIe lannes? WTF are the devs thinking.
If it is designed to be a small demo/evaluation version board for a scalable server SoC that the silicons can be connected together to form a more powerful one. Making it a ARM version of the Epiphany processor. It's way too expensive. The thing can be beaten easily by a GPU or (hopefully) an array of Ryzen chips interconnecting.

I'm really confused what point this board is trying to make

It's for building, testing, and debugging software on ARMv8. Ideally it'd have more DIMM slots, and more PCIe lanes, but that may just be a limitation of the SoC.

[starshipeleven]

You can buy a lot of Khadas Vim boards for this kind of money.

Did you just mention a Mali-equipped board whose "opensource" kernel is stuck on 3.something in this thread?

[audi.rs4]

Am I the only one who sees this board as looking so plain? The motherboard has so much space of just open PCB. Not like x86 boards at all.

[GraceAsylum]

The new board with the RK3399 looks interesting.

https://www.96rocks.com/

[Tomin]

I wonder what the DIP switches are for.

[starshipeleven]

Am I the only one who sees this board as looking so plain? The motherboard has so much space of just open PCB. Not like x86 boards at all.

I see it too, but I think it's normal. This thing basically has all it needs inside the SoC and power regulation is a total joke because the SoC is using 5W, not 95W.