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

[phoronix]

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

Slipping under our radar back during the recent Linaro Connect event in San Francisco was word that Linaro, Gigabyte, and Socionext are coming together to produce an interesting microATX-based, 24 x ARM Cortex-A53 desktop / developer box...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=24-Core-ARM-mATX-Desktop

[Nille]

For an 24 x Cores Cortex-A53 its a huge amount of Money. And with only 5W TDP i guess the Performance for Development is more a Joke compared the x86 Systems with Crosscompile and a ARM-CPU Emulation.

[rubdos]

That'd make an interesting NAS, given the PCIe ports. One can easily add SATA/SAS controllers now.

[Nille]

That'd make an interesting NAS, given the PCIe ports. One can easily add SATA/SAS controllers now.

to expensive for that usage. the 5W is without memory and you need extra Controller for the Harddrives.

[marty1885]

to expensive for that usage. the 5W is without memory and you need extra Controller for the Harddrives.

It is way too expensive. But there are sata ports on the thing. You don't need extra controllers.

[Nille]

You don't need extra controllers.

Just 2 of them. Even a 50$ Mainboard with a CPU has 4. I would by something like an Supermicro X11SAA, it has 6 SATA Ports, a M2 Slot and 6W TDP. The biggest Limitation is the Memory Configuration, only 1 Slot for 8GB.

[marty1885]

I would love this board if they sell the thing in half of the price with more power consumption.
It got everything it will ever need as a desktop/HPC dev board. Heck it got PCIe to plug a GPU in. But it is too slow and too experience.
I can only think of one thing it can do well : Be a deep learning training server with a low power CPU to save some power and train everything on a GPU. So bad.

[hetzbh]

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

[marty1885]

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

Why? I believe you can poke some registors in the correct way to initialize them. If firmware blob is needed, just send it.
There is no reason why an x86 processor is needed. You can initialize a PCIe and a SATA controller with a RISC V core if you want to.

[Modu]

Will it have an APU or just the CPU?