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

[alpha_one_x86]

Too expensive, you have similar computing power + 16GB memory for 500$

[schmidtbag]

Everything I'm looking for in an ARM board, except the price. I wish there were more ARM boards with swappable PCIe cards, DIMMs, and SATA while being compatible with desktop chassis. I'd have bought one for my home server if one existed for a reasonable price.

Also, they could've effortlessly made this a Flex ATX board (basically a micro ATX narrow enough to not need the extra 2 screw holes you see at the bottom of the image).

[torsionbar28]

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

I don't think this is true. I've installed modern SATA cards in a 1990's era DEC Alpha and they worked fine. You can't boot from them of course, you'd have to boot from the two onboard SATA ports on this ARM board, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to use SAS or SATA controllers provided the Linux kernel supports them.

[UseLinuxNotWindows]

If only somebody would come out with a DECENT ARM based motherboard for NAS purposes! How about (say) 8 x SATA ports as well as dual NICs. Built-in open source supported graphics adaptor (like the Broadcom ones that Eric Anholt is working on) like the AMD APUs would be fine. If I had enough knowledge/time then I would work on an open source MALI driver. For me, 16 x CPUs + (say) VC5 graphics would be OK. If somebody could produce a turbocharged Pi-like device with

* 8 or 16 core 64 bit ARM SOC capable of addressing over 4GB of RAM - say up to 16GB with SODIMM slots
* VC5 graphics (or get ARM to open source MALI properly)
* 4 x USB 3.x channels (would do instead of SATA if USB was fast enough - through USB 3.0 to SATA adaptors)
* Decent 2 x 1GB network channels

Even if this board was (say) $200+ then it would be a killer.

I have a Pine64 board connected to (and powered by) a beefy USB 2.0 hub which also powers 2 x 3TB laptop drives (with USB to SATA converters). Even this humble little board (which has plenty of problems and shortcomings) can stream data quite happily at 30MB/sec+ through 1Gbit Ethernet as a NAS running Ubuntu Server 16.04 (for ARM).

A Pi-killer (like the dream one I have mentioned above) would also work as a lightish-weight laptop. I have a Pinebook with 2GB RAM and 64GB eMMC and that is a great little Netbook (running Ubuntu Mate skinned like Linux Mint Mate).

Come one guys - it cannot be THAT hard to produce a decent ARM NAS motherboard or developer class ARM laptop.

[linuxgeex]

All the folks crying that this would have been a great NAS board if only... and the complete lack of people saying how sweet this would be for development are making a point that whoever invented this board was a moron.

Nobody would ever buy a 24-core Atom as a Workstation. Every developer wants a responsive desktop. Every IDE has a sadly single-threaded text editor with sadly single-threaded lexer and sadly single-threaded code completion. Not in a million years would I step back from an Intel Core to an Atom for development, what in God's name were they thinking? Oh wait... "Developers need lots of cores to compile fast" - and they completely forgot that compiling is only one piece of the puzzle. It should have 2 A72 cores minimum if it's going to be a workstation.

[robclark]

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

Shouldn't be a problem.. they are using a cute trick w/ libqemu in edk2 to run the x86 option roms from PCI cards. I've seen it running w/ both nv and amd pci cards. EFI GOP works just fine (bios setup menu, and everything you would expect on an x86 system).

[coder111]

You forgot one thing for a NAS box- ECC memory support.

Oh, and AFAIK Vivante GPUs have decent Linux support, as do Adreno ones. But I don't see a board like this using a Qualcomm chip.

If I had to build a NAS box today, I'd probably stick with x86 and buy a Ryzen 1300 with a mini-ITX mobo. Mostly because they are cheap, fast, and they do support ECC (unofficially, but who cares). Server oriented low-power CPUs are an option, but price/performance isn't great.

Oh, and there were Linux+ARM based netbooks ~2009. They never reached the market. There were stories of Microsoft representatives talking to different OEMs in an exhibition and Linux+ARM netbooks disappearing the next day. Today I guess there are some Chromebooks...

If only somebody would come out with a DECENT ARM based motherboard for NAS purposes! ....

[robclark]

All the folks crying that this would have been a great NAS board if only... and the complete lack of people saying how sweet this would be for development are making a point that whoever invented this board was a moron.

Nobody would ever buy a 24-core Atom as a Workstation. Every developer wants a responsive desktop. Every IDE has a sadly single-threaded text editor with sadly single-threaded lexer and sadly single-threaded code completion. Not in a million years would I step back from an Intel Core to an Atom for development, what in God's name were they thinking? Oh wait... "Developers need lots of cores to compile fast" - and they completely forgot that compiling is only one piece of the puzzle. It should have 2 A72 cores minimum if it's going to be a workstation.

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the point of this system. No one would ever buy a 24 core atom workstation because there are better inexpensive options in the x86 world. That isn't really true with aarch64 SBSA/SBBR systems[1. This is a relatively (compared to a server) cheap thing that kernel and other dev's can stick under their desk and actually use.

[1] ie. things that have UEFI/ACPI and various standard hw interfaces that you expect in the desktop/server world.. not talking about rpi3/db410c devicetree type boards here

[SyXbiT]

24 core with ultra slow single threaded performance. What a terrible idea. It should be a multi (16+) core ARM Cortex A73 (or better, the upcoming A75). You don't need the low power cores on desktop/server. They're designed for mobile use to save power.

[schmidtbag]

Nobody would ever buy a 24-core Atom as a Workstation. Every developer wants a responsive desktop. Every IDE has a sadly single-threaded text editor with sadly single-threaded lexer and sadly single-threaded code completion. Not in a million years would I step back from an Intel Core to an Atom for development, what in God's name were they thinking? Oh wait... "Developers need lots of cores to compile fast" - and they completely forgot that compiling is only one piece of the puzzle. It should have 2 A72 cores minimum if it's going to be a workstation.

That's because it isn't really a workstation, but more like a test platform. Also, since when are IDEs so demanding on CPU that an ARM device would struggle to handle it? The most CPU-intensive IDE I've ever used (that would be compatible with Linux+ARM) is Atom, and I'm sure that would be still be usable on any ARMv8 platform. I think you're blowing the performance issues out of proportion.