Libre Computer Board Launches Another Allwinner/Mali ARM SBC

Written by Michael Larabel in Arm on 19 November 2017 at 07:13 AM EST. 28 Comments
ARM
The Tritium is a new ARM single board computer from the Libre Computer Board project.

Earlier this year the first Libre Computer Board launched as the Le Potato for trying to be a libre and free software minded ARM SBC. That board offered better specs than the Raspberry Pi 3 and aimed to be "open" though not fully due to the ARM Mali graphics not being open.

The group has now launched Tritium as a drop-in replacement to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The Tritium though can be equipped with more memory, higher I/O capabilities, 4K video, and supports both Ubuntu and Android.


Their different launch models of the Tritium include:

Tritium IoT: Allwinner H2+, 32-bit, 512MB DDR3, Mali-400MP2, 1080P60, Linux
Tritium 1GB: Allwinner H3, 32-bit, 1GB DDR3, Mali-400MP2, 4K30, Android 7.0, Linux
Tritium 2GB: Allwinner H5, 64-bit, 2GB DDR3, Mali-450MP4, 4K30, Android 7.1, Linux


Pricing can be found at $9 USD for their stripped-down "IoT" board, $19 for their 1GB board, or $29 for their 64-bit quad-core 2GB board.

The Mali graphics remain the least open part of the system. To the Mali driver situation they write, "Initiatives to develop an open source driver never achieve the critical mass to provide resources to drive adoption by the community. Due to the number of deployments with this 3D GPU series, we know that having this would open new possibilities. We really want this to happen and have contributed resources to this effort. We will continue contribute resources when presented the opportunity to affect meaningful progress on this front."

With most of the Allwinner support already being upstream thanks to the linux-sunxi folks, they hope to soon have upstream support for the Tritium DeviceTree so that this ARM SBC can be soon running out-of-the-box on the mainline kernel.

More details on the Tritium can be found via Kickstarter. They expect to begin shipping these Raspberry Pi alternatives in January.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week