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Though the Dragon Board looks great, the specs on the HiKey board are even more impressive [1, 2], but I haven't found anyone selling them yet. There is a varia

by jcr 11y ago

Though the Dragon Board looks great, the specs on the HiKey board are even more impressive [1, 2], but I haven't found anyone selling them yet. There is a variation of the HiKey board made by LeMaker that has more RAM [3]. The 96boards "Enterprise Edition" boards are just stunning [4, 5] and have two DDR3 SO-DIMM sockets, but again, they aren't shipping yet. [1] https://www.96boards.org/products/ce/hikey/ https://www.96boards.org/products/ce/hikey/ [2] http://www.em.avnet.com/en-us/design/drc/Pages/HiKey-board.aspx http://www.em.avnet.com/en-us/design/drc/Pages/HiKey-board.a... [3] http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/09/23/lemaker-hikey-96boards-development-board-comes-with-1-to-2gb-ram-sells-for-75-and-up/ http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/09/23/lemaker-hikey-96board... [4] http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/06/28/amd-announces-96boards-enterprise-edition-server-board-powered-by-opteron-a1100-processor/ http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/06/28/amd-announces-96board... [5] https://community.amd.com/community/amd-business/blog/2015/06/23/extending-arm-s-ecosystem-for-server-developers https://community.amd.com/community/amd-business/blog/2015/0...

tbr 11y ago
I got mine from Arrow(US) in July. They suspended shipping at some point after that due to missing FCC tests, but you could still get the board if you signed a waiver. The HiKey board has different pros and cons. Pro: It's received a lot more engineering time, as it was the first 96board. Actual open source first stage bootloader, from what I can tell. Con: WiLink8 WiFi; Initially unobtainium as "produced" by Circuitco in homeopathic doses; HiSilicon also needs quite some proprietary blobs for things. So far ALL 96borads have their problems and surprisingly all of them seem to violate the LINARO/96boards spec in multiple ways.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  I think there were hardware bugs on a lot of the Hikey wifi boards too. Mine always failed in the driver and I ended up using USB Ethernet after rebuilding the kernel. The onboard eMMC is also extremely slow, luckily it's easy to switch it to boot off a microSD instead. The kernel forked at 3.17 and hasn't been updated since. So far I'm pretty disappointed, both hardware and software wise. I find it surprising Linaro would put their name on this, I really hope this isn't the "reference" for quality.

by jcr 11y ago

tbr 11y ago

I got mine from Arrow(US) in July. They suspended shipping at some point after that due to missing FCC tests, but you could still get the board if you signed a waiver. The HiKey board has different pros and cons. Pro: It's received a lot more engineering time, as it was the first 96board. Actual open source first stage bootloader, from what I can tell. Con: WiLink8 WiFi; Initially unobtainium as "produced" by Circuitco in homeopathic doses; HiSilicon also needs quite some proprietary blobs for things. So far ALL 96borads have their problems and surprisingly all of them seem to violate the LINARO/96boards spec in multiple ways.

TD-Linux 11y ago
I think there were hardware bugs on a lot of the Hikey wifi boards too. Mine always failed in the driver and I ended up using USB Ethernet after rebuilding the kernel. The onboard eMMC is also extremely slow, luckily it's easy to switch it to boot off a microSD instead. The kernel forked at 3.17 and hasn't been updated since. So far I'm pretty disappointed, both hardware and software wise. I find it surprising Linaro would put their name on this, I really hope this isn't the "reference" for quality.