3 ms·

He's going to have to revisit this when the Pine A64 ships. Also if you're willing to step up to the $99 price level, you should check out the Geekbox. RK3368 S

He's going to have to revisit this when the Pine A64 ships. Also if you're willing to step up to the $99 price level, you should check out the Geekbox. RK3368 SOC, 8-core Cortex-A53 at 1.5GHz, 2GB RAM. http://www.geekbox.tv/ http://www.geekbox.tv/ I've been porting some stuff to it lately, along with a Ugoos UT4 (same chip) and my old Raspberry Pi. I've also pre-ordered an AMD Opteron A1100 board. http://lenovator.com/product/103.html http://lenovator.com/product/103.html Will be interesting to see how AMD's Cortex-A57 performs compared to these other Cortex-A53s.

mmphosis 11y ago
The pi are good enough for my purposes. Depending on what you want to do, at the $99 price level I started looking at http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-ITX/ http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-ITX/
- morganvachon 11y ago
  I had the N3700 version of that board, and as a base for building a Windows 10 machine, it was very nice for the price. But Linux support for the onboard video was terrible, so I ultimately gave it to a friend who needed a Win10 media center PC. Once Intel starts officially supporting the Braswell/CherryView GPU in Linux (and it might by now; I got rid of it before the 4.4 kernel was released which supposedly supported it), it will make for an excellent, quiet Linux workstation or special purpose board.
- hyc_symas 11y ago
  Mainly what I want to do is use ARM64 and abandon Intel, so I don't look at options like that. It's pretty clear that the x86 ISA has retarded the state of the art in computing for the past couple decades. The byzantine encodings make it mathematically impossible to write an optimal compiler for today's x86 instruction set. http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx05_vx64.htm http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx05_vx64.htm http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx06_rmw.htm http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx06_rmw.htm Of course, compiler writers still chase after greater performance, which leads to optimizations of questionable value (and demonstrable harm). http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307 http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307 Throw away all that cruft, use a clean instruction set, and compilers can go back to being small and fast, easily generating output that is also small and fast.
- arm 11y ago
  Kind of pathetic of them to use the Transmission icon¹ without attribution or permission in their marketing² materials³ though. ―――――― ¹ — https://www.transmissionbt.com/ https://www.transmissionbt.com/ ² — http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/9-Power%20Gear(L).png http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/9-Power%20Gear(L).png ³ — http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/PowerGear-2.jpg http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/PowerGear-2.jpg
mastax 11y ago
Thanks for linking the A1100 board. I was searching for one of those but couldn't find one. It's always a bit disappointing when these small companies release complicated boards like this, though, the price is never competitive with more mass market stuff. I could get an Intel desktop CPU and motherboard for $150, though I guess that's missing the point.
- rwmj 11y ago
  There are a lot of differences between Odroid/Dragonboard and the AMD A1100-based Cello. The former boards are essentially Android phone/tablet chips with the minimal amount of support circuitry to put them on a development board, and the result is of course very cheap, owing to the sheer volume of Android chips being sold. However boards like the AMD Cello, the Gigabyte MP30-AR0, the Huskyboard, have server chips in them, external DIMMs (the Gigabyte takes up to 128GB of RAM), real SATA, PCIe slots, multiple ethernet (Gigabyte has 5 x ethernet, 2 running at 10Gbps), IPMI and so on. They also conform to the SBSA/SBBR standard so you can boot RHEL and (in the near future) Windows on them. The cost of this is significant - a fully equipped AMD Cello (with case, RAM, SDD, etc) is going to be US$600. A fully equipped Gigabyte w/32 GB of RAM and an SDD will set you back US$1000+, but you're getting a real server for that money. More about the Gigabyte board on my blog: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=mp30 https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=mp30
  - hyc_symas 11y ago
    That looks pretty good too, was wondering how X-Gene fares. In the meantime, there's still quite a gap between cheap phone SOCs and server boards. Nothing really in the middle, desktop/laptop space - 2 DIMM slots and a modest set of SATA/PCIe ports.
    - rwmj 11y ago
      The X-gene 1 is a 3 year old design in 40nm [1]. It's not blazingly fast, but it's a reliable workhorse that boots the upstream kernel out of the box. The AMD A1100 is much newer, with the excellent superscalar Cortex-A57 core (but only 4 of them). I believe that's the space that the Huskyboard and Cello are meant to occupy, although you may well think the price -- $300 just for the board -- is not exactly in that gap, and I'd agree. I have the Cello on order, and will blog about it once I receive it, expected in a month or two. [1] http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/HC26-11-day1-epub/HC26.11-4-ARM-Servers-epub/HC26.11.430-X-Gene-Singh-AppMicro-HotChips-2014-v5.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/...

mmphosis 11y ago

The pi are good enough for my purposes. Depending on what you want to do, at the $99 price level I started looking at http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-ITX/ http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-ITX/

morganvachon 11y ago
I had the N3700 version of that board, and as a base for building a Windows 10 machine, it was very nice for the price. But Linux support for the onboard video was terrible, so I ultimately gave it to a friend who needed a Win10 media center PC. Once Intel starts officially supporting the Braswell/CherryView GPU in Linux (and it might by now; I got rid of it before the 4.4 kernel was released which supposedly supported it), it will make for an excellent, quiet Linux workstation or special purpose board.
hyc_symas 11y ago
Mainly what I want to do is use ARM64 and abandon Intel, so I don't look at options like that. It's pretty clear that the x86 ISA has retarded the state of the art in computing for the past couple decades. The byzantine encodings make it mathematically impossible to write an optimal compiler for today's x86 instruction set. http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx05_vx64.htm http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx05_vx64.htm http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx06_rmw.htm http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx06_rmw.htm Of course, compiler writers still chase after greater performance, which leads to optimizations of questionable value (and demonstrable harm). http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307 http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307 Throw away all that cruft, use a clean instruction set, and compilers can go back to being small and fast, easily generating output that is also small and fast.
arm 11y ago
Kind of pathetic of them to use the Transmission icon¹ without attribution or permission in their marketing² materials³ though. ―――――― ¹ — https://www.transmissionbt.com/ https://www.transmissionbt.com/ ² — http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/9-Power%20Gear(L).png http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/9-Power%20Gear(L).png ³ — http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/PowerGear-2.jpg http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/PowerGear-2.jpg

mastax 11y ago

Thanks for linking the A1100 board. I was searching for one of those but couldn't find one. It's always a bit disappointing when these small companies release complicated boards like this, though, the price is never competitive with more mass market stuff. I could get an Intel desktop CPU and motherboard for $150, though I guess that's missing the point.

rwmj 11y ago
There are a lot of differences between Odroid/Dragonboard and the AMD A1100-based Cello. The former boards are essentially Android phone/tablet chips with the minimal amount of support circuitry to put them on a development board, and the result is of course very cheap, owing to the sheer volume of Android chips being sold. However boards like the AMD Cello, the Gigabyte MP30-AR0, the Huskyboard, have server chips in them, external DIMMs (the Gigabyte takes up to 128GB of RAM), real SATA, PCIe slots, multiple ethernet (Gigabyte has 5 x ethernet, 2 running at 10Gbps), IPMI and so on. They also conform to the SBSA/SBBR standard so you can boot RHEL and (in the near future) Windows on them. The cost of this is significant - a fully equipped AMD Cello (with case, RAM, SDD, etc) is going to be US$600. A fully equipped Gigabyte w/32 GB of RAM and an SDD will set you back US$1000+, but you're getting a real server for that money. More about the Gigabyte board on my blog: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=mp30 https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=mp30
- hyc_symas 11y ago
  That looks pretty good too, was wondering how X-Gene fares. In the meantime, there's still quite a gap between cheap phone SOCs and server boards. Nothing really in the middle, desktop/laptop space - 2 DIMM slots and a modest set of SATA/PCIe ports.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    The X-gene 1 is a 3 year old design in 40nm [1]. It's not blazingly fast, but it's a reliable workhorse that boots the upstream kernel out of the box. The AMD A1100 is much newer, with the excellent superscalar Cortex-A57 core (but only 4 of them). I believe that's the space that the Huskyboard and Cello are meant to occupy, although you may well think the price -- $300 just for the board -- is not exactly in that gap, and I'd agree. I have the Cello on order, and will blog about it once I receive it, expected in a month or two. [1] http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/HC26-11-day1-epub/HC26.11-4-ARM-Servers-epub/HC26.11.430-X-Gene-Singh-AppMicro-HotChips-2014-v5.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/...