5 ms·

I'm not saying the old Pinebook wasn't bad, I've never owned it but some of your points are a bit hollow for me. > CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was comp

by Youden 7y ago

I'm not saying the old Pinebook wasn't bad, I've never owned it but some of your points are a bit hollow for me. > CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference. Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware. > It barely ran with the stock software How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all? > and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video fullscreen without noticeable frame drops With which software? Did it support the A64's hardware decoder? > They were also unable to get Windows running on it when they tried using a Raspberry Pi image ...Is expected that you're able to boot Raspberry Pi images on completely different devices? > Pine64 themselves claim that the machine is not a daily driver. I think you should have opened with that. > I had been looking at the phone a few days before and was astonished at how outdated the hardware was, even for an open source device that is possibly upgradeable. Open source hardware projects don't have the luxuries that multi-billion dollar behemoths like Samsung do. They don't have access to pre-production SoCs so they're handicapped from the start and they need to handle everything from design to parts sourcing to manufacture to distribution themselves, with a small team. That means you're going to get "outdated" hardware. You don't buy open source for the latest shiny things, you buy it for other reasons.

rjsw 7y ago
There is a project that adds hardware video acceleration [1]. [1] https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus
burnte 7y ago
> Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware. No one said this was a problem, the commenter was simply stating the comparison. > How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all? The commenter explained that in literally the second part of the sentence: > > It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running) >With which software? Did it support the A64's hardware decoder? Again, as stated by the commenter, it was using youtube in the distro that comes with the machine. > ...Is expected that you're able to boot Raspberry Pi images on completely different devices? It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10. > Open source hardware projects don't have the luxuries that multi-billion dollar behemoths like Samsung do. Pine64 is just a Chinese knockoff of the Raspberry Pi, and is more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use. They have more support and reliability issues too. There's no need to be rude, but if you're going to be rude, you should at least be accurate.
- floatboth 7y ago
  > It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10. There's a lot more to a system than the CPU. For the Raspberry Pi, someone bothered to port EDK2 and write ACPI tables: https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg And Microsoft themselves were interested in the Pi (for IoT Core), so they even have some support for weird Broadcom hardware in the NT kernel. If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :) > more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use Allwinner has the most community support out of all SoCs there are. It is reverse engineered of course, but it's really good. To the point of someone writing a FOSS driver for the video decoder: https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus — the RPi still only has blobs for video acceleration. The GPU situation is a bit reversed: VC4 is well established and maintained by Broadcom, while Panfrost and Lima are still pretty young. It would be very incorrect to suggest that anything is more closed than the old garbage SoC that's in the RPi. It starts booting from the GPU (!) and it has a custom Broadcom exclusive interrupt controller instead of ARM GIC (!!). The author of the open GPU side firmware for the Pi literally suggested Allwinner (sunxi) as a better alternative: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37#issuecomment-388695429 https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37#is... But Rockchip of course a much better company because they themselves work with upstream Linux.
  - burnte 7y ago
    > There's a lot more to a system than the CPU. I said SoC, not just the CPU, but even there, no, there isn't much difference as you yourself state: > If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :)

by Youden 7y ago

rjsw 7y ago

There is a project that adds hardware video acceleration [1]. [1] https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus

burnte 7y ago

> Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware. No one said this was a problem, the commenter was simply stating the comparison. > How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all? The commenter explained that in literally the second part of the sentence: > > It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running) >With which software? Did it support the A64's hardware decoder? Again, as stated by the commenter, it was using youtube in the distro that comes with the machine. > ...Is expected that you're able to boot Raspberry Pi images on completely different devices? It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10. > Open source hardware projects don't have the luxuries that multi-billion dollar behemoths like Samsung do. Pine64 is just a Chinese knockoff of the Raspberry Pi, and is more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use. They have more support and reliability issues too. There's no need to be rude, but if you're going to be rude, you should at least be accurate.

floatboth 7y ago
> It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10. There's a lot more to a system than the CPU. For the Raspberry Pi, someone bothered to port EDK2 and write ACPI tables: https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg And Microsoft themselves were interested in the Pi (for IoT Core), so they even have some support for weird Broadcom hardware in the NT kernel. If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :) > more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use Allwinner has the most community support out of all SoCs there are. It is reverse engineered of course, but it's really good. To the point of someone writing a FOSS driver for the video decoder: https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus — the RPi still only has blobs for video acceleration. The GPU situation is a bit reversed: VC4 is well established and maintained by Broadcom, while Panfrost and Lima are still pretty young. It would be very incorrect to suggest that anything is more closed than the old garbage SoC that's in the RPi. It starts booting from the GPU (!) and it has a custom Broadcom exclusive interrupt controller instead of ARM GIC (!!). The author of the open GPU side firmware for the Pi literally suggested Allwinner (sunxi) as a better alternative: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37#issuecomment-388695429 https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37#is... But Rockchip of course a much better company because they themselves work with upstream Linux.
- burnte 7y ago
  > There's a lot more to a system than the CPU. I said SoC, not just the CPU, but even there, no, there isn't much difference as you yourself state: > If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :)