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Sad to see it end, but I appreciate the honesty. One of the huge challenges with building niche, enthusiast hardware is that you have fewer resources than a bi

Sad to see it end, but I appreciate the honesty. One of the huge challenges with building niche, enthusiast hardware is that you have fewer resources than a bigger company, yet enthusiast customers tend to be far more demanding than normal. The Helios products look fantastic, but even in this HN thread you can see potential customers explaining why they wanted more out of the product (Mostly RAM). I have a feeling their fate would have been a lot of people agreeing it was a cool product but then going off and buying something else after doing some research. ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable, so most things are a compromise. In retrospect, I wish they would have applied their obviously fantastic product engineering skills to building an awesome NAS case first that accepted a standard Mini-ITX board. From there, they could have partnered with a Nano-ITX board vendor to offer a smaller V2, then as they picked up momentum they could branch into the custom all-in-one solution. Trying to jump straight to a full custom product from top to bottom is extremely hard, to say the least.

rjsw 5y ago
> ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable I get the feeling that most ARM SoC vendors had made their first 64-bit products by just pasteing a 64-bit CPU into their previous 32-bit SoC design. It is only recently that reasonably cheap 8GB boards have become available.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  This reminds of an exchange I read between a Rockchip dev and a kernel maintainer. The Rockchip dev wrote the following as justification for special handling of their board: There are many legacy IPs which only support 32bit bus, we have to use them as is in the new 64bit SoCs, I think the 32bit GIC can be considered the same as those case, can we add CONFIG_ZONE_DMA32 support in GIC driver? https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/874kg0q6lc.wl-maz@kernel.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/874kg0q6lc.wl-maz@ker... Note that this is in regards to their new rk356x platform, which supports up to 8 GB of RAM.
- gumby 5y ago
  The business model of Mediatek, Rockchip etc is not to sell chips on a traditional merchant basis. They don't even produce data sheets. So there isn't much value for them in working on reference boards. Their model is to qualify a customer by volume and then provide a "solution": IC with a custom linux or android on it, including undocumented drivers etc.

rjsw 5y ago

> ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable I get the feeling that most ARM SoC vendors had made their first 64-bit products by just pasteing a 64-bit CPU into their previous 32-bit SoC design. It is only recently that reasonably cheap 8GB boards have become available.

CameronNemo 5y ago
This reminds of an exchange I read between a Rockchip dev and a kernel maintainer. The Rockchip dev wrote the following as justification for special handling of their board: There are many legacy IPs which only support 32bit bus, we have to use them as is in the new 64bit SoCs, I think the 32bit GIC can be considered the same as those case, can we add CONFIG_ZONE_DMA32 support in GIC driver? https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/874kg0q6lc.wl-maz@kernel.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/874kg0q6lc.wl-maz@ker... Note that this is in regards to their new rk356x platform, which supports up to 8 GB of RAM.
gumby 5y ago
The business model of Mediatek, Rockchip etc is not to sell chips on a traditional merchant basis. They don't even produce data sheets. So there isn't much value for them in working on reference boards. Their model is to qualify a customer by volume and then provide a "solution": IC with a custom linux or android on it, including undocumented drivers etc.