10 ms·

Cubieboard: A small, high-performance ARM box

136 points by bound008 14y ago

Moto7451 14y ago
This is really cool. Seems like this could be turned into a really nice little web/file server and screams to be used in car AV/carputer setups.
viraj_shah 14y ago
Great board. Great price. Heard about this through the Homebrew Robotics Club.
wittrock 14y ago
It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application. I'm very curious though about what appears to be a SATA port on the Cubieboard. Also, the RasPi has a huge initial advantage in that it was in the space first. They have a leg-up in publicity, marketing, and simply an initial user-base. If the Cubieboard benchmarks don't absolutely trounce the Raspberry Pi for almost every type of computation, I don't see the Cubieboard overtaking the Pi anytime soon. Still, a cool board nonetheless.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  In this space, I wouldn't be too worried about publicity/marketing just yet. Also, if the cubbie has less demand/quicker manufacture lead time, it will sell VERY well. Especially because of the huge backorder on the pi. At that price point, if I can order and get the cubbie now, or get a pi in 6 months, I'd get both. Also, in the hacker/hobbiest world, having one (or more) of each isn't infeasible.
- zokier 14y ago
  > It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application. Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers? At least Mali400 has "limadriver" project going on, quick googling didn't find anything for raspi. Overall I'd love that Allwinner A10 got more attention, it seems fairly popular chip in cheapo chinese tablets. Getting GNU/Linux instead of Android for those would be neat.
  - protospork 14y ago
    >Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers? I have to ask, what is the preoccupation with FOSS GPU drivers? Not just with boards like this, but even standard desktop hardware. Does anyone seriously think a firm like NVidia is going to illicitly slip spyware or something into their binaries?
    - pronoiac 14y ago
      Open drivers are good for debugging and avoiding crashes, and for flexibility, re: Linux kernel versions and API changes over the lifetime of the device.
    - zokier 14y ago
      Actually you are right. The problem (from user point of view) is not licensing. The real issue is the drivers being out of tree, making them much more fragile. I'd like to be able to update kernel and/or xorg without having to worry if binary blobs explode on my face.
    - krzyk 14y ago
      I can compare fglrx (used it for 2 years) and radeon (used for 2 months). And besides worse performance in 3D and smaller power consumption, fglrx is much worse and causes some problems with my laptop. Not to mention that when I used fglrx I was afraid to upgrade the kernel because it forces me to recompile fglrx module (with all the strange DKMS thingy which is very strange to me - I just want to "make install")
ekpyrotic 14y ago
The amateur quality of the website (esp. the prose) worries me. Do we have any further information on the owner? Or, the location of the company? I could quite easily imagine cubiebox being no more than an amateur scammer's effort to cash in on the uptick in interest in ARM boxes. In particular, the grammar on the parent Company's website (http://cubietech.com/ http://cubietech.com/) is horrific. Plus, it has a newsfeed populating from god knows where: "Missing NY teen found safe Marriage doesn't make people happier, it just stabilizes the happiness they already have. The research shows that the married people surveyed weren't any happier than..." Not encouraging.
- ghost91 14y ago
  It seems to be a small chinese company. I've no reason to believe they are scammer. After a google search this "http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Tom&last=Cubie http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Tom&last=Cubie profile belongs to the cofounder.
- trotsky 14y ago
  90% of the 2nd/3rd tier arm market is like that, they certainly have their problems but they're almost all legitimate companies that deliver a product.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    Agreed. I've worked with some of them (with the mini2440), and a lot of their websites are just ugly, and out of date. They are mostly used as a place to post their phone numbers, and not as a business front. Keep that in mind.
- hundchenkatze 14y ago
  Also all of the generic comments on the buy page(http://cubieboard.org/buy/ http://cubieboard.org/buy/). Most of which are asking "Please keep me updated when its available for shipping." and getting the response "ok, we will inform you when ready to ship." Seems likely the Q and A were posted by the same person to give the illusion of popularity.
kstenerud 14y ago
Would be cool if it had two SATA ports on it so that you could build a NAS with mirrored storage.
- maglos 14y ago
  yes... a 100mb/s NAS...
  - notimetorelax 14y ago
    Well my ReadyNas Duo isn't any better...
  - greyfade 14y ago
    Not all NAS applications require a gigabit LAN.
aaronpk 14y ago
I don't see any mention of the power requirements for the board? Is it powered by 5V DC? (i.e. USB)
- duskwuff 14y ago
  Looks like there's a cylindrical DC power jack on the board.
  - zokier 14y ago
    The power jack is labeled "DC5V@2A", but I doubt that the board would actually pull that much current as the SoC is commonly used in tablets.
    - Moto7451 14y ago
      More than likely 2A is just to have some headroom for everything. They likely allocate an amp for the two USB. I can't seem to get access to the site now but I imagine there are a couple 5v and 3.3v pins in the GPIO header that are allocated a few tens of milliamps. That said, you're right that the board itself shouldn't pull anywhere near 2A.
duskwuff 14y ago
Nasty gotcha: It's using the Allwinner A10 SoC, which is primarily aimed at running Android tablets. The documentation for the chipset is extremely limited, so trying to use it for applications outside the norm may be quite difficult.
- zokier 14y ago
  Indeed. Interestingly they do mention Ubuntu quite prominently on their front page, so I guess they have managed to get it to run? edit: Some people at least are managing to run Ubuntu on a similar hardware, so I guess it'll work. http://liliputing.com/2012/07/linux-distributions-that-can-run-on-an-mk802-mini-pc.html http://liliputing.com/2012/07/linux-distributions-that-can-r...
- stusmall 14y ago
  Which the SoC in the pi isn't perfect on either. IIRC They redacted everything about the graphics from the datasheet.
- neurotech1 14y ago
  The Mali400 GPU is used in the A10/A13 is used by numerous other SoCs, and was developed by ARM Ltd.
- angusgr 14y ago
  Actually the Allwinner A10 is pretty well documented by the vendor and by the community, has a bunch of standard linux distributions running already. Much better than most ARM SoCs in the cheap Android tablet market. AFAIK the one exception is the video decoding hardware, where the Linux libraries are apparently sub-par. Some jumping off points for resources: http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ https://www.miniand.com/forums https://www.miniand.com/forums
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    Perhaps things have changed since I first heard about it; initial reports were less than positive: http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/002881.html http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/0...
khakimov 14y ago
Btw, BDTI Benchmark Results for the ARM Cortex-A8 http://www.bdti.com/Resources/BenchmarkResults/Processors/Cortex-A8 http://www.bdti.com/Resources/BenchmarkResults/Processors/Co...
erichocean 14y ago
Does anyone know if the Mali400 supports hardware acceleration with Google Chrome? UPDATE: It'd be great if ran Chrome OS, too.
- randallu 14y ago
  It supports GLES2 very well, so probably. It's used on various Samsung SoCs so was in some GS2 and GS3 variants.
- steevdave 14y ago
  Chromium maybe. I'm not sure there are any Chromebooks based on ARM yet although there seems to be a profile for building tegra2 devices. I know the Trimslice is supposed to be able to run it but I haven't actually seen a software release of Google Chrome for it. Hexxeh does seem to be working on it for the Pi but I haven't used the Pi so I can't say (I personally need a little more power than armv6 has)
SnaKeZ 14y ago
502 Bad Gateway
- khakimov 14y ago
  looks like they nginx runs on their cubieboard =)
zhobbs 14y ago
Are any of these ARM solutions open source for the full stack? Arduino is nice because I can use it to prototype something, and then if I want to mass produce it I can take the open schematics, rip out what I don't need and produce custom boards. Is that possible with any of these ARM solutions?
- Zuph 14y ago
  Take a look at the Olinuxino: https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO https://www.olimex.com/dev/imx233-olinuxino-maxi.html https://www.olimex.com/dev/imx233-olinuxino-maxi.html They've got one version running an admittedly slow i.MX processor, and another coming down the pike running an Allwinner chip. As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips.
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    > As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips. The A10/A13 require memory which is only available as BGA, though.
    - Zuph 14y ago
      Fair point. You can find BGA memories with ball spacing just slightly north of impossible, though. As far as I'm aware, that isn't possible with most (any?) A10/A13 chips.
      - duskwuff 14y ago
        You might be surprised to learn that the A13 is available as QFP: http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-sure-allwinner-a13/ http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-sur...
- brigade 14y ago
  BeagleBoard/BeagleBone have full schematics available (http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design)
vyrotek 14y ago
How well would this work on a TV as a basic HTPC? I'm looking to play with something simple that would only need to really run a browser with Flash.
oliwarner 14y ago
I would be suspicious of this. It's not just one alarm bell ringing. - The website. Jesus. With all the templates and content management you can pluck out of thin air, the result is very shoddy. Apparently that isn't a warning sign enough for some people. - No corporate history. The company has another site but their blog there is empty. No news. Dodgy RSS listings. The whole thing is even shoddier than the product site. - The payment is through Paypal. Address was visible yesterday (now encrypted) as mr.hipboy@gmail.com. lolwut? What a handle. Very professional. Real name appears to be Luffy Wang of Hesseney Road, Hubei 150, HK. (hipboi@qq.com) This guy really likes hips. - The product is $49. Less than the price (delivered) of two Raspis with a SATA controller and port. This was what made my eyes light up. The phrase "too good to be true" exists for a reason. - And while I'm talking about specs, why do the pictures and words disagree so much? How many card readers are there? Are they SD or MMC? - Oh and it's available almost without delay. Despite that there are no reviews, no tester units in the wild. No videos of on working. Not even the hint of a fart from a prototype. + There is a GitHub page: https://github.com/cubie-tech https://github.com/cubie-tech This is probably a detail I wouldn't have bothered with if I were running this scam. Yesterday my acquaintances on G+ and I decided that this is most likely a scam. I really hope it's not and I'll be the first in line for the second batch, but please be careful.
- cantankerous 14y ago
  I'm a bit suspicious, too. Googling the name of the board turns up maybe 10 results all in the same domain. Immediately following are things not related to the Cubieboard. I'm probably gonna sit this one out for now. EDIT: Using some different terms brings up a ton of articles about the board from popular sources, yet they're all new within the past few days. I dunno, it might actually be real, but it me a bit uncomfortable, but that may just be me.
  - oliwarner 14y ago
    This is typical of the technology-journalist-circle-jerk you see when a new product is announced but nobody has hands on yet. No news older than a few days old. Same photos over and over again.
polshaw 14y ago
cnx say it is expected to be open hardware.[1] if true this would make it a pretty big deal. sata also. also this is no 'scam' project.. >the cubieboard (intended as BeagleBone competitor) and that aliexpress shop are both from Tom Cubie (aka hipboi). Also the author of the initial u-boot/mmc for sunxi and the software engineer at Allwinner Tech who GPLed the code released by QWare.[1] assuming this is accurate, this puts him in a pretty good position to support it. Fwiw, I have Linux running on my a10 tablet and it runs pretty well.. obviously a light weight desktop.. ff runs well on most sites, although there is slow down on complex sites eg. engadget there is some linux support for the gpu, but not the video acceleration (hopefully, 'yet'). 1. http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/31/49-cubieboard-allwinner-a10-open-hardware-development-board/ http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/31/49-cubieboard-allwinn...
Sauce1971 14y ago
About the price of the chinese Android mediacenters. Probably nice, but the great thing about the Pi is the community support.
regehr 14y ago
Speaking as the instructor for a class that is using raspberry pis: at this point the most important thing about the raspberry pi is the community and mindshare. It's going to be hard for a new board, however awesome, to replicate this.
- rektide 14y ago
  I thank you, in the same way I thank Ubuntu for existing: Someone needs to draw away the popular attention from those with the will to get stuff done. If I can re-furl my barbs & continue, if the Cubieboard were taking orders right now it would be a shit show of people coming in from Engadget and HN and all over buying these things up then being extremely aggravated they A) don't just work B) require some fairly serious willingness to chase out the good information on uboot, the sunxi platform, & to get your OS installed: there's not much in the way of authoritative, well compiled references for doing so. I was pretty shocked seeing this board on Engadget today. There've been a steady stream of similar-ish boards, such as the $60 Hackberry, also A10 based, which too is still in "prerelease" form.
- malkia 14y ago
  Ditto. The community, 40,000+ posts, the idea, the talks that's what matters sometimes. There might be 10x more powerful devices in a year or less for the same price, yet they have to gain the same momentum as Pi. And nothing stops the Pi folks from concentrating on these. My understanding is that they (Pi) are not doing it for the money, they simply want kids to learn programming as many of us did back in our Apple ][ prompt, or BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, etc. ] HGR ] HPLOT 10, 10 TO 20, 20
aortega 14y ago
I can't believe the level of raspberry pi astroturfing present here. This board is so much more powerful that it can run full Ubuntu fast and the same chip is actually used to build very competent android tablets. I read things like "mindshare" "community" "The site is wrong" "the GPU is better in the raspberry" (Ha! sure, games will run better i suppose) , well the site looks perfectly OK for me. I gonna burn points for this, but the u$s 50 Raspberry pi is overpriced since you can get a u$s 67 complete android tablet (http://goo.gl/Misru http://goo.gl/Misru)
- tlb 14y ago
  A key advantage would be if you could actually buy it. Raspberry Pi is still "due to extreme demand the estimated delivery time is uncertain and may exceed 12 weeks." Gumstix are more expensive but easily available in any quantity, so that's what I'm designing with now.
  - catch23 14y ago
    If you buy on element14, I believe you can get it in a few days. Supposedly these guys can ship immediately: http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi I bought one last week and it arrived no slower than amazon.com so I think it's safe to say orders are no longer taking forever.
    - mrbill 14y ago
      I bought six RPi units from Newark/Element14 over the past couple of months with no problem (in batches of two, once they allowed bulk ordering), and have since bought four more from MCM, all of which have shipped within a few days of placing the order. It's sort of hard to believe anyone who talks about RPi units not being available when I have TEN of them.
  - dillona 14y ago
    I bought one on element14 over the (holiday) weekend, and it shipped today. It's not that bad
sciurus 14y ago
There's so much great, cheap hardware based on the Allwinner A10 out there right now! I just ordered a Mk802 II for $65. It has a 1GHz Cortex-A8 single core processor, Mali 400 graphics, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a microSDHC card slot, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 1 full-sized USB port (usable for power), 2 micro USB ports, and a full-sized HDMI connector so you cna just plug it in to your TV. It ships with Android 4.0 on the internal storage (with access to the Google Play Store) or you can run the linx dustro of your choise from a microsd card. http://liliputing.com/2012/08/mk802-ii-android-4-0-mini-pc-now-shipping.html http://liliputing.com/2012/08/mk802-ii-android-4-0-mini-pc-n... http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=305 http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=305
- BitMastro 14y ago
  I have one, too. Yesterday I tried Ubuntu with LXDE, it's a little bit slower then expected and video decoding is not fast enough. I guess I'll use android and maybe try CM10. I use a powered USB hub to plug external drives (the power may not be enough for some USB drives)
  - sitkack 14y ago
    Make sure you are using hardware decoding which is more than fast enough. I doubt these systems have enough cpu capacity to decode HD streams w/o assistance.
ktizo 14y ago
This looks really cool. Will have to get one to talk to my r-pi as I think it is a bit lonely. I love the fact that more people are building these kind of devices at this price point. I have been looking at pc104 boards for years but they were always far too expensive for anything with some decent kick. Give it a few more iterations and a few more people trying to build similar devices and then there is a proper marketplace for essentially a new consumer device class, in much the same way as the OLPC project was the catalyst for the emergence of dirt cheap netbooks. There will be tonnes of people working on this after witnessing the demand for the r-pis. And anyone who thinks that the r-pi lot will do anything other than welcome things like this is off their head. They are a non-profit with the stated aim of getting as many of these kind of small cheap devices out there as possible. Remember, you don't compete against an organisation like that in the normal sense of the word, as if you put them out of business by doing it bigger and better and cheaper, then all you have done is helped them to achieve their objective without them having to do as much work. Personally I suspect that it is exactly the kind of development the r-pi lot were hoping for.
erichocean 14y ago
I wish Samsung would sell a similar product using the board and chip from the Galaxy S3.
- whyenot 14y ago
  I think the ODROID-X is about as close as you can get. Significantly more expensive, but quite nice. http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931 http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...
mmphosis 14y ago
VGA?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
rolak 14y ago
I wish manufacturerers would make thse boards with VGA output. There's no sense in buying a 35 of 50 dollar computer if you need a $150 monitor to use it.
ssamuli 14y ago
Still waiting for someone to make this kind of cheap little board with 2 ethernet ports. With OpenBSD it would work well as a home firewall or similar mini network appliance. Maybe some day! :)

136 points by bound008 14y ago

This is really cool. Seems like this could be turned into a really nice little web/file server and screams to be used in car AV/carputer setups.

viraj_shah 14y ago

Great board. Great price. Heard about this through the Homebrew Robotics Club.

wittrock 14y ago

It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application. I'm very curious though about what appears to be a SATA port on the Cubieboard. Also, the RasPi has a huge initial advantage in that it was in the space first. They have a leg-up in publicity, marketing, and simply an initial user-base. If the Cubieboard benchmarks don't absolutely trounce the Raspberry Pi for almost every type of computation, I don't see the Cubieboard overtaking the Pi anytime soon. Still, a cool board nonetheless.

ImprovedSilence 14y ago
In this space, I wouldn't be too worried about publicity/marketing just yet. Also, if the cubbie has less demand/quicker manufacture lead time, it will sell VERY well. Especially because of the huge backorder on the pi. At that price point, if I can order and get the cubbie now, or get a pi in 6 months, I'd get both. Also, in the hacker/hobbiest world, having one (or more) of each isn't infeasible.
zokier 14y ago
> It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application. Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers? At least Mali400 has "limadriver" project going on, quick googling didn't find anything for raspi. Overall I'd love that Allwinner A10 got more attention, it seems fairly popular chip in cheapo chinese tablets. Getting GNU/Linux instead of Android for those would be neat.
- protospork 14y ago
  >Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers? I have to ask, what is the preoccupation with FOSS GPU drivers? Not just with boards like this, but even standard desktop hardware. Does anyone seriously think a firm like NVidia is going to illicitly slip spyware or something into their binaries?
  - pronoiac 14y ago
    Open drivers are good for debugging and avoiding crashes, and for flexibility, re: Linux kernel versions and API changes over the lifetime of the device.
  - zokier 14y ago
    Actually you are right. The problem (from user point of view) is not licensing. The real issue is the drivers being out of tree, making them much more fragile. I'd like to be able to update kernel and/or xorg without having to worry if binary blobs explode on my face.
  - krzyk 14y ago
    I can compare fglrx (used it for 2 years) and radeon (used for 2 months). And besides worse performance in 3D and smaller power consumption, fglrx is much worse and causes some problems with my laptop. Not to mention that when I used fglrx I was afraid to upgrade the kernel because it forces me to recompile fglrx module (with all the strange DKMS thingy which is very strange to me - I just want to "make install")

ekpyrotic 14y ago

The amateur quality of the website (esp. the prose) worries me. Do we have any further information on the owner? Or, the location of the company? I could quite easily imagine cubiebox being no more than an amateur scammer's effort to cash in on the uptick in interest in ARM boxes. In particular, the grammar on the parent Company's website (http://cubietech.com/ http://cubietech.com/) is horrific. Plus, it has a newsfeed populating from god knows where: "Missing NY teen found safe Marriage doesn't make people happier, it just stabilizes the happiness they already have. The research shows that the married people surveyed weren't any happier than..." Not encouraging.

ghost91 14y ago
It seems to be a small chinese company. I've no reason to believe they are scammer. After a google search this "http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Tom&last=Cubie http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Tom&last=Cubie profile belongs to the cofounder.
trotsky 14y ago
90% of the 2nd/3rd tier arm market is like that, they certainly have their problems but they're almost all legitimate companies that deliver a product.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Agreed. I've worked with some of them (with the mini2440), and a lot of their websites are just ugly, and out of date. They are mostly used as a place to post their phone numbers, and not as a business front. Keep that in mind.
hundchenkatze 14y ago
Also all of the generic comments on the buy page(http://cubieboard.org/buy/ http://cubieboard.org/buy/). Most of which are asking "Please keep me updated when its available for shipping." and getting the response "ok, we will inform you when ready to ship." Seems likely the Q and A were posted by the same person to give the illusion of popularity.

kstenerud 14y ago

Would be cool if it had two SATA ports on it so that you could build a NAS with mirrored storage.

maglos 14y ago
yes... a 100mb/s NAS...
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  Well my ReadyNas Duo isn't any better...
- greyfade 14y ago
  Not all NAS applications require a gigabit LAN.

aaronpk 14y ago

I don't see any mention of the power requirements for the board? Is it powered by 5V DC? (i.e. USB)

duskwuff 14y ago
Looks like there's a cylindrical DC power jack on the board.
- zokier 14y ago
  The power jack is labeled "DC5V@2A", but I doubt that the board would actually pull that much current as the SoC is commonly used in tablets.
  - Moto7451 14y ago
    More than likely 2A is just to have some headroom for everything. They likely allocate an amp for the two USB. I can't seem to get access to the site now but I imagine there are a couple 5v and 3.3v pins in the GPIO header that are allocated a few tens of milliamps. That said, you're right that the board itself shouldn't pull anywhere near 2A.

duskwuff 14y ago

Nasty gotcha: It's using the Allwinner A10 SoC, which is primarily aimed at running Android tablets. The documentation for the chipset is extremely limited, so trying to use it for applications outside the norm may be quite difficult.

zokier 14y ago
Indeed. Interestingly they do mention Ubuntu quite prominently on their front page, so I guess they have managed to get it to run? edit: Some people at least are managing to run Ubuntu on a similar hardware, so I guess it'll work. http://liliputing.com/2012/07/linux-distributions-that-can-run-on-an-mk802-mini-pc.html http://liliputing.com/2012/07/linux-distributions-that-can-r...
stusmall 14y ago
Which the SoC in the pi isn't perfect on either. IIRC They redacted everything about the graphics from the datasheet.
neurotech1 14y ago
The Mali400 GPU is used in the A10/A13 is used by numerous other SoCs, and was developed by ARM Ltd.
angusgr 14y ago
Actually the Allwinner A10 is pretty well documented by the vendor and by the community, has a bunch of standard linux distributions running already. Much better than most ARM SoCs in the cheap Android tablet market. AFAIK the one exception is the video decoding hardware, where the Linux libraries are apparently sub-par. Some jumping off points for resources: http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ https://www.miniand.com/forums https://www.miniand.com/forums
- duskwuff 14y ago
  Perhaps things have changed since I first heard about it; initial reports were less than positive: http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/002881.html http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/0...

khakimov 14y ago

Btw, BDTI Benchmark Results for the ARM Cortex-A8 http://www.bdti.com/Resources/BenchmarkResults/Processors/Cortex-A8 http://www.bdti.com/Resources/BenchmarkResults/Processors/Co...

erichocean 14y ago

Does anyone know if the Mali400 supports hardware acceleration with Google Chrome? UPDATE: It'd be great if ran Chrome OS, too.

randallu 14y ago
It supports GLES2 very well, so probably. It's used on various Samsung SoCs so was in some GS2 and GS3 variants.
steevdave 14y ago
Chromium maybe. I'm not sure there are any Chromebooks based on ARM yet although there seems to be a profile for building tegra2 devices. I know the Trimslice is supposed to be able to run it but I haven't actually seen a software release of Google Chrome for it. Hexxeh does seem to be working on it for the Pi but I haven't used the Pi so I can't say (I personally need a little more power than armv6 has)

SnaKeZ 14y ago

502 Bad Gateway

khakimov 14y ago
looks like they nginx runs on their cubieboard =)

zhobbs 14y ago

Are any of these ARM solutions open source for the full stack? Arduino is nice because I can use it to prototype something, and then if I want to mass produce it I can take the open schematics, rip out what I don't need and produce custom boards. Is that possible with any of these ARM solutions?

Zuph 14y ago
Take a look at the Olinuxino: https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO https://www.olimex.com/dev/imx233-olinuxino-maxi.html https://www.olimex.com/dev/imx233-olinuxino-maxi.html They've got one version running an admittedly slow i.MX processor, and another coming down the pike running an Allwinner chip. As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips.
- duskwuff 14y ago
  > As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips. The A10/A13 require memory which is only available as BGA, though.
  - Zuph 14y ago
    Fair point. You can find BGA memories with ball spacing just slightly north of impossible, though. As far as I'm aware, that isn't possible with most (any?) A10/A13 chips.
    - duskwuff 14y ago
      You might be surprised to learn that the A13 is available as QFP: http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-sure-allwinner-a13/ http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-sur...
brigade 14y ago
BeagleBoard/BeagleBone have full schematics available (http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design)

vyrotek 14y ago

How well would this work on a TV as a basic HTPC? I'm looking to play with something simple that would only need to really run a browser with Flash.

oliwarner 14y ago

I would be suspicious of this. It's not just one alarm bell ringing. - The website. Jesus. With all the templates and content management you can pluck out of thin air, the result is very shoddy. Apparently that isn't a warning sign enough for some people. - No corporate history. The company has another site but their blog there is empty. No news. Dodgy RSS listings. The whole thing is even shoddier than the product site. - The payment is through Paypal. Address was visible yesterday (now encrypted) as mr.hipboy@gmail.com. lolwut? What a handle. Very professional. Real name appears to be Luffy Wang of Hesseney Road, Hubei 150, HK. (hipboi@qq.com) This guy really likes hips. - The product is $49. Less than the price (delivered) of two Raspis with a SATA controller and port. This was what made my eyes light up. The phrase "too good to be true" exists for a reason. - And while I'm talking about specs, why do the pictures and words disagree so much? How many card readers are there? Are they SD or MMC? - Oh and it's available almost without delay. Despite that there are no reviews, no tester units in the wild. No videos of on working. Not even the hint of a fart from a prototype. + There is a GitHub page: https://github.com/cubie-tech https://github.com/cubie-tech This is probably a detail I wouldn't have bothered with if I were running this scam. Yesterday my acquaintances on G+ and I decided that this is most likely a scam. I really hope it's not and I'll be the first in line for the second batch, but please be careful.

cantankerous 14y ago
I'm a bit suspicious, too. Googling the name of the board turns up maybe 10 results all in the same domain. Immediately following are things not related to the Cubieboard. I'm probably gonna sit this one out for now. EDIT: Using some different terms brings up a ton of articles about the board from popular sources, yet they're all new within the past few days. I dunno, it might actually be real, but it me a bit uncomfortable, but that may just be me.
- oliwarner 14y ago
  This is typical of the technology-journalist-circle-jerk you see when a new product is announced but nobody has hands on yet. No news older than a few days old. Same photos over and over again.

polshaw 14y ago

cnx say it is expected to be open hardware.[1] if true this would make it a pretty big deal. sata also. also this is no 'scam' project.. >the cubieboard (intended as BeagleBone competitor) and that aliexpress shop are both from Tom Cubie (aka hipboi). Also the author of the initial u-boot/mmc for sunxi and the software engineer at Allwinner Tech who GPLed the code released by QWare.[1] assuming this is accurate, this puts him in a pretty good position to support it. Fwiw, I have Linux running on my a10 tablet and it runs pretty well.. obviously a light weight desktop.. ff runs well on most sites, although there is slow down on complex sites eg. engadget there is some linux support for the gpu, but not the video acceleration (hopefully, 'yet'). 1. http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/31/49-cubieboard-allwinner-a10-open-hardware-development-board/ http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/31/49-cubieboard-allwinn...

Sauce1971 14y ago

About the price of the chinese Android mediacenters. Probably nice, but the great thing about the Pi is the community support.

regehr 14y ago

Speaking as the instructor for a class that is using raspberry pis: at this point the most important thing about the raspberry pi is the community and mindshare. It's going to be hard for a new board, however awesome, to replicate this.

rektide 14y ago
I thank you, in the same way I thank Ubuntu for existing: Someone needs to draw away the popular attention from those with the will to get stuff done. If I can re-furl my barbs & continue, if the Cubieboard were taking orders right now it would be a shit show of people coming in from Engadget and HN and all over buying these things up then being extremely aggravated they A) don't just work B) require some fairly serious willingness to chase out the good information on uboot, the sunxi platform, & to get your OS installed: there's not much in the way of authoritative, well compiled references for doing so. I was pretty shocked seeing this board on Engadget today. There've been a steady stream of similar-ish boards, such as the $60 Hackberry, also A10 based, which too is still in "prerelease" form.
malkia 14y ago
Ditto. The community, 40,000+ posts, the idea, the talks that's what matters sometimes. There might be 10x more powerful devices in a year or less for the same price, yet they have to gain the same momentum as Pi. And nothing stops the Pi folks from concentrating on these. My understanding is that they (Pi) are not doing it for the money, they simply want kids to learn programming as many of us did back in our Apple ][ prompt, or BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, etc. ] HGR ] HPLOT 10, 10 TO 20, 20

aortega 14y ago

I can't believe the level of raspberry pi astroturfing present here. This board is so much more powerful that it can run full Ubuntu fast and the same chip is actually used to build very competent android tablets. I read things like "mindshare" "community" "The site is wrong" "the GPU is better in the raspberry" (Ha! sure, games will run better i suppose) , well the site looks perfectly OK for me. I gonna burn points for this, but the u$s 50 Raspberry pi is overpriced since you can get a u$s 67 complete android tablet (http://goo.gl/Misru http://goo.gl/Misru)

tlb 14y ago
A key advantage would be if you could actually buy it. Raspberry Pi is still "due to extreme demand the estimated delivery time is uncertain and may exceed 12 weeks." Gumstix are more expensive but easily available in any quantity, so that's what I'm designing with now.
- catch23 14y ago
  If you buy on element14, I believe you can get it in a few days. Supposedly these guys can ship immediately: http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi I bought one last week and it arrived no slower than amazon.com so I think it's safe to say orders are no longer taking forever.
  - mrbill 14y ago
    I bought six RPi units from Newark/Element14 over the past couple of months with no problem (in batches of two, once they allowed bulk ordering), and have since bought four more from MCM, all of which have shipped within a few days of placing the order. It's sort of hard to believe anyone who talks about RPi units not being available when I have TEN of them.
- dillona 14y ago
  I bought one on element14 over the (holiday) weekend, and it shipped today. It's not that bad

sciurus 14y ago

There's so much great, cheap hardware based on the Allwinner A10 out there right now! I just ordered a Mk802 II for $65. It has a 1GHz Cortex-A8 single core processor, Mali 400 graphics, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a microSDHC card slot, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 1 full-sized USB port (usable for power), 2 micro USB ports, and a full-sized HDMI connector so you cna just plug it in to your TV. It ships with Android 4.0 on the internal storage (with access to the Google Play Store) or you can run the linx dustro of your choise from a microsd card. http://liliputing.com/2012/08/mk802-ii-android-4-0-mini-pc-now-shipping.html http://liliputing.com/2012/08/mk802-ii-android-4-0-mini-pc-n... http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=305 http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=305

BitMastro 14y ago
I have one, too. Yesterday I tried Ubuntu with LXDE, it's a little bit slower then expected and video decoding is not fast enough. I guess I'll use android and maybe try CM10. I use a powered USB hub to plug external drives (the power may not be enough for some USB drives)
- sitkack 14y ago
  Make sure you are using hardware decoding which is more than fast enough. I doubt these systems have enough cpu capacity to decode HD streams w/o assistance.

ktizo 14y ago

This looks really cool. Will have to get one to talk to my r-pi as I think it is a bit lonely. I love the fact that more people are building these kind of devices at this price point. I have been looking at pc104 boards for years but they were always far too expensive for anything with some decent kick. Give it a few more iterations and a few more people trying to build similar devices and then there is a proper marketplace for essentially a new consumer device class, in much the same way as the OLPC project was the catalyst for the emergence of dirt cheap netbooks. There will be tonnes of people working on this after witnessing the demand for the r-pis. And anyone who thinks that the r-pi lot will do anything other than welcome things like this is off their head. They are a non-profit with the stated aim of getting as many of these kind of small cheap devices out there as possible. Remember, you don't compete against an organisation like that in the normal sense of the word, as if you put them out of business by doing it bigger and better and cheaper, then all you have done is helped them to achieve their objective without them having to do as much work. Personally I suspect that it is exactly the kind of development the r-pi lot were hoping for.

erichocean 14y ago

I wish Samsung would sell a similar product using the board and chip from the Galaxy S3.

whyenot 14y ago
I think the ODROID-X is about as close as you can get. Significantly more expensive, but quite nice. http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931 http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

mmphosis 14y ago

VGA?

deleted 14y ago
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rolak 14y ago

I wish manufacturerers would make thse boards with VGA output. There's no sense in buying a 35 of 50 dollar computer if you need a $150 monitor to use it.

ssamuli 14y ago

Still waiting for someone to make this kind of cheap little board with 2 ethernet ports. With OpenBSD it would work well as a home firewall or similar mini network appliance. Maybe some day! :)