[Arm-dev] List of 64-bit hardware for testing?

Gordan Bobic gordan at redsleeve.org
Fri Dec 25 06:33:38 UTC 2015


The big problems I have with the majority of the development boards are:

1) Memory
On 32-bit ARM, the RAM was always limited to 4GB, which would be find if 
there were a significant number of devices available that ship with 4GB 
of RAM (minus the various necessary memory holes). But that simply isn't 
the case. I can think of hundreds of devices with <= 1GB of RAM. I can 
think of only about 4 with 3-4GB of RAM (of which at least 2 are 
deprecated and unavailable), including ARMv8 which is not limited to 
4GB. And two of those four are laptops.

2) Memory Type
We've been being told since forever that the main reason why ARM devices 
don't come with DIMM sockets is because they are 32-bit and DIMMs have 
64 data lines. Well, with ARMv8 we have those 64 data lines, and yet 
there are precious few devices available featuring DIMM sockets for 
memory. There are in fact probably more dev boards in SODIMM form factor 
than there are those featuring DIMM memory sockets.

3) Board Form Factor
There are painfully few ARM boards in *TX form factor. Off the top of my 
head I can think of a total of 5, of which one is positively ancient and 
probably no longer available (Atmel, IIRC), one is deprecated, the 
manufacturer of the 3rd appears to have gone bust, one is on the 
underpowered side (VIA APC) and the 5th is exorbitantly expensive (at 
€800 there is no incentive at all to buy an ARM board instead of a much 
more powerful, more fully featured and better supported Xeon board).

Worse, these variously deficient devices aren't exactly cheap, either 
(well, apart from the Raspberry Pis). I find the lack of supply of 
boards with sensible features quite thoroughly baffling, especially 
since the rock bottom features (if they cut any more corners they'd be 
perfect spheres) don't match the relatively high prices.

Instead of leveraging decades of industry standardization on the basics 
such as memory sockets, form factor (including power supplies), almost 
every ARM board manufacturer seems to be intent on reinventing their own 
wheels, and doing a pretty poor job of it, even though these problems 
have been thoroughly solved for decades.

Not that I think any manufacturers are listening...

Gordan

On 24/12/15 21:20, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>
>
> On 12/23/2015 07:45 PM, miniNodes Info wrote:
>> The Lenovator HiKey board Jim mentioned can be found here:
>> http://www.lenovator.com/product/90.html That is a 2gb RAM, 8gb eMMC,
>> 8-core ARM64 board.
>
> No sata for all that power.
> And draws a lot more power too.
>
> I will continue to wait to see what the Cubietruck plus will be and how
> much.  They put out the blog on it back in July.  And then Hans will
> have to get one to make the uboot for it...
>
>
>>   They also offer a 1gb RAM version as well:
>> <http://www.lenovator.com/product/86.html>http://www.lenovator.com/product/86.html
>>
>> Also worth mentioning, the Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c finally has been
>> restocked and has availability now, located here:
>> https://www.arrow.com/en/products/dragonboard410c/arrow-development-tools#page-1
>
> Even less in terms of interfaces.
>
>>
>> The URL for the PINE64 board is simply
>> <http://pine64.com>http://pine64.com.  That product is still being
>> developed and funded via Kickstarter, so there is no general
>> availability on that one quite yet.
>
> So, for now, I will stay with the armv7.



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