The features that have attracted me to ARMv7 are: 1) Power consumption My ROI on power savings was 15 mo. with the Cubieboards over my current Intel SFF boxes. And along with that is lower UPS requirements and heating. I have 5 boards, plus drives powered from one USB power supply. 2) Board size With boards the same or smaller than a 25" drive, I truly have an appliance that can be placed anywhere. Now there are few ARMv7 boards that meet my exacting requirements: 1 or 2 MB ram (depending on appl), 2+ core, and SATA interface. If all I have is USB, then I get the USB/SATA adapter cost and powering thrown into the equation. Also a board that has been moved into the mainline kernel and distro support. RPi stands out as being a pain. 4-port LAN features require kernel customization. I was talking with one manufacture that was meeting my main req at $15/board. But they went for a mass-market target and dropped the DIY one. I will be talking to them again next month. But their board is not in the general sunxi effort. Yet. On 12/25/2015 01:33 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > Arm-dev mailing list > Arm-dev at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/arm-dev >