
ODROID C2 out of stock - ekianjo
https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=135&t=28809
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geokon
You can get a Khadas Vim Pro which has very similar hardware. And like the C2
it's one of the few ARM dev boards that has partial mainline Linux kernel
support. It has opensource Mali drivers thanks to BayLibre, but some
outstanding issues with USB unfortunately. (the Khadas team is really small so
unfortunately progress is slow :( )

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exikyut
What is ts this due to?

An unusual event?

The time of year?

Or is it a sign of some new (potentially negative?) trend?

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Danieru
Dram and nand manufacturers have been under producing. The logic being that
last time there was an undersupply everyone upped production and flooded the
market. They see this as a massive negative as it dropped prices and sunk
everyone into losses.

Dram and nand fabbing does not use the same process as cpus. Thus it has its
own seperate supply and those machines can only be used to make that supply.
Thus there is no simple mechanism for the market to self regulate. Unless a
maker is willing to idle multi million dollar machines supply is fixed. Which
is just another way of saying that a significant portion of the cost in dram
and nand manufacturing are fixed costs and thus even if you lose money overall
because you make money on the marginal unit you are forced to keep making more
units even as you lose money.

Its a tough industry but for now they have a sweet situation going. Provided
no new makers enter the market and no existing makers up supply they will keep
printing cash.

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peterburkimsher
I work for a tech company in Taiwan who package DRAM and SD cards.

The factory takes silicon wafers, grinds them down to the right thickness,
cuts them up (dicing), bonds wires on, puts them into plastic chip packages,
tests them, and puts the finished chips into pretty cardboard boxes with
plastic windows that you see for sale in stores.

The testing and manufacturing machines are really expensive. The parent
company invested too much in x-ray machines to test BGA chip packages, and
almost went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Management wanted to fire the
expensive programmers in the IT department/call centre/automation.

My boss (the founder's son) just finished his Masters in Artificial
Intelligence in the US. He wasn't going to let the programmers just leave. So
he made a startup company in the same office, spun off, refinanced the loans,
and now both companies work together closely but the IT department can also do
contracts for other clients to help stay afloat.

Automation tasks are fun when I get them - lots of coding drivers for old
hardware in the testing area. Most of the time the factory just keeps running
though, so I can do data analysis on the log files to help optimise the
scheduling.

Most cards are manufactured at high capacity (e.g. 512GB SD card, 400 GB
microSD). When they fail a test, they are "reworked" \- the die is cut in half
with an electron microscope, and tested again. Thus we get many small cards
and a few expensive big cards.

The clients are the people with their name on the SD card, and they're the
ones designing the silicon. If they order more, the factory has the capacity.
But if the purchase orders are down, we can't make more unless they sell.

tl;dr - It's a market issue, not a factory issue.

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wtallis
> When they fail a test, they are "reworked" \- the die is cut in half with an
> electron microscope, and tested again.

Are they actually slicing NAND flash dies, or just unstacking them and
disabling defective blocks? (The largest NAND dies so far are 512Gb TLC, which
is 64GB, so large SD cards need several dies.)

~~~
peterburkimsher
They're not literally cut in half; the arrays are designed with "jumpers" to
disable blocks. But the capacity is halved, so that's why the 64GB dies become
32GB, 16GB, or 8GB cards. (the dies live again!)

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throwawaybbqed
Many knowledgeable people in this thread. I have a related question. I want to
compile AOSP and run on hackable hardware (i.e. some dev board). The official
instructions are for some slightly pricey board called HiKey/LeMaker. I was
surprised about lack of RPi support. Any comments?

~~~
fest
If you are ok with using older AOSP, Olimex Allwinner A20 based boards are a
good bet. If you want a recent version of Android, I would look at Snapdragon
410c.

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peterburkimsher
I bought an ODroid W back when it was still in stock. It uses the same CPU as
the Raspberry Pi, is pin-compatible with the Pi's GPIO, and is smaller.

It's like the Pi Zero, but came out earlier and has battery management built
in. It's a pity that's still out of stock.

~~~
Yaggo
Odroid-w will never be re-stocked because Broadcom stopped selling them the
SoC (presumably because the Raspberry Pi Foundation didn't like the
competition). I also grabbed two of them before Zero came out, for tenfold(!)
price.

~~~
peterburkimsher
If you really like that SoC, the Egoman media dongle is using the same one.
(disclaimer: they also make the red Raspberry Pi, and I worked for them for 4
months in summer 2013).

[http://www.globalsources.com/si/AS/Egoman-
Technology/6008825...](http://www.globalsources.com/si/AS/Egoman-
Technology/6008825991329/pdtl/Media-Sharing-Dongle/1141324732.htm)

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squarefoot
I was about to leave here a pointer to elty.pl where I bought one a while
back, and they were in stock just a few days ago, but they've become
unobtanium there as well. Now until they become available again the closest
thing to the C2 seems the NanoPI K2, which is close enough but not identical,
so compatibility has to be tested.

Here's an article comparing the two. [https://www.cnx-
software.com/2017/04/13/40-nanopi-k2-board-i...](https://www.cnx-
software.com/2017/04/13/40-nanopi-k2-board-is-powered-by-
amlogic-s905-processor/)

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lucaspiller
Kind of highjacking the thread, but are there any SBC that support 4K HDR
under Linux? I bought a OrangePi PC2 as the hardware does, but it only works
at that resolution under Android.

~~~
nerdponx
Supposedly the ROCK64 does.

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chaosite
They're selling it from the web store again.

21 day lead time.

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ekianjo
Nope, When you try to place the order from there you get an error message that
it's out of stock. The 21 days is just a placeholder.

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Quequau
I hope this is sign that there is a next generation board coming out.

