

Cubieboard: A small, high-performance ARM box - bound008
http://cubieboard.org/

======
oliwarner
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> 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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I don't know anything about these guys, but I don't think it's too good to be
true.

Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been
coming out the woodwork. As expected, now there are projects on vWorker (ex
RentACoder) asking for engineers to design such computers with state of the
art specs with a maximum bid of $499. I can't make this shit up! $499! At
least toss us a bone and add a zero so we don't laugh _quite_ so hard!

Anyway, aside from that rant, this is a Great Thing. I predict an array of
products that are now possible due to a flood of dirt cheap, physically small
computers that can run Linux. One off industrial controllers that would have
taken a week of development time can now be pushed out in a day, etc.

~~~
joezydeco
_"Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been
coming out the woodwork"_

No, they've been here all along in the SBC and industrial spaces. They're just
on _your_ radar now because they're cheap.

Is Gumstix a line of "one-off industrial computers"?

<http://www.gumstix.com/>

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Having lived in the SBC and industrial space my entire career I'd probably
take issue with that statement if I could be bothered to.

I'll amend it to " _cheap_ credit-card sized computers" if it makes you feel
better.

Gumstix have been around for what, about 10 years IIRC? They are more
expensive than what I'm talking about. The point I'm making is that CPU boards
on the level to run flavors of Linux easily are approaching "jellybean"
component status and that will enable applications that simply weren't
feasible before.

------
aortega
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>)

~~~
tlb
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
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>

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.

------
ekpyrotic
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/>) 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.

~~~
trotsky
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
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.

------
duskwuff
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.

~~~
angusgr
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/> <https://www.miniand.com/forums>

~~~
duskwuff
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/0...](http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-
netbook/2012-March/002881.html)

------
sciurus
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-n...](http://liliputing.com/2012/08/mk802-ii-android-4-0-mini-pc-now-
shipping.html)
[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
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
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.

------
regehr
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.

~~~
malkia
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

------
wittrock
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.

~~~
zokier
> 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
>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?

~~~
krzyk
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")

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

~~~
maglos
yes... a 100mb/s NAS...

~~~
notimetorelax
Well my ReadyNas Duo isn't any better...

------
polshaw
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-
allwinn...](http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/31/49-cubieboard-
allwinner-a10-open-hardware-development-board/)

------
zhobbs
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
Take a look at the Olinuxino: <https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO>
<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
> 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
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
You might be surprised to learn that the A13 is available as QFP:

[http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-
sur...](http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-sure-
allwinner-a13/)

------
Moto7451
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.

------
SnaKeZ
502 Bad Gateway

~~~
khakimov
looks like they nginx runs on their cubieboard =)

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

~~~
whyenot
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.ph...](http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931)

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

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

------
ssamuli
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! :)

------
vyrotek
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.

------
erichocean
Does anyone know if the Mali400 supports hardware acceleration with Google
Chrome?

UPDATE: It'd be great if ran Chrome OS, too.

~~~
steevdave
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)

------
Sauce1971
About the price of the chinese Android mediacenters. Probably nice, but the
great thing about the Pi is the community support.

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

~~~
duskwuff
Looks like there's a cylindrical DC power jack on the board.

~~~
zokier
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
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.

------
mmphosis
VGA?

------
ktizo
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.

------
rolak
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.

