
$15 Pine A64 is trying to be a faster, 64-bit Raspberry Pi - astaroth360
http://www.geek.com/chips/15-pine-a64-is-trying-to-be-a-faster-64-bit-raspberry-pi-1641789/
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gbl08ma
The problem, as always, lies in the fact this is powered by an AllWinner SoC.
They are not famous for respecting the licenses of the software they use,
namely the Linux kernel, and things like graphic acceleration are usually hard
to get working (and I'm not talking about working without blobs, I mean they
are hard to get to work at all).

IMO this is the major downside to Raspberry Pi alternatives like the Orange Pi
and this. The Raspberry Pi is more expensive, but at least there's more
documentation available, an effort to merge kernel stuff upstream, and there
are even people working in getting proper, blob-free Mesa drivers working:
[https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/](https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/)

With that said, it's nice to see cheap ARM64 development platforms becoming
available, even if they aren't as open/supported as they should be.

~~~
soared
I agree. These companies keep trying to compete on price, but thats not the #1
differentiator. Rapsberry Pi is so successful because of the community support
and therefore ease of use. I would be more convinced by a new board if they
supplied extensive documentation and had a bunch of project guides ready to
go.

------
rasz_pl
This is allwinner, notorious GPL offender. NO drivers for GPU, NO drivers for
hardware video acceleration.

In case you are wondering how serious are they(pine) about software support
here is a hint:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-
sunxi/Ze_UhiO0...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-
sunxi/Ze_UhiO00t8)

[http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/491-need-help-on-
pi...](http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/491-need-help-on-
pine-a64-15-64bit-quad-core-12ghz-single-board-computer/)

TLDR: they plan to maybe send TWO boards to developers...

~~~
voltagex_
Argh. Thanks for that - you've saved me quite a bit of cash. If only I'd read
a post like that before backing the Almond and the UDOO.

A reasonable amount of my network at home is run by an aging and ailing
Dreamplug - ARMv5 and remarkably sturdy. I'm still looking for a viable
replacement. I was hoping to jump to a Pogoplug (same SoC, but USB3) but I
(soft-)bricked it upgrading uBoot.

The now-worthless Australian dollar makes most of these things much more
expensive, but it really looks like my choices are expensive industrial boards
with nebulous support arrangements or giving up on ARM entirely.

~~~
dreamcompiler
What's wrong with the Almond? Mine works fine.

~~~
voltagex_
Works fine, company doesn't care about FOSS, relationship with the ODM,
Cortina Systems is unknown. It was running kernel 2.6 when I got rid of it
last year.

------
wyldfire
> 512MB of RAM

Well, ok, but unless I'm going to do some ridiculous amount of paging, I can't
really take advantage of the 64-bit much. And in the meantime my 64-bit
executables will suffer from larger pointers.

The stuff that arm does well (IMO) is stuff that uses Python and other high-
level languages. Those tend to port with little to no effort. Yet they use a
ton of indirection so the size of those pointers really matters for memory
consumption.

$15 for an ARM board still seems like decent value, though.

~~~
joosters
Does ARM Linux offer a 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers?

On x86-64, Linux supports a 'x32' mode which gives all of the advantages of
the 64 bit ISA, but with a 32 bit memory model, meaning that programs using
lots of pointers will take up far less memory (but still get to use the extra
registers & instructions), leading to faster code. You can run x32 binaries
inside a 64 bit kernel (ubuntu offers several packages, for example)

OTOH I don't know if the ARM64 ISA offers many other improvements to make a
similar 32-in-64 kind of mode worthwhile.

~~~
keenerd
These 64 bit Allwinner SOCs only have a 32 bit* memory bus anyway (presumably
to reduce board cost), so an x32 mode could double performance for pointer-
heavy code.

* Anyone remember the 8088?

------
gozo
While I like affordable things and development boards in particular, hardware
price isn't that much of an issue anymore. Most people, especially
programmers, are going to spend more in terms of labour cost even just getting
this up and running. Actually doing something exciting takes from a fair to a
huge amount of time, which you most likely won't be able to recuperate. At
least not directly. Until someone has a next level value proposition that
enables more things, I would suggest sticking to the boards you're already not
using.

------
soared
Yet another product I would buy from a store in a heartbeat, but instantly
dismiss because of kickstarter. Granted, this one looks professional and it
appears they've already set up manufacturing, but that really doesn't sway my
opinion.

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rdancer
It's still vaporware now, unlike alternatives. What's the fascination about
64-bit architecture anyway, apart from it being a bigger (=> better) number?

~~~
theresistor
AArch64 is a dramatically nicer instruction set than AArch32.

~~~
ant6n
Is it actually? You loose almost all the conditional execution, lots of the
interesting shifted addressing (I think Aarch64 allows shifts up to 3 only).
You get more registers. Oh and no 16-bit instruction mode anymore.

------
Lan
Another cheap rPi alternative that doesn't solve any new problems. What I'd
like to see is one of these with a few SATA ports and ECC memory. Then you'd
have a viable low-cost, low-power server, in a market that is sorely lacking
those things considering the closest alternative is one of the newer Intel
Atom boards that costs upwards of $250.

------
oxryly1
You don't select a Raspberry Pi for it's speed. This is like advertising a
bigger Mini.

~~~
mey
Mini did that, they called it a Countryman [1][2], to massive success [3]

[1]
[http://www.miniusa.com/content/miniusa/en/model/countryman.h...](http://www.miniusa.com/content/miniusa/en/model/countryman.html)
[2]
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487046155045761728...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704615504576172832123217962)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Countryman#Reception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Countryman#Reception)

------
StillBored
2G of RAM and 1Gbit ethernet, decent display, reasonable CPU's. The missing
piece is the lack of SATA.

I get it that most of these boards are just phone processors, but having wired
ethernet and a decent storage mechanism allow them to be used as speedy little
NAS's, video servers, desktop machines, whatever.

USB2 storage is pretty much stuck at ~30MB/sec, around the same max that is
possible with SD. Its probably faster to run the storage over the gbit
ethernet port.

