Upcoming new ARM SBCs and a new 24 core ARM developer PC

Over the last week I spotted a few upcoming ARM single board computers (SBCs) and a new 24 core ARM development PC in the wild that might be of interest:

• Marvell Macchiato : video

Upcoming:

• GIGABYTE SynQuacer ARM 24 core developer PC : video 1 : video 2
• Rock960 : video
• Arrow Dragonboard820c : video

Enjoy! ;-)

Charbax has a follow up video to the Socionet 24core desktop PC showing it running Mandriva Linux. And it seems there is a laptop version too. As for performance Bero states that Linux takes about 10 minutes to compile on the machine while an Intel i7 takes about 3 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ItXpmLsINs

As lovely as it is dreaming of RISC OS running of different ARM boards, I’d personally prefer to see time spent on improving the underlying functionality of the Operating System than porting to another system. But I certainly wouldn’t stop anyone from doing so.

Marvell Macchiato

Good solution. With probably 60% more power than the Titanium…
… So it’s better to had first multicore to RISC OS.

Imagine the possibility to launch ASM, Basic, C code on other cores (with only access to a part of the memory and a few SWI; no need of full SMP). Then a Pi3 or a Titanium could go faster than the Macchiato with the current version of RISC OS.

What impressed me, apart form the hardware specs, was Bero seemingly working on the Macchiatobin board on the Wednesday and then turning his efforts into a desktop and laptop which he demonstrated on the Friday. ;-) Come on Tristan and Michael G!!! :-)

Here’s a video of Charbax talking to Bero on the Wednesday. Friday’s video can be found above.

With all the power of these new boards I am suprised that even with 24 ARM cores that compiling the linux kernel takes just under 10 minutes when an i7 is supposed to take only 3 minutes. I wonder if its down to the way the compiler’s been written and optimised.

One thing that stood out for me is that some of these boards do have the potential to bring 4K graphics to the desktop.

Good solution. With probably 60% more power than the Titanium…
… So it’s better to had first multicore to RISC OS.

Agreed. The advantage that Elesar’s Titanium has over these boards is that it has 4 SATA ports, two video outputs and of course RISC OS running on it. ;-)

24 ARM cores

24 Cortex-A53@1 GHz. Very slow cores.

Very slow cores.

Equals: won’t catch fire.

Look at the specs for the Samsung S7 and note that it just won’t run all cores flat out for reasons that quickly become apparent when doing some heavy duty number crunching like Google Navigate. That’s when you learn that the fancy metal edge around the phone doubles up as the heat sink!

That said, in an imaginary world where RISC OS could even manage multiple cores without stalling over issues such as FileCore’s lack of reentrancy, 24×1GHz isn’t so bad. Fair enough it isn’t 24GHz, but a specially written program could disperse workload across multiple cores to run concurrently to make it “seem” like more than a few cores clocking 1GHz apiece.

That said 2 (the sequel), what on RISC OS would really make any benefit of this sort of thing? It isn’t as if RISC OS is a hot offline video editing solution…!

BTW, the $250ish tag is for the octo-core board. How much does the 24 core monster run in at?

How much does the 24 core monster run in at?

No actual price given yet, but estimates have been suggested at under £1,000 for a complete system. Also the release date is sometime in December, the board will be available from the 96boards website.

Equals: won’t catch fire.

Very true – power consumption = 5 watts.

When you look at the direction that ARM and it’s ecosystem is moving towards; it’s multi-core > multi-chip > multi-cluster.

So ultimately, RISC OS will need to be upgraded ¹ to handle this if it is to remain somewhat relevant going forward.

¹ I make it sound oh so simple

CNX software has produced a summary article of what it calls are the top 5 most powerful ARM SBCs

Having lots of cores and a binary blob Linux driver doesn’t make a good board for RISC OS.

Take a look at this document – a mere 3,492 pages describing the operation of the OMAP3 (and that doesn’t even cover GPU operation, only framebuffer style video output).
Without something of that level of technical detail, porting an operating system to a new ARM device will be all but impossible.

I don’t know about UEFI machines, but until (fairly) recently all PCs would boot up with the processor behaving as a primitive 16 bit machine, with some standard memory (~640K), kbd/com/lpt etc in standard known locations, a CGA display device, and of course a set of BIOS routines for talking to the machine and kicking off the probing to discover what is actually there (oh, it’s not a 640K 8088 with 640×480 display, it’s a 2GB Pentium4 with 1920×1080!).

ARM devices, on the other hand, are only starting to get the idea of maybe a “device tree” might be useful (duh!) since what hardware is built into the SoC and where it is located in memory is pretty much akin to giving a blindfolded toddler a set of dice. For the SoCs intended to run operating systems, you can pretty much guarantee three things¹:
1. There there will be a serial port, a USB interface, some sort of display device, and a wodge of memory.
And:
2. The serial port will be anywhere, and may or may not resemble a 16550; ditto the USB interface which will be “somewhere” and will have “some registers” and may or may not resemble a known interface; ditto the graphics²; ditto…. are you spotting a trend here?
And finally:
3. Attempting to probe for stuff will probably go wrong, stiff the machine, etc.

That’s why one single LiveCD of some Unix clone will boot on a PC, but pretty much every ARM board will need it’s own build of <x> (Linux, Android, RISC OS…); and if you think about it, the devices don’t even boot up in the same way – the OMAP3 looks for “MLO” to get going with some specifics about how and where it is located, the Pi looks for “bootcode.bin” (and maybe something else, re. the NOOBS distribution).

At any rate, no documentation = no hope. So please don’t be wowed by vast amounts of memory, USB3, SATA, or two dozen cores. Be wowed by a respectable level of documentation. Without that, you’re stuck with whatever versions of Linux/Android the manufacturer bothers³ to support.

¹ Espressobin… ;-)

² For GPU on ARM devices, I’m aware of: Mali, Vivante, BCM VideoCore, PowerVR SGX – each of those have serveral different versions, and I’m sure there are others – didn’t Nvidia do a GPU on an ARM board?

³ If you want Ângström for the Beagle(xM), don’t bother with http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/ as that’s now a half-assed WordPress site that is mostly content free. Where’s the downloads? Where’s the content!?
Thankfully you can pick up a copy from https://beagleboard.org/latest-images (dated 2012/01/11), though it’s worth noticing that there’s a much more recent (a year old) image of Debian Jessie that might be better than the terminally buggy Ângström…

A little bit of an update to this thread with regards to ARM (arm) hardware. Gigabyte has quietly produced a new Workstation class ARM PC ;-) that’s bound to cost you an ARM and a leg. I did some further research related to how much one might cost and came up with the following link .

A different potentially more affordable version of an ARM PC comes from a Socionext and Gigabyte which follows the 96boards enterprise spec. Here’s a user experience video with a nod to the RISC PC…

I guess the ARM PC or workstation might interest those who do a lot of cross-compiling x86 → ARM or for those keen to see how closely they resemble an IYONIX PC.

Also if you have an interest in AI, 96boards has a new website dedicated to ARM hardware that contains AI capabilities.

Hidden in the AI news is the announcement of a new dual sata ARM based motherboard that contains a Rockchip RK3399 – release date Q2 2018.

As Steffen Huber mentions in another thread the 96boards snapdragon 820 has been released for $199 .

Firefly have released a couple of boards aimed at industrial applications with more I/O connectors than your average Pi, it comes in two flavours a Rockchip RK3288 and RK3399