Just as a word of warning, I bought the old PineBook64 and it was dreadful. I could accept the speed limitations of a $99 laptop - but the hardware was inadequate. The trackpad couldn't tell the difference between scrolling and zooming. The keyboard regularly skipped keypresses. Firmware updates were promised, but never arrived.
There was also very little software support. The occasional community build of of Ubuntu or Android. Neither of which received much in the way of bug fixes or development.
I appreciate it was designed as a "tinkering" machine - but it's hard to tinker when the basics don't work.
Devices like this live and die by their community. If you don't have lots of committed people working on supporting a platform it quickly withers and dies.
I like the look of the "pro" model. But if it receives the same lack of attention as their earlier hardware, it won't be worth buying.
> The trackpad couldn't tell the difference between scrolling and zooming. The keyboard regularly skipped keypresses. Firmware updates were promised, but never arrived.
Only when people run into things like that, they get appreciation for people making decent low-end hardware.
I say, it is twice as hard to design a decent $300 laptop that a decent $1000 laptop.
Supply chain for low-end parts is a total Wild West (or East if you want.) If you want 100k top-tier panels from Samsung, you sign the contact and go away having a good sleep. If you want 100k of ok quality and moderately priced panels, you are up for a lot of sleepless nights picking them up from random distributors, through all of manufacturing run.
For touchpads that don't go on standalone modules, calibration is also case by case. Some times, it simply doesn't work - you plastic is too thick, it's dielectric value is off. Ideally, you have a specialist company making a custom made module for you, with Synaptics blessing, but for budget stuff, you your only option is to calibrate it yourself using SDKs leaked to Chinese FTPs
And stuff like keyboards - there are no dedicated keyboard module makers these days, your chassis maker is doing that nowadays. You are up for a lot of trial and error on that, and if you want any custom switches, god save you.
Ideally, if you are a budget maker, you want to spin as many models on a single "chassis" as possible to cover RnD expenses. This is the only way big ODMs like Quanta and Clevo or brands like Asus can make cheap and moderately good stuff.
Trying to be small and differentiated differentiated is the hardest thing to do for a budget OEM.
Checkout a brand called Chuwi - it's a miracle how they can make five different chassis a year, and do it profitably, while being an e-commerce-only brand.
Indeed. Casio is one of my favorite brands in electronics because they have been so reliable about doing cost reduction without compromising the core device functions. For example, when they do a high end keyboard, which seems to happen about twice a decade, the key features are soon brought back down to their low end models, meaning that at any given moment their offering is most likely biased towards the cheapest of the range, with a bit of price differentiation on features.
Casio is a well-established brand and gets the benefits of scale, but that only makes some parts of the job easier. They still have to carve out market share one product at a time, like everyone else, and they don't do it through the expensive flagship pieces.
> There was also very little software support. The occasional community build of of Ubuntu or Android. Neither of which received much in the way of bug fixes or development.
This is exactly why I gave up on the PINE ecosystem. Their hardware is amazing. But their software support is dreadful. I don’t understand why they cannot have PINE supported OS builds.
I was curious enough to try it too. Wish I hadn't. It's e-waste in my opinion. My inner environmentalist wanted me to make my first youtube review video to warn people off but it looks like we'll have to settle for this HN comment for now.
Are there fast desktop ARM machines? Can I spend $500, not $50, to get something with 16-32GB of RAM and a ton of CPU cores?
I am with Linus on this "server ARM revolution won't happen". I've had to fix an ARM incompatibility that QEMU didn't emulate (related to hardware timers). Pine64 wasn't in stock. I got RPI, but compilation on that toy machine was soooo slooow that I literally forgot about the whole project before it finished compiling.
The ROCKPro64 is not super fast, but it is a pretty big step up from the Pi. 2 big cores and 4 little cores with 4GB RAM for $80. ~2800 geekbench multicore, Pi 3 is ~1400.
$269 (+ $70-100 shipping) will get you a MACCHIATObin (+ a 4GB DIMM), a mini-ITX board with four A72 cores, PCIe and FOSS firmware (https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf... or even just mainline TianoCore) capable of running a graphics card before the OS (thanks to qemu).
Just ran across your post. Coming over the summer we are releasing a mini-itx board based on https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/ That will be early release silicon. Production silicon will be end of 2019
The chip is 16 core 2ghz (maybe 2.2ghz for production), up to 64GB of DDR4
The board will be
ATX PSU / 12v input
4xSATA connectors
1xNVME (x4 lanes)
PCIe gen 4 x8 open slot (gen3 for LX2160A first silicon) PCIe add-in card
1x USB 3 in the back
2x USB 2.0 in the back
2x USB 3 header for front panel
2x USB 2.0 header for front panel
1xQSFP28 100Gbps cage (100Gbps/4x25Gbps/4x10Gbps)
1 1Gbps rj45 ethernet
RTC battery
Multiple FAN connectors; one of them with PWM / Tach
USB FTDI
USB to STM32 for remote management (on/off, remote SPI flash etc...)
The barebones board and COM will be sub $500. So adding all the bells and whistles you are going to looking at minimum $750 for a full working system. We have a proper Developer Workstation spec'd out in the $1300 range. Radeon GPU with multi-display support, 32GB of memory, 1TB NVME, nice looking compact mini-itx case, cooling loop etc.
Just for comparison a full ARM64 kernel build takes about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The same build on a ThreadRipper2 16 core / 32 thread takes 50 seconds. However the ThreadRipper is a 200Watt CPU and this is a 30Watt SOC
The MACCHIATObin Double Shot[0] from Marvell is reasonably fast. CPU wise it's twice the speed of a RPI, has two 10 Gb NICs, one 1 Gb NIC, 3 SATA ports, a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, in a mini-ITX form. I picked one up from Solid Run with 16 GB RAM for around $500 with the intention of making a desktop replacement to do all my online financial stuff on. Unfortunately the processor initialization doesn't configure large enough BAR space for video cards. A desktop like this has been done[1], but how was not publicly documented.
You should use the TianoCore based firmware instead of the U-Boot it comes with. TianoCore even runs QEMU to emulate the VBIOS, so you should be able to get graphics before OS boot, like on a normal PC :)
There are also jumpers for configuring where it gets the boot loader, so when I did happen to put a bad build into the SPI flash, it was possible to recover by using the SD card.
I'll have to revisit the TianoCore build as my previous attempts to use it were miserable failures. I assume due to the fact that my OS isn't arranged in such a way as to support EFI booting.
I would love to get it up and running as my gut feeling is that running on a platform that less than 0.0000001% of users are using insulates you from almost all automated attacks I'd encounter on the internet. The only thing I'd feel more secure using would be a Talos PowerPC based system, but those are out of my budget.
I read Linus's point as saying that the desktop/developer experience is what drives the adoptions, not the other way around. You want to be able to run similar stacks on both. So server can't happen unless desktop/laptop gets adoption first.
I for one would love to see an ARM desktop; I'm already a Linux user and I've largely stopped gaming so there's no reason for me to stick around x86 except that that's basically all I can get. Architecturally I find ARM much cleaner and nice to use, without all of the crufty 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit compatibility shims that we're stuck with because of the evolution of the x86-64 [ed: was IA64] architecture.
I have a RockPro64 4GB version & I have been very pleased! Lots of OSs available & easy to flash with their provided installer software. Used it mainly as a home web server runnibg Ubuntu 18.04 so far, but I have some other ideas to tinker with in the future.
Been really happy to have it around! Nice to see the company continue to deliver new products. I might pick up one of those camera cubes. Bravo Pine64!
Back then I was interested in the $90 Pinebook and finally opted against it, mainly because the driver support seemed problematic. The new Pinebook Pro according to the article will have a RK3399: Arm Cortex-A72 + quad-core Cortex-A53 + Mali T860 MP4 GPU. Can someone here judge based on the specs how driver support of that laptop will be like? Does the Mali gpu have a proper free (kernel-included?) linux driver? I did not find the answers to that.
RM produce designs for a GPU called 'Mali'. This is incorporated in many SoCs and thus devices. It is used in a number of devices that can run Debian.
There are three major revisions of Mali GPUs: Utgard, Midgard, and Bifrost. See wikipedia page for reference.
Partial free drivers were developed for Utgard but were abandoned (lima). Work on Utgard has continued by a new set of developers (lima). Free drivers for Midgard and Bifrost are under active development but are not yet ready for Debian users (panfrost).
Proprietary drivers are also available from the vendor for each Mali version. Since 2016, the binary drivers put out by ARM have been redistributable and thus can be packaged for non-free. GPLed kernel shim drivers are also released by ARM, which is eligible for Debian contrib. As of March 2017, these have been packaged in Debian for Midgard devices; see MaliMidgard. Upstream proprietary drivers are available from The ARM developer site
> ARM dropped support for X in their releases after r16 (Jan 2017). This is a massive pain as that's what we all still use. Only wayland, fbdev and android are supported after that.
If that's not misleading and there would be no proper X support the laptop is a no-starter for me. On the other hand, panfrost is in mesa now and https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost... sounds promising. Maybe that free driver will be ready till then.
The RK3399 has improved mainline support in 4.21/5, I think (which is just out now, thankfully!). Right now it'll work, but some boards (like the Rock960) are still a bit sketchy and things are missing. The user leds aren't in the device tree on the Rock960 for example. Otherwise you're at the whim of maintainers, eg if you want docker you need a kernel with aufs/overlay support and this is often not the case.
Thanks, Mainline support is great. And like mentioned above, that there is mesa/panfrost for the gpu could very well mean that this time the driver situation will actually be quite good when the laptop comes out. I'm looking forward to see how it works out.
My experience with Pine64 is that if it didn't work out of the box you're not going to get a fix later. And that definitely includes the video drivers. It's kind of a shame because the chipset has good specs on paper, but the driver situation is a total shitshow. I don't even think I ever even got the GPIO pins to work.
Think the Pine guys are doing what the Raspberry peeps should have done long ago: releasing products with 3-4GB of RAM. This way consumer facing devices are not constantly disk trashing for swap disk when browsing the web.
> Raspberry Pi _could_ have offered 4GB+ of it, and they could also have quadrupled the price.
Raspberry Pi's SoC does not support more RAM than the 1 GiB that it now has. This is as far as I am aware considered a serious problem by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
I don't know by what they thus plan to replace the SoC in the future.
This is what I was alluding to. There was an interview recently with Eben, where he explained that the SoC needs an upgrade to give them more (faster) peripherals and the ability to add more RAM. I can't find the source at the moment.
As I understand it the SoC in the Pi was some older IP that was licensed to them (RPF/Eben) for free (or close to) by Broadcom.
The RPF will have to sink so significant cost into a new SoC (and I choose to believe that this is already happening, as we speak).
>As much as I'd love a Pi with 4GB+ of RAM, is quite obvious why the $35 computer doesn't have it.
The reason is because it can't. Almost all SBCs are based on TV boxes (including the Rasberry Pi) which don't need more than 4 GB of RAM and are designed to only support that much.
16GB of RAM is $89 retail at the local Microcenter, in 2x8gb sticks. Not seeing how adding a bit more RAM would quadruple the price. Pine sells a 4gb RAM sbc for what, $59?
Edit : "Pricing will remain the same with the 1GB model priced at $24.95, the 2GB model at $34.95, and the 4GB model at $44.95."
That's the thing, everyone has different things that they want. Some want higher bus speeds but consider the current CPU speeds and RAM to be sufficient. Others need more CPU, but don't need the RAM. Still others would like to have more RAM, but don't necessarily need dramatically faster processors.
I don't see how the Pi Foundation can cater to all of them. Although, I do expect the Pi 4 next year to address at least some of them.
In the mean time, there are great devices, like the RockPro64.
IME, 1GB can be enough to browse modern websites without swapping, and 2GB allows you to do so while keeping lots of tabs open. Of course having more RAM than that is always nice, but even these "low RAM" specs are far from useless.
I recently bought an Orange Pi 3 which is roughly similar to Pine H64. Easy enough to setup and runs Pi Hole and Kodi just fine, unfortunately no way to run RetroPie at the moment.
These boards are kind of hamstrung by lack of Mali support from what I can tell. If you want a cheap single use server board they are great but they don’t compare to Raspberry Pi’s community and support ecosystem.
I bought an Orange Pi 1+ H6 for the high-end Mali GPU. The board was dead on arrival, as in, it never pulled any current from the power supply. It was plain as day to see this on my bench top power supply. The support I received was horrible. They kept demanding the same "troubleshooting" steps over and over and for me to upload YouTube videos showing me doing the steps. It clearly was DOA. I threw it in the garbage and swore off Orange Pi forever.
I switched to a Rock 960 and had a much better experience.
I really really love the idea of this Pinebook Pro but find this Pine64 ecosystem a risk. I would love it if I could buy this with an RPi heart. At least then I'd know I could easily run fullHD video on the GPU, I would for certain get a nice modern Ubuntu Mate desktop that is reasonably nice speed-wise. I'm pretty sure I could do most of the things I do on my 800 dollar laptop on a Pi3. The Pine64 eco-system makes me very weary though and it is again echoed here in the comments.
I do a fair amount with SBCs for my home automation, and various projects (always flashed with Dietpi where possible). I've got Raspberry Pis, NanoPi Neos, Odroids, and the one regretful purchase, a Rock64 by Pine.
The hardware support was abysmal from day one; the only recourse was a message board where suggestions from the makers included using a magnifying glass to look for bad surface mount welds on resistors.
Dietpi later came out with an image for the Rock64 (those folks really walk on water in my eyes), which has saved my Rock from the bin (all the officially supported linux builds were rife with crashes), and I'm currently using it as a massively overpowered nginx server (because I don't trust the hardware for anything else at this point).
tl;dr - I would not buy something from Pine64 again.
These look really cool, I had no idea the PINE project was so diverse in its hardware projects.
Especially the $20 "naked" digital camera core ("The Cube") looks like it might trigger loads of cool projects. I guess it runs Linux, since it's pretty high-specced and has rich I/O. Power over Ethernet support suggests fixed installations is a niche (like security cameras, smart homes, automation and so on), but it might also be useful for visual effects. Cool stuff.
I think this:
Over the last year or two we’ve seen the Raspberry Pi form factor starting to become a defacto standard for single-board computers, much like Adafruit’s Feather has for micro-controllers
was a bit surprising, Feather is cool but surely it's an attempt to establish another standard, since Arduino already is the standard for microcontrollers? It was a bit weird that Arduino wasn't mentioned, there.
Looking forward to seeing when these become possible to order.
I have the original Pine64 in a case with all the addons, remote, etc. I played with it for a bit thinking to use it as a Kodi box. It’s been sitting on my project tablet since then. It is going on the eBay item pile soon. It was just not quite fast enough to keep up with how I wanted to use it. At this price point however it was a cheap experiment. I will likely order a the newer model and try it out. They current Kodi box for the man cave TV is an Intel compute stick (i5) (windows 10 because I am to lazy to figure out how to get Linux on it). It drives a 4K TV. It has steam installed for older games. Speaking of which it was funny as I was playing the Mater of Orion remake on the system. At larger sizes of galaxy it was painfully slow. I also have a much older (~5 years) 6 core AMD FX. Tried it on that system and it was much faster. Looking at activity monitor it seems it was one of the few games (from a few years ago) that take advantage of multi core chips.
Indeed, that's what makes the raspberry pi so hard to beat, even though I'm just a hobbyist using it as a tinker toy.
If something major breaks software-wise you can be pretty sure that the rPi community is large enough to produce a fix within hours.
OTOH if you'd like a new kernel for that fancy $65 big.LITTLE 4GB dualchannel ECC Gigabit PCIe SBC then you're at the mercy of your vendor who considers 4.4 LTS ought to be good enough and already reassigned the entire dev team to work on a future hardware release. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Biggest deal in my opinion is 2 dedicated USB2 _hosts_, in addition to a USB3 host. The raspberry pi multiplexes (i.e. uses a 4 way USB hub) it's ports. If I remember correctly the Ethernet is also multiplexed on the same bus. This makes connecting multie cameras and streaming over Ethernet a problem.
Had to wait a long time to get a Build-to-order email for the old pinebook after I sign up. Maybe I sign up today I'll get a pinebook pro before it stops being cool.
I'm considering ordering the pinebook as a replacement for my rMBP too.
For me, CPU power and RAM are not that important, I don't need MacOS (any unix system will do for me) and I don't play games (or at least none that would require a powerful GPU).
The pinebook offers 4k60 over USB-C (my MPB only does 4k30 over hdmi, and the mDP ports on the early rMBP have a design flaw that makes them unusable for 4k monitors). The 10Ah battery in combination with the low-power hardware should give very good battery life.
What I'm looking for in a laptop is a metal case, decent keyboard and upgradability. The pinebook seems to offer just that. At a low enough pricepoint not to be disappointed if it has some flaws. (Any flaw on a 3000 euro macbook would make me mad, and it has many).
> mDP ports on the early rMBP have a design flaw that makes them unusable for 4k monitors
what is the context on this? I have a 2015 MBPr hooked up to two 4k monitors on my desk right now, and I am not having any issues...
I would also worry about the GFX ability to actually output 4k/60 for anything other than a terminal (The ARM Mali-T860MP4 GPU doesn't look like it is going to be able to deal with 4k video for example)
The early (first?) retina macbook pro's (sold from mid 2012 till 2013) have a design flaw on the motherboard, this causes external 4k displays to show noise, weird colors, lose sync or not turn on at all. Apple 'solved' this by not listing the 2012 macbook pro on the supported device list for 4k monitors [0] (this list appeared in 2015)
It seems like a signal timing issue on the early motherboards. The macbook negotiates 60Hz with the monitor, but as soon as the monitor switches to 60Hz it loses sync. If you install linux you can work around this issue by forcing the output to 30Hz.
The issue was solved in the following motherboard revision, somewhere in 2013. So that's why your MBP plays nice with your monitors.
(btw, I was not complaining that my almost-7-year-old 2012 device does not work with modern 4k displays. I was just trying to explain why a 200USD pinebook would be an upgrade over my 2012 macbook.)
Software & systems engineering. I am tired of Apple positioning themselves as premium brand and fucking up every product cycle since Steve Jobs passed away. I need very little and I would like to pay them but not for these broken ideas like removing the jack from all mobile devices or screwing with the keyboard. If they are serious about being a premium brand they have to do better.
I'm wondering too. Generally you spend that much money because your time is valuable and Apple offers a safe and "no bullshit" experience. A $200 ARM laptop by a company that isn't known to support it's hardware well doesn't sound like it's in the same market at all.
There was also very little software support. The occasional community build of of Ubuntu or Android. Neither of which received much in the way of bug fixes or development.
I appreciate it was designed as a "tinkering" machine - but it's hard to tinker when the basics don't work.
Devices like this live and die by their community. If you don't have lots of committed people working on supporting a platform it quickly withers and dies.
I like the look of the "pro" model. But if it receives the same lack of attention as their earlier hardware, it won't be worth buying.