Rockpro64 ARM CPU A72/A53 seems to be avaible for kickstarter projects


You see those suspiciously-far-away-from-each-other-placed holes next to the SoC? I doubt these things are optional...

levi said:
What makes you say they're going to make it available in small quantities to anyone who wants one as an SoC only?
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It's Rockchip, and that's a kickstarter link.
 
I think the CPU upgrade should be kickstarted, if the Pyra team can design a pi-sized board for the CPU upgrade board to connect to they could sell those to the normies and we could just buy the bare CPU board and upgrade our Pyras. Heck, one of the pledge levels could even get you an entire Pyra. It could be good advertising for the Pyra, by then the OS will be stable and lots of software.

Didn't ED say something like this?
 
There are odd holes all over the board. I don't really understand what they're for at all. But the fact that SoC is metal topped suggests to me that some external cooling might be very nice to have.

I still don't see what the kickstarter for a devboard has to do with small sales of the SoC only, but you're probably right that Rockchip are the sort of people who will sell to all and sundry.
 
Oh, I thought the company was just allowing their CPU to be in kickstarter projects, like they'll offer support to small projects or something.
 
Yeah, that's a risk, which is why I pointed out it has a metal top designed for thermal paste, but maybe with it being a more modern core that can do more per clock tick, it could run with maybe two of those hot cores disabled and still be faster than the OMAP 5 within the same power budget. And that GPU looks quite tasty on paper, if we're no longer limited to GLes 2.0, but could go up to GLes 3.1 (no Vulcan though as far as I can see), although I've not heard too good things about mali GPUs in the past. That could potentially be a big part of the power budget that requires active cooling, I don't know.

Edit: That iMX-8M chip sports up to 4 A53 cores only. This has two of those plus two A72 cores which are much more performant in single core benchmarks. You don't get the benefit of open source graphics drivers for this though, which you apparently do with the iMX8 GPU. But you shouldn't lose anything in terms of peak performance here, provided it can be run reasonably quickly without cooking itself.
 
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Ugh, ARMs bar graphs are terrible for using a massively non-zero axis. But yeah, it does seem to be a small step on from the A73, and if it really is more efficient, then it's worth keeping an eye on. Just bear in mind we haven't seen any A7x designs so far that look to me like cool running chips for a fanless solution.
 
levi said:
There are odd holes all over the board. I don't really understand what they're for at all. But the fact that SoC is metal topped suggests to me that some external cooling might be very nice to have.
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That's what I was getting at, look at the pictures of that other board in the linked Golem article, it has the heatsink outline printed on the board.
 
levi said:
That's a different board though I think.
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It's the very same chip and it's pretty obvious that both have a common origin, especially concerning the heatsink holes. The only noteworthy difference is that the Rockpro64 board shares the heatsink with the RAM chips while the Firefly one dedicates it to the SoC. Either way, the planned heatsink for those boards is fairly large for this kind of chip.
 
The ODroid N1 has this processor.
It is quite powerfull, building stuff on this is fast. The procossor doesn't heat up too much, but there is a fan installed, and it does start sometime.
 
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If I could justify splashing out that kind of cash I'd get one of the Nvidia Jetson boards I think. They're the only thing Nvidia do on Linux that isn't pure evil and they'd probably be a lot more useful for me.

But I can't justify it because I'd use it a few times, then go back to my desktop and leave it to gather dust.
 
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