> https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte...
The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally.
You can buy a cheap powerful phone because there's a market for it. The margins are in the scale of the consumer market. However, there isn't as much a market for a generic "beige-box" cheap CPU. It's one of the difficult realizations of being a techie: the kind of undifferentiated, cheap, flexible box we want just doesn't carry itself as a product.
Rockchip RK3399 boards:
NanoPC-T4, $109 2x A72@2GHz, 4xA53@1.5Ghz 4GB LPDDR3-1866 RAM, 4 lane PCIe M.2 80mm https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&... http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4
RockPro64, $80 2x A72@1.8GHz, 4xA53@1.4Ghz 4GB RAM, 4 lane PCIe full-size slot http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c...
Rock960, ~$99 https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/
HiSilicon Kirin boards:
HiKey960, $239 Kirin 960, 4x A73@2.4GHz 4x A53@1.8GHz, 3GB LPDDR4, TSMC 16nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey9...
HiKey970, $299 Kirin 970, 4x A73@2.36GHz, 4x A53@1.8GHz, 6GB LPDDR4X-1866, PCIe M.2 2260?, TSMC 10nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM
There's also the Socinext 24-core developer box. It's $1200 for a complete system: https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/
Even finding usable images to flash was tough on the RK3399 and near-impossible on the HiKey960. Even then, the HiKey960 image I found was pretty unstable (randomly killed processes due to a mysterious OOM) and was contributed by a _forum user_, not the official vendor (they seem to mainly support Android).
What should be kept in mind is that these are essentially phones-on-a-board that may or may not have been shoehorned properly to run a desktop Linux. That comes with all of the relevant baggage. For example, the HiKey960 board will aggressively thermal throttle given that all that comes with the board is a piddly copper "heatsink" that you _glue_ on the SoC.
Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi is the only board that I've come across that offers a sane GNU/Linux experience in terms of software support. The performance is acceptable if you consider that even these 4xA73 boards would still get smoked by a reasonable desktop CPU.
https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bf...
Fantastic for a $80 board that consumes less than 10W.
And nobody wants a stripped-down, locked-down version of MacOS-Lite.
So, no.
That's what everyone was saying before the iPad launch and look how that turned out. Personally, I would hate an iPadBook, but I can see it selling really well. Especially among students.
And nobody wants a stripped-down, locked-down version of MacOS-Lite
Yet in iOS that is exactly what Apple sells the most.
There's nothing inherent in an ARM transition that would lead to such a thing, and there's nothing in the current x86 architecture that's preventing it.
Plenty of people use iPads instead of laptops, no?
I guess you missed the fact that Apple has endless billions to spend and can buy or hire to achieve anything they want.
Intel and AMD sell an entire System-on-a-Chip disguised as a CPU processor. Their CPU is much more than a CPU core: they contain an entire system in there.
If you want to make a comparison, it is more correct to compare the Snapdragon and the Exynos chips to the off-the-shelves CPUs that Intel and AMD sell.
Arm only sells technologies that enable other companies to create a final product, it doesn't impose those kind of "management systems" and binary blobs.
In 2013 AMD successfully fabricated a CPU with said ARM Cortex core embedded, thus that was the first year they actually offered their PSP. AMD had similar problems with their APU's for a number of years IIRC, whereby making a single chip with both CPU and GPU on it had poor yields with a high percentage of dead chips.
They could have used MIPS, PowerPC or any other CPU cores for PSP, they just decided to go with Arm.
The only reason why it might not be considered a ME or PSP replacement is that the user can control the signing keys.
This means some companies have hidden proprietary code in their bootloaders. For example the Samsung Exynos have a range of ARM chips, but to boot them you must use their bootloader, which may contain spyware, backdoors or surveillance systems. You can not see the source code for this bootloader and have no way of auditing what it actually does.
Rockchip is another company that makes ARM chips, and can be considered mostly free [1]. As with all hardware it's very hard to know what's going on inside, but all the code to boot into Linux (minus the optional GPU) on a Rockchip product is open source and can be audited/compiled by anyone.
ARM also have TrustZone [2] that allows you to run applications in a "secure" (or separate) space. It doesn't run on a separate chip, but runs on the ARM chip, separating memory and instructions from the operating system. (Don't quote me but...) I believe you don't actually have to use TrustZone. The instructions/documentation for it doesn't appear to be available to the public, however if you don't upload a blob for TrustZone, with Rockchip it simply won't use it and will run everything on the same level. (Note this is true for Rockchip, but again depending on who is manufacturing the ARM chip, they may force you to use TrustZone).
Unlike with Intel ME and AMD PSP, if you don't want to use their ME, you have no choice. If you remove the blob your system won't boot (or will restart after 30 minutes for some older models).
This means if ARM TrustZone is compromised you can remove it and continue on as normal. But if ME and PSP are compromised you are at the will of Intel and any agency it may have colluded with.
While we're on the subject of free and open source code, note that with (most) ARM chips, the GPU is closed source just like the Intel ME. Again, the difference is if you don't want to use the GPU, you can just not upload the blob, and use the CPU without the GPU. There are some movements being made to open the GPU [3], but it's still a long way off.
1. https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html
2. http://www.openvirtualization.org/open-source-arm-trustzone....
SoC power management, system bringup, and maintenance tasks are complicated enough these days to warrant a full small core tacked onto the side. These cores are necessary, and aren't going away. Complaining about them being there is just pissing into the wind. Complain about what they're used for and the closed source nature of their code.
There's a vast difference between such a core being used solely for bringup/power management/housekeeping and it having a network connection to the outside and being used for "remote management" (and running with godawfully insecure parsing code, at that).
So the real question is: will the laptops let end users replace the TrustZone kernel?
A complication is that ARM only designs the ISA, implementors can very much add their own management system to the SoC.
Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area.
Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.
Good battery life though.
So, for ARM to become as performant as x86 means they wind up burning the same area and power.
That having been said, breaking a monoculture would be welcome, especially given how cavalier Intel is about security.
(You will note I didn't say "In light of" with respect to Intel and security. IBM, DEC, etc. have been preaching about the fact that x86 has lousy security for 30+ years. It's just that nobody cared until x86 became a mainframe ... err ... cloud.)
Then how come ARM won on mobile?
Yup. The thing is that ARM can indeed match Intel on scaling up as you noted. Intel is struggling with x86 in scaling down, though. Easy to see which one is in a better position overall.
Intel's x86 architecture reset and housecleaning is due to land in 4 or 5 years and it should be really interesting then.
To them¸ I tell that dozens of makers of ARM laptops in China could not be wrong manufacturing a product at huge profit for over a decade (yes, the netbook wave has ceased much in the Western world, but the need for cheap, near disposable machine that can send email and read simple websites is still around)
Cheap laptops made on prehistoric Via Wondermedia chips are made by tons and are flooding places like Africa and India https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...
> Windows 10 systems powered by Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs are already available from ASUS, Lenovo, HP, and Samsung have also announced they will join the mix as well.
E.g.: https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/30/asus-novago-review/?gucc...
The one I have is ergonomically great! Asus, something or other, but it has an Intel Atom, Win 7 Starter (fine for what I use it for) and a single GB Ram.
Under powered to say the least. It runs Linux much better though.
Anyway, I use it with some embedded dev tools. It actually does the job, and the form factor is great.
Want one just like it, touch screen, more RAM and a fast enough, efficient Arm CPU.
But in 1987 the ARM was so astoundingly powerful that it should have become the king of the workstation market. A failure of marketing, perhaps.
And remember, back then the whole notion of a _personal_ PC was very new, and thus companies with first mover advantage got huge leverage by instilling the idea into common people that AT/XT "common phenotype clone" is the computer.
Lots of people then got an idea that a computer must be a kind of at/xt derivative and nothing else:
My parents brought a second hand CZ310 from Japan in late 1994. A super expensive machine even for them (they were possibly within the top 2000 at that time in Russia.) I remember, mom saying about those times affectionately that she asked for "the best computer the money can buy." And that when it gave up the ghost in 1997 or 1996, the repairman simply did not believe that it was a computer and not a some kind of a gaming console.
The failure of non-PC-clones in the 80s/90s is mostly attributable to those two deficiencies, I think.
Then again, both Atari and Amiga tried that with their 030 machines and had no success. They were not taken seriously as workstation vendors (in the then lucrative workstation market) in many cases because of the brand on the box. I distinctly remember a UnixWorld article about the Atari TT030 with the headline "Up from toyland" (above an otherwise positive review)
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/04/19/...
> "Windows Defender System Guard runtime attestation, which is built into the core Windows operating system, will soon be delivered in all editions of Windows. Windows Defender System Guard runtime attestation, like Credential Guard, takes advantage of the same hardware-rooted security technologies in virtualization-based security (VBS) to mitigate attacks in software."
BTW, Google uses hardware-based security on all of their servers:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/google_reveals_its_...
In my mind, there are two big questions: (1) is it fast enough for users, and (2) will users be able to run business-critical x86 / Windows software on it?
(1) was pretty bad with the first ARM-based Chromebooks, which could handle at best 3-4 tabs, but has started getting better (see the Samsung Chromebook Plus).
(2) boils down to whether the relevant parties can get x86-on-ARM emulation working. I feel like Microsoft had a pretty good tech demo of this at a past Build conference, but I wouldn't be surprised if non-technical reasons prevent it from shipping.
The various Snapdragon 835 powered Windows laptops use it AFAIK.
The real test for this is software.
Anyone remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
Exactly...
Given that. AMD has licensed cpu to China Hygon AMD now has competitive gaming CPUs ARM is releasing laptop cpus
ARM platforms are extremely diverse largely due to the fact that its cores are integrated into SoCs for a wide range of uses, and I'd say the majority of ARM SoCs in use don't even have any public documentation. This is particularly true of those used in smartphones and tablets.
Or put it more bluntly, "legacy-free means compatibility-free."
It is the same reason why x86 doesn't work out when it is moving into mobile space, same reason ARM doesn't work out moving up to Notebook Desktop space.
Two more years down the road I wouldn't be surprise to see a Dual Zen Core, 64 Vega APU selling for $59 or less.
While i want to see the x86 desktop get a serious contender once again, it has risen on the back of a very open and modular platform.
But ARM based products are virtual black boxes by comparison.
Thus i worry if ARM rising to the challenge on the desktop will lead to an acceleration of the trend of "devicification" the desktop.
