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96Boards Officially Launches The HiKey 960 ARM Board

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  • 96Boards Officially Launches The HiKey 960 ARM Board

    Phoronix: 96Boards Officially Launches The HiKey 960 ARM Board

    The 96Boards organization has announced the official launch and shipping of the HiKey 960...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    This ARM board has 3GB of LPDDR4 and 32GB of flash storage and Mali graphics.
    Mali? No open drivers? Sorry but I quit. When will there be another Snapdragon board that we can use out of the box?

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    • #3
      Seems like a very nice board.
      Too bad its pretty expensive too.
      Much more powerful than Raspberry Pi, on the other hand I can buy several RPi for the price of one.

      I would like to see a RISC-V board.

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      • #4
        With 240 USD, I can buy 9~12 quadcore or 5~8 octacore boards with a little less ram & emmc or 3~5 boards with very similar configuration all including the powersuply, fan, heatsink, box, etc that they need.

        Someone enlighten me, why is this board so special that makes it worth paying 240 speechless george washingtons for?

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        • #5
          Originally posted by FastCode View Post
          Someone enlighten me, why is this board so special that makes it worth paying 240 speechless george washingtons for?
          I am disappointed in this, but it appears this is to replicate a high-spec, but mid-range phone from the end of this year or the beginning of next year, so it is supposed to boost AOSP development. Thus, they seem to have priced it the way a phone with such specs would currently be priced, minus the screen + battery + portability + phone.

          They are only releasing an AOSP Android with it for now, so with Mali still being closed, someone would have to make a leap of faith and buy the board, then spend time trying to get it's kernel up and running, then mash another filesystem on it in a way that can boot, then wire up libhybris with the GPU drivers from Android to try to get it to run with most of the hardware support.

          So for now, this is a dev board for phones and tablets, even though it could've been a real computer.

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          • #6
            overpriced.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by FastCode View Post
              With 240 USD, I can buy 9~12 quadcore or 5~8 octacore boards with a little less ram & emmc or 3~5 boards with very similar configuration all including the powersuply, fan, heatsink, box, etc that they need.

              Someone enlighten me, why is this board so special that makes it worth paying 240 speechless george washingtons for?

              You did not look at the specifications. A single Cortex-A73 is at least 2-3 times faster than a Cortex-A53 at the same clock frequency. So 4 Cortex-A73 @ 2.4 GHZ + 4 Cortex-A53 @1.8GHz are at least 7-8 times faster that 4 Cortex-A53 @ 1.2 GHz (e.g. Raspberry Pi 3). Thus, if you divide $240 by 8, you have $30, so the performance per dollar is at least as good as for Raspberry Pi 3 or similar computers.

              This board might not be suitable for many purposes because it is unlikely that it will have good documentation and good software support, but not because of the price, which is very good for what you get.

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              • #8
                I still think the Odroid XU4 is among the best price to performance of the higher end SBCs.

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                • #9
                  Right now the HiKey 96 I see as not even an option but a mere tinker thing.

                  I have a love hate relationship with ARM. However, I would really like to see a desktop alternative as an additional option alongside x86 albeit it more modifiable like the x86 platform.

                  I do prefer x86 and agree there is no comparison 'at the moment that is', I see massive potential in ARM based systems as multimedia/gaming/workstation capable systems. I see mobile technologies already opening up a gateway for this. While it would propose a headache for developers for example Linus Torvalds himself gives his first hand account of that.

                  We are drawing closer to the handheld workstation but that is far far off in my opinion.

                  One of the biggest problems of ARM based technologies now, quite obviously is that they are very disposable, "An Issue of Modernity". The hardware platform is a styrofoam cup due to the current lack of being modifiable in traditional sense that we PC users are accustomed to.
                  Last edited by creative; 26 April 2017, 12:02 PM.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by FastCode View Post
                    With 240 USD, I can buy 9~12 quadcore or 5~8 octacore boards with a little less ram & emmc or 3~5 boards with very similar configuration all including the powersuply, fan, heatsink, box, etc that they need.

                    Someone enlighten me, why is this board so special that makes it worth paying 240 speechless george washingtons for?
                    OpenCL 2.0 will be supported so it opens the door for hundreds of computer vision projects by researchers and students. Cortex-A73 is a large out of order core so performance is going to be 3x that of the Raspberry Pi in single threaded applications and 5x in multi threaded applications. This does not include GPU which is on the order of 10-100 times faster than the one in the Raspberry Pi 3. Fully software support is included in ASOP so the latest Android will support this board. Linux components will be mainlined by Linaro.

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