An AMD ARM 64-bit Dev Board Is Launching For $299 USD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An AMD ARM 64-bit Dev Board Is Launching For $299 USD

Since last year we have been waiting for AMD to launch their "HuskyBoard" ARM development board built around their Opteron A1100 ARM 64-bit SoC. That board was originally supposed to ship in Q4'15 while now available for pre-order is a new A1100 development board that looks like it may be taking its place...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-LeMaker-Cello

[chuckula]

Dev boards tend to be overpriced. Especially when this is basically just a cut-down version of a previous generation smartphone chip without any integrated graphics/radios/sensors/etc. If it was the 8-core version of the A1100 then it might be interesting for testing purposes, but at $300, I'd be willing to drop $50 more for an 8-core production-ready Avoton board that's been out since 2013: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157475

Or, you could dial it back to 4 cores spend less money for a production board than the cost of this dev board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157419

[mbello]

Agree, Avoton is much more interesting at a similar price.

A DEV board could be interesting if there were momentum behind AMD's ARM efforts. But AMD has again dropped the ball and no one is expecting anything interesting from them anymore.

By the time the A1100 is available it will offer the performance of a USD 35-40 Raspberry Pi4 or ODROID-C3 which by that time will already have been released.

[haagch]

25 Watt TDP does sound a bit anemic for using it as a desktop replacement with good performance...

PCIe	x16 PCIe G3 slot

Put a Fury X on it and do some benchmarks!

[uid313]

1.7 GHz and DDR3, meanwhile modern smartphones have 2.2 GHz and DDR4.

If you just want a ARM64 board there are many cheaper such as RPi 3 and ODROID-C2.

This way too expensive, and not even cutting-edge.

[schmidtbag]

To me, this is the first true enthusiast ARM platform. I personally like the fact that it doesn't come with RAM, storage, or a GPU. You could make a pretty modest PC out of this platform since you can expand it on your own. The open source radeon drivers are in pretty good shape and in theory should work fine on this, so getting a discrete AMD GPU could be a good fit for this.

[schmidtbag]

1.7 GHz and DDR3, meanwhile modern smartphones have 2.2 GHz and DDR4.

If you just want a ARM64 board there are many cheaper such as RPi 3 and ODROID-C2.

This way too expensive, and not even cutting-edge.

Yeah, and you don't need DDR4 if you don't have an IGP. CPUs don't benefit that much from RAM frequency, especially with clock rates below 2GHz. Also keep in mind there is a variant of this board that is a true 8-core CPU; it isn't like those "fake" big.LITTLE 8-cores. I wouldn't be surprised if you could overclock this too.

RPi3 and the C2 are very limited. You can't use that much memory, they don't have USB 3.0, they don't have SATA, they don't have PCIe, etc.

You're comparing apples to oranges here.

[JonathanM]

1.7 GHz and DDR3, meanwhile modern smartphones have 2.2 GHz and DDR4.

GHz != performance and how often is the speed of ddr3 ram the bottleneck on an arm device?
I hope that Michael will receive a review sample, I'm curious about how this would perform.

[Min1123]

Cortex-A57 is the out-of-order supporting BIG version of the chip. Clocked at this it should be interesting to see where it falls on the benchmarking scale (I hope it whips the 25w AM1 Athlons and Semprons at least). At this point I'd rather be seeing A72s or custom architecture from AMD, but they are quite busy trying to get ready for Bristol Ridge and its rollout. Those Excavator Athlon chips were a paper launch at the beginning of February, they are just now (as in the next few days) coming to market for people who want to buy those. I also would hope that AMD's new proprietary GPU Vulkan/OpenCL plugin modules have ARM variants so we can use those with the FOSS drivers until they go sufficiently FOSS. It'll be interesting to see the boot structure, and hopefully some sort of nice firmware and Linux support out of the gate for this board.

[chuckula]

Wait, so in context of the other article about how hot the RPi 3 gets when running four A53 cores at 1.2 GHz, how come all those pictures of the dev boards show no heatsink/fan cooling for a chip that supposedly has 4 A57 (much bigger than A53) cores running at north of 2 GHz?

Is that just for promotional purposes or are you responsible for providing your own cooling solution for a non-standard dev board form factor?