After Years Of Waiting, Hands On With The AMD ARM Board

With Zen CPUs turning out very well in the marketplace, AMD appears to have divested some of their interest in ARM-based processors at least for the time being. But after waiting for years, I finally have my hands on an AMD Opteron A1100 ARM-based SBC for testing.

I was ecstatic when earlier this week an AMD ARM board turned up at my door thanks to our friends at one of the ARM-focused companies around, LoveRPI. The board that arrived is the LeMaker Cello.

The Cello was announced in early 2016 as a $299 USD developer board with the A1100 ARM 64-bit SoC with four Cortex-A57 cores @ 1.7GHz. The Cello features two DDR3 SO-DIMM slots capable of ECC RAM, two Serial ATA 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, and one PCI Express x16 3.0 slot. There are no integrated graphics, but the PCI-E x16 slot can make for some interesting testing.

This board was to begin shipping in Q2'2016, but it and the AMD HuskyBoard never materialized in 2016 and remain largely unavailable to this day. Last month we heard the LeMaker Cello finally shipping to some pre-order customers but on their web-site is listed as "no stock." (Meanwhile, the HuskyBoard that is still yet to be available was first talked about for release back in 2015 but never materialized.)

So it's really not clear what the future holds for the AMD A100 and future AMD ARM CPUs, but anyhow, our curiosity over this SoC can finally be answered with now being able to run some real Linux benchmarks on it. Unfortunately, no results to share today as the power adapter and DDR3 ECC Unregistered SO-DIMMs are arriving in a later shipment.

We are told by the folks at LoveRPI.com, they will be selling their limited supply of LeMaker Cello boards paired with supported memory in August. Stay tuned for the test results in the days/weeks ahead.