# I want this! (it's a 16-core ARM CPU)



## overmind (Mar 7, 2014)

I want this on a server motherboard, on a machine running FreeBSD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xW22lflfn0.

Pretty please...


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## SirDice (Mar 7, 2014)

I think I just had a nerdgasm...


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## graudeejs (Mar 7, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I think I just had a nerdgasm...


LOL. That made my day.


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## robspop (Mar 10, 2014)

graudeejs said:
			
		

> SirDice said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Me too 

Slightly off topic perhaps....

It would be nice if there was a drift away from the x86 platform anyway.  I'm sure the issue of Microsoft and their Secure Boot system has been discussed here as it has on other forums, but I would like to get away from the whole thing.  I really do wish Microsoft would stop trying to foist their product on those of us who don't want any part of it.

I see Richard Stallman runs a laptop called a Leemote Yeelong.  I had a look at this out of interest.  The company's products are not widely available in Europe, and no doubt there are some issues with them, but at least they are not tied to various sorts of proprietary code.  I think there is some sort of FreeBSD kernel port either available or in progress.

These are just thoughts off the top of my head, but it seems to me that FreeBSD runs on "PC" hardware because it is widely available and cheap.  In turn, I run the hardware that I do because it works with the OS I choose to use.  A market and manufacturing base as large as China's must surely have some influence on hardware.  Perhaps all the *nixes should start thinking about moving towards an alternative hardware platform, which could be economically viable as an offshoot of the mobile phone/tablet market: in terms of number of devices this must now be just about the biggest platform in the world and is not x86 based.

Oh well, back to work!


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## ronaldlees (Mar 10, 2014)

It'd be great if some aspiring entrepreneur would create a "BSD-Box" for all of us, maybe by taking one of the hobby boards that are available now and then using it as a seedling for the product.   Unfortunately, the American entry with the most potential (Texas Instruments) says their boards (Beagle) are not to be used in commercial products.  Do I have that right? I think that's also true of the Raspberry, but I'm not sure.  Anyway - I've seen no such restriction on Samsung's Exynos5 (Odroid-Xu) board product, which is more powerful than the others anyway.  Does anyone have different information on this?  It seems Samsung is going gonzo to bring eval boards to the masses.

I looked for a board based on the chip that this thread is all about, but didn't find one...


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## ronaldlees (Mar 10, 2014)

The newer chips are making small scale homebrew impossible, because those chips cannot be realistically soldered with low priced equipment.  That's why I think the "BSDBox" would use a standard board of some type...

I suppose it'd need to be called something other than "BSDBox" - given possible trademark considerations


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## wblock@ (Mar 10, 2014)

FreeBSD runs on the Raspberry Pi, although it should still be considered experimental at this point.

I searched for information on this 16-core ARM CPU, and found nothing except vague generalities.  No benchmarks, no spec sheet that even showed a TDP.


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## Crivens (Mar 10, 2014)

Maybe this could be of service?

Well, now that I have read some of the specs and also got mugged down memory lane (yes, I also have some PowerUP Hardware still running  ) I somehow see another discussion at home about how much junk I already have and that there is no need for more...


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## robspop (Mar 10, 2014)

The Amiga box looks like a nice bit of kit, but I notice the starting price in UK is around GBP2100 which doesn't exactly rival a similar spec PC in the "cheap 'n' cheerful" stakes.

Not the same sort of beast but I see the Lemote company I referred to above do this little box http://www.tekmote.nl/epages/61504599.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Products/CFL-006 for not much more than a 10th of the price.  It runs off 12V and uses only a few watts of power.


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## SirDice (Mar 10, 2014)

The interviewee talks about the CPU being used in mobile base stations. It's currently not in use in anything else but he said it was possible to use it for other purposes. There's just nothing else yet.


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## Crivens (Mar 10, 2014)

robspop said:
			
		

> The Amiga box looks like a nice bit of kit, but I notice the starting price in UK is around GBP2100 which doesn't exactly rival a similar spec PC in the "cheap 'n' cheerful" stakes.
> 
> Not the same sort of beast but I see the Lemote company I referred to above do this little box http://www.tekmote.nl/epages/61504599.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Products/CFL-006 for not much more than a 10th of the price.  It runs off 12V and uses only a few watts of power.


Being off the mainstream never was cheap, because then it would soon turn into the main stream.

The Lemote is indeed a good choice, for starters. The CPU is (according to Wikipedia) available with up to eight cores, that should give you enough processing power for most things (I know, no system is ever fast enough). I for one would love it. But maybe there could be some more kickstarter to this? What spec/CPU would we need for our use cases so that a lot of FreeBSD typical workload can be shifted to non-Intel, at least in theory?


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## andyzammy (Mar 10, 2014)

ronaldlees said:
			
		

> It'd be great if some aspiring entrepreneur would create a "BSD-Box" for all of us, maybe by taking one of the hobby boards that are available now and then using it as a seedling for the product.   Unfortunately, the American entry with the most potential (Texas Instruments) says their boards (Beagle) are not to be used in commercial products.  Do I have that right? I think that's also true of the Raspberry, but I'm not sure.  Anyway - I've seen no such restriction on Samsung's Exynos5 (Odroid-Xu) board product, which is more powerful than the others anyway.  Does anyone have different information on this?  It seems Samsung is going gonzo to bring eval boards to the masses.
> 
> I looked for a board based on the chip that this thread is all about, but didn't find one...



I'm very interested in this subject, especially complete system that could potentially be built (board and all) at home. I actually asked on NetBSD's IRC channel if there were any supported chips that were LQFP packaged, and I got directed to the Olimex site: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXi ... e-hardware

Porting is under way for the iMX233 range (I'm not sure about the others). It's quite limited (64 MB RAM, no PCI), but the other range of CPUs (A13, A10, A20) are much more to today's standards. The hardware is open source, and more importantly, unlike RPI and Beagle, it's usable in commercial environments (see link). I'm no expert but this range seems like a good candidate.


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## overmind (Mar 11, 2014)

Many of use are interested in this subject. What we would need is an ARM platform for server, desktop, laptop, small form factor board, comparable in CPU power to x86 and with less power consumption.


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## Crivens (Mar 11, 2014)

Ok, then maybe I will start some thread to gather wishes. I do not think that the platform needs to be based on ARM, tough. Since IBM went on to support PowerOPEN and there are SPARC cores available as source code (vhdl) - why stick to something that has royalties (and thus lawyers) attached to it?


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## SirDice (Mar 11, 2014)

Are there royalties involved in using an ARM processor? I thought that was only when you _designed_ an ARM SoC, not when you use one?


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## overmind (Mar 11, 2014)

Crivens said:
			
		

> ... I do not think that the platform needs to be based on ARM, tough...



anything RISC would do the job.


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## overmind (Mar 11, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Are there royalties involved in using an ARM processor? I thought that was only when you _designed_ an ARM SoC, not when you use one?



I don't thing there are royalties involved.

On the other hand, why do we need 4 core CPU on a phone?  This is kind of offtopic rethoric question probably asked by many people before me.


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## SirDice (Mar 11, 2014)

overmind said:
			
		

> On the other hand, why do we need 4 core CPU on a phone?  This is kind of offtopic rethoric question probably asked by many people before me.


There's only one reason really, games. I think it's mainly the ever growing market of mobile games that's driving this push towards multicore CPUs.


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## Crivens (Mar 11, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Are there royalties involved in using an ARM processor? I thought that was only when you _designed_ an ARM SoC, not when you use one?


If you use an off-the-shelf chip, then no. But if at one point you want to roll your own CPU one day, If you take ARM, then you are going to be in some trouble at that point. Like, when you want to add your own kind of SIMD engine for scientific computing, LZ4 in hardware or what ever you may need. ARM itself is fine, a nice design. But it is expensive at that point.


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## ondra_knezour (Mar 11, 2014)

There is still royalty free solution between take any board available and being fullscale fab(less) CPU producer - Xilinx and probably others produce ARM + FPGA devices.

Xilinx Zyng-7000
And just found similar one from the Altera.


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## phoenix (Mar 12, 2014)

overmind said:
			
		

> Many of use are interested in this subject. What we would need is an ARM platform for server, desktop, laptop, small form factor board, comparable in CPU power to x86 and with less power consumption.



ARM just released a platform specification for ARM-based servers that standardises the boot process, device enumeration, power management, etc.  It's using UEFI, ACPI, PCIe, and such.  It simplifies a lot of things for dealing with ARM-based SoCs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7721/arm- ... m-standard

AMD's Opteron A-series of CPUs is the first system based on this platform.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/it-b ... eron-a1100

This should make it a lot easier to port OSes to ARM-based servers.  It basically does to ARM-based servers what the "IBM Compatible" platform did for PCs.


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## vanessa (Feb 10, 2015)

Any news on this topic guys? I am interested in the Olinuxino boards. Has anyone tried booting on them?


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