DeskPi Super6C CM4 board with the SOQuartz

[CounterPillow]

This is an interesting board, I note a few things though that make it less ideal for SOQuartz than for RPi:

• no UART, which is very unfortunate since you'll most likely need this in some capacity
  
• SD card on the bottom, which means its harder to access, which you have to do more on the SOQuartz unless you want to bother with Rockchip's USB download mode that I don't think we've documented on the wiki anywhere
  

It inspired me to draft up specifications for an "ideal" (but within the realm of possible) SOQuartz mini-ITX carrier board of my own though, which I'll leave here for comments: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/User:Counte...rier_Board

Highlights of suggested differences vs. the Super6C:

• SATA for each board (removes the USB 3.0 capability from the monitor board)
  • Allows to use this as a distributed (node redundancy rather than block device redundancy) storage cluster (Ceph, GlusterFS) with an HDD cached by an SSD. Imagine 6 SOQuartzes, each with a 18 TB drive (like $315 each right now) and a 500GB TLC NVMe SSD (like $50 now) for caching with bcache. At 2x redundancy, that leaves you with 54 TB of SSD-cached storage for like $2190 for the storage and around $600 for SOQuartz + board + eMMC, or 36 TB if you want to be safe against two node failures at the same time.
    
• Broken out UART, 5V, 3.3V, GND
  
• Fan controller that can be steered over I²C or SPI, e.g. to have a daemon on the monitor board receiving temp readings from all the other boards over the network and set the speed that way
  
• Only 1 HDMI port
  
• A way for the monitor board to reset the other boards
  
• A suggestion to put SD cards on the top layer
  
• None of the RPi specific jumpers
  
• No USB 2.0 hub to provide internal USB 2.0 pins (I thought that was a bit on the unnecessary side, but can be added into the specs if that's something people really care about)
  
• A suggestion to have I²C broken out as STEMMA/QWIIC, maybe SPI too, for adding whatever sensing capabilities one might want in a server system (e.g. power monitoring, more temperature monitoring, case open sensing, access to a flash chip, etc.
  

This is obviously not a real product whether in development or not but a specification, but it's possible within the constraints of the interface, hardware and desired price point, so it's a bit beyond just playing ideas guy. I'll see if PINE64 itself is interested in picking this up or if the SOQuartz Blade covers this market for them already.