PINE64

Dear community and team,

I just recently stumbled upon the sopine A64 and the clusterboard and think it is a great alternative to the traditional pis (orange, raspberry, etc.) and especially with the clusterboard you get a very neat cluster-design.
I am looking forward to building a skyminer for the skywire network with this, but would like to know a few additional things, before purchasing.

Especially regarding the onboard switch, I am a bit confused as to what specs / speeds the clusterboard offers.
Does it really offer full gigabit connectivity for each compute module at the same time?
In other words, is the switching capacity really 16Gbps?

I would be really thrilled to get some more information on this, since a colleague pointed out, the "onboard switch" might not be, what it seems to be. Although I doubt this is the case, I still want to make sure, I have full gigabit connectivity at every compute module and of course also on ethernet port (and all that at the same time -> 16Gbps switching capacity).

Thanks in advance and have a nice weekend

Best regards,
Zyklone

(04-14-2018, 09:55 AM)Zyklone Wrote: [ -> ]Dear community and team,

I just recently stumbled upon the sopine A64 and the clusterboard and think it is a great alternative to the traditional pis (orange, raspberry, etc.) and especially with the clusterboard you get a very neat cluster-design.
I am looking forward to building a skyminer for the skywire network with this, but would like to know a few additional things, before purchasing.

Especially regarding the onboard switch, I am a bit confused as to what specs / speeds the clusterboard offers.
Does it really offer full gigabit connectivity for each compute module at the same time?
In other words, is the switching capacity really 16Gbps?

I would be really thrilled to get some more information on this, since a colleague pointed out, the "onboard switch" might not be, what it seems to be. Although I doubt this is the case, I still want to make sure, I have full gigabit connectivity at every compute module and of course also on ethernet port (and all that at the same time -> 16Gbps switching capacity).

Thanks in advance and have a nice weekend

Best regards,
Zyklone

The on-board switch is a gigabit switch and this mean the max capacity still 1Gbps.

To be more precise, the switch chip on the clusterboard is a Realtek RTL8370N. This is an 8-port 1Gbe switch, with a total switching capacity of 8Gbps.

BUT...note that there is only 1 port of the switch chip that leaves the board.

Therefore you could, in theory, get all of the 7 soPine's talking to each other simultaneously at near 1Gb each, but if you want the data to leave the cluster you are limited to 1Gbps total between all of the modules.