07-06-2021, 02:49 PM
To date, there are only 3 meaningful types of performant and readily available ARM64 desktop workstations:
- M1 Mac Mini / iMac
- Nvidia Xavier NX/AGX
- Honeycomb LX2
All other "look at me, I haz arm" devices are either laptops, puny tablets trying to imitate laptops or plain devboards with an Android image or a quarter-functional, outdated Debian..
They mostly use smartphone chips, sometimes higher frequency-binned and with a more liberal power limit. And they lack HW documentation. Or they are discontinued.
What is truly needed to kickstart the ARM64 ecosystem further is a good desktop workstation.
In such a board, I reckon there should be:
I was thinking, perhaps Pine could be a good vendor to tackle this? Of course, this is a complicated problem to solve, but discussion is a good thing.
- M1 Mac Mini / iMac
- Nvidia Xavier NX/AGX
- Honeycomb LX2
All other "look at me, I haz arm" devices are either laptops, puny tablets trying to imitate laptops or plain devboards with an Android image or a quarter-functional, outdated Debian..
They mostly use smartphone chips, sometimes higher frequency-binned and with a more liberal power limit. And they lack HW documentation. Or they are discontinued.
What is truly needed to kickstart the ARM64 ecosystem further is a good desktop workstation.
In such a board, I reckon there should be:
- some kind of ATX standard form factor to mount it in a regular PC case with a regular PC power supply
- socketed RAM
- PCIe, USB, SATA, 3.5mm jack, RJ45..
- a power and a force reset button
- a chip to keep the bootloader on, so as to make the OS installation simpler
- targetting Arm SystemReady certification, which given enough work on proper UEFI, would allow for installing OSes like on a normal PC, from a livecd etc..
- an OSS-friendly SoC that can heat up as much as it wants - performance is key in this form factor! (without a broken PCIe implementation, I'm looking at you, Raspberry Pi...)
- Intel-/AMD-compatible mounting holes for a cooler
- DC/PWM fan headers (may be on a separate controller)
I was thinking, perhaps Pine could be a good vendor to tackle this? Of course, this is a complicated problem to solve, but discussion is a good thing.