Allwinner

[tkaiser]

Allwinner seems to want to get market share in this boards

Why should they? They sell millions of SoCs for Android gadgets where nobody cares about quality of drivers or this disturbing 'open source' thing.

Just look at all the new boards that came and are comming out.
All based on Allwinner SoCs... Why is that?

It isn't. Amlogic, Actions Semi, Rockchip just to name a few. They all developed some sort of 'love' for open source stuff in the meantime and their Cortex-A53 designs are way more interesting compared to the A64.
Allwinner is intersting due to being dirt-cheap and the strong linux-sunxi community (vendors seem to rely on in the meantime to do their work). The people behind the C.H.I.P. were clever by choosing an old Allwinner design (the R8 is based on the A13) and by hiring free-electrons to do the mainlining work. Therefore they will end up with an SBC that's useable with Linux. This won't apply to the PineA64 when shipping since they made the mistake to choose a brand new Allwinner SoC.

Well, maybe it's not a mistake if you're running a kickstarter campaing since people buy numbers. They think '64 bit' are twice as... what? They prefer '64 bit' over '32 bit' without having the slightest idea why. Numbers sell.

I still don't get why anything should change now when Pine Corp might order 50k A64 to solder them on SBCs. They sell way more SoCs to manufacturers of Android devices where no one cares about kernel version, driver quality or closed source drivers (that work within Android but not with Linux). Dealing with the linux community means more efforts and less income.