Pine 64 benchmarks

[tllim]

Thanks, this is very useful. It looks like heatsinks for the A64 are going to be strongly advisable then, it's a bit of a shame there wasn't an option for one directly from Pine.

Both not true fortunately 

If you don't do numbercrunching on the Pine64+ or try to run irrelevant benchmarks you might not need a heatsink at all. On the other hand users that think about using a pretty small enclosure should think about adding a heatsink or otherwise they might experience performance degradation under full constant CPU load (use monitoring to get an idea when and how often that happens unless you run moronically benchmarks).

And then there's another thing that should be considered. The Pine64 has a video engine called CedarX and also a somewhat weak GPU (Mali400). By being able to use these hardware engines (driver/software thing) stuff that might require already overclocking+heatsink on other ARMv8 designs (Raspberry Pi 3 trying to decode H.265 video for example) will run on the Pine64 with just slightly higher internal temperature. A64 is pretty similar to Allwinner's H3 and there we can decode H.264/H.265 using CedarX already in Linux flawlessly: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...es/?p=6009

For Android this is already the case (full CedarX/GPU support) and I would expect that it doesn't take that long until the same works in Linux too.

Regarding an heatsink option from the vendor. I think they were a bit surprised how heavy CPU bound workloads in Linux might differ from the Android situation. But @tllim wrote he's already in contact with a heatsink specialist and a customised heatsink for Pine64+ (covering also DRAM if I remember correctly) will be available. The one I use costs just 50 cents and already helps a lot. If they take care they can come up with a heatsink that improves heat dissipation a lot more.

We are currently working with a reputable heat sink vendor to design a heat sink and samples will available on next week. The size is 35x42x5mm, Aluminum body with copper coating. The bottom of this heat sink has three self-adhesive pads that covers 2 SDRAM and the A64 SoC. We will send to Andrew2 to try out when receive the sample.