Pine A64 +OS X

[firrae]

At the moment the Pine64 is an Android toy only.

To be honest this will likely be more powerful than a Pi2 so there can be a lot more to it than a simple Android toy. I plan on trying a sripped down ARM version of Debian when I get mine.

I've already made an Ubuntu image for the Pine64: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...#entry3173

It's quite easy to combine any ARMv7/ARMv8 rootfs with the Android boot.img you now get when using the A64 SDK. But that's not that important since the magic happens somewhere else. It's hardware initialisation and drivers. And I really doubt that we're able to use HW accelerated video encoding/decoding (called CedarX) in Linux and are able to use 2D/3D acceleration (Mali400MP2) there that soon.

BTW: There exist a few more SBC than just the RPi 2 -- many of them way more powerful than the Pine64. What makes a real difference regarding RPi compared to other SBCs is the state of the software. You can even take a RPi A or B from 2012, clock the single CPU core down to 200 MHz and are still able to watch h.264 encoded video or encode a 1080p/h.264 camera stream with 30fps in real-time. Since there drivers are accessible from within Linux that delegate all this stuff to the VideoCore 4 VPU and frees up the ARM core.

Something that's only possible in Android with the A64 at the moment.

Good point. I'm personally uninterested in video encoding/decoding at the moment, I'm using these boards as small servers for testing software I write, so every bit of CPU and RAM performance I can get is a bonus, also 64 bit can help a bit in that field. I'm at the limit on some of my software with the RPi 2s with memory limitations, CPU never gets above 80%.

[tkaiser]

Good point. I'm personally uninterested in video encoding/decoding at the moment, I'm using these boards as small servers for testing software I write, so every bit of CPU and RAM performance I can get is a bonus, also 64 bit can help a bit in that field. I'm at the limit on some of my software with the RPi 2s with memory limitations, CPU never gets above 80%.

I don't see how '64 bit' might help here without re-compiling the whole userland also:



Please note that they compared A57 using 32 vs 64 bits. We're talking about the slow A53 implementation the A64 uses.

That means that if the Pine guys do not at least base their promised Ubuntu release on the Arm64Port then the '64 bit' are pure marketing.

[Eddy120876]

RI

I want that to happen. I do have several OS X Disk at home ?

Do you think it can be done?

It looks like at the moment won't happen but I'm hopeful that soembody will work the wizardry skills and manage to pull it out.

[Andru]

If it ever happens, whatever it is, it will be unofficial, and not supported, because Apple would not allow it.
So if you are a professional, make your bets on linux or windows, they allow anyone to use tem, especially for iot.