The problem, as always, lies in the fact this is powered by an AllWinner SoC. They are not famous for respecting the licenses of the software they use, namely the Linux kernel, and things like graphic acceleration are usually hard to get working (and I'm not talking about working without blobs, I mean they are hard to get to work at all).<p>IMO this is the major downside to Raspberry Pi alternatives like the Orange Pi and this. The Raspberry Pi is more expensive, but at least there's more documentation available, an effort to merge kernel stuff upstream, and there are even people working in getting proper, blob-free Mesa drivers working: <a href="https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/</a><p>With that said, it's nice to see cheap ARM64 development platforms becoming available, even if they aren't as open/supported as they should be.
This is allwinner, notorious GPL offender. NO drivers for GPU, NO drivers for hardware video acceleration.<p>In case you are wondering how serious are they(pine) about software support here is a hint:<p><a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-sunxi/Ze_UhiO00t8" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-sunxi/Ze_UhiO0...</a><p><a href="http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/491-need-help-on-pine-a64-15-64bit-quad-core-12ghz-single-board-computer/" rel="nofollow">http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/491-need-help-on-pi...</a><p>TLDR: they plan to maybe send TWO boards to developers...
> 512MB of RAM<p>Well, ok, but unless I'm going to do some ridiculous amount of paging, I can't really take advantage of the 64-bit much. And in the meantime my 64-bit executables will suffer from larger pointers.<p>The stuff that arm does well (IMO) is stuff that uses Python and other high-level languages. Those tend to port with little to no effort. Yet they use a ton of indirection so the size of those pointers really matters for memory consumption.<p>$15 for an ARM board still seems like decent value, though.
While I like affordable things and development boards in particular, hardware price isn't that much of an issue anymore. Most people, especially programmers, are going to spend more in terms of labour cost even just getting this up and running. Actually doing something exciting takes from a fair to a huge amount of time, which you most likely won't be able to recuperate. At least not directly. Until someone has a next level value proposition that enables more things, I would suggest sticking to the boards you're already not using.
Yet another product I would buy from a store in a heartbeat, but instantly dismiss because of kickstarter. Granted, this one looks professional and it appears they've already set up manufacturing, but that really doesn't sway my opinion.
It's still vaporware now, unlike alternatives. What's the fascination about 64-bit architecture anyway, apart from it being a bigger (=> better) number?
Another cheap rPi alternative that doesn't solve any new problems. What I'd like to see is one of these with a few SATA ports and ECC memory. Then you'd have a viable low-cost, low-power server, in a market that is sorely lacking those things considering the closest alternative is one of the newer Intel Atom boards that costs upwards of $250.
2G of RAM and 1Gbit ethernet, decent display, reasonable CPU's. The missing piece is the lack of SATA.<p>I get it that most of these boards are just phone processors, but having wired ethernet and a decent storage mechanism allow them to be used as speedy little NAS's, video servers, desktop machines, whatever.<p>USB2 storage is pretty much stuck at ~30MB/sec, around the same max that is possible with SD. Its probably faster to run the storage over the gbit ethernet port.