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Rhombus Tech A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card Schematics Completed
lkcl writes "Rhombus Tech's first CPU Card is nearing completion and availability: the schematics have been completed by Wits-Tech. Although it appears strange to be using a 1ghz Cortex A8 for the first CPU Card, the mass-volume price of the A10 was lower than other offerings. Not only does the A10 classify as 'good enough' (in combination with 1GB of RAM), Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place. Overall, it's the very first step in the right direction for collaboration between Software (Libre) developers and mass-volume PRC Factories. There will be more (faster, better) EOMA-68 CPU Cards: this one is just the first."
Too many links... no intro telling me what this is.
For those who want to know... it is a PCMCIA (PC-card) sized integrated computer designed to compete with the Raspberry Pi... supposedly cheaper and faster. Raspberry Pi does have one major advantage though: it is in production and shipping whereas this is still in the schematics stages. So... nothing to see here...
It also bothers me to see "ghz" on a supposed tech site. It's GHz. Giga and Hertz.
Anyone care to provide a little background on what this is and why the hell any of us should care? Since, you know, the submitter/editors can't seem to grasp that old journalistic concept of letting the audience know why the fuck they should care.
I tried to read the summary, really I did, but my +1 machete of reading comprehension was rendered useless against the overpowering thicket of overused parenthetical asides and link-whoring.
I thought they might take me to V14GRA pages.
Wait, this wasn't randomly generated text designed to bypass spam filters?
Huh. Go figure.
An odd number of cores. Perhaps they have 4 cores, each controlling 16 CPUs. Or 4 cores set aside for other purposes?
Okay, so a company that works to 'serve the community' produces a CPU card in a PCMCIA form factor (though which is electronically incompatable) chose a very inexpensive Chinese processor for their first project. The CPU is 3x the speed of a Rasberry Pi. It has some GPL code provided by the CPU manufacturer--who seems very cool to the OSS movement.
The schematic and layout are out for this card. There is code coming. There will be boards coming. The BOM is $15, but who knows what the shipping cost will be? With shipping, it might not matter what the BOM and sales price will be.
This could be interesting, but we know way too little to make any meaningful statement at this time.
I guess having 2 other major manufacturers of chips is just way too many to keep track of or they'd have realized there's already chips called A8 and A10 from AMD. In fact, I think they just recently released A10 chips.
I think it's an interesting concept that could lead to developing usable low volume products tailored for a specific need at a low cost as long as the cost of the card ends up being under $20. It will give an architecture to develop hardware devices with an upgrade path for processor and peripherals. It's not for creating a desktop PC for the average user.
http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68
...from how hard these guys are trying to ride them.
Some of the suppliers are shipping right now....others are playing games with ship dates.
but Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place
C'mon, any volume production pretty much goes to China by default.
More succinct to elaborate only if it's going to somewhere other than China.
If they just completed the schematic drawings this tells me that they are at least half a year away from production - if they are super good designers and if their prototype works right the first time they power it up.
The schematic is often the easiest part of the design. An EMC compliant PCB is usually harder; passing FCC/CE/* EMI compliance is harder; setting up for mass production is not for beginners either. Those guys just made the first step on a long road. And that's exactly why it's so hard to build hardware these days; the progress is so fast that by the time you are ready to manufacture the key parts are obsolete and out of production. Even if the parts are still available your design may be already obsolete because newer, better parts became available. It's either "design it under 3 months" or "do something else with your life."
Difference is, Apple has a lot of money to throw around for advertising/marketing. Doesn't mean they have better product.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Look around the budget end of the processor/computer market and there's some incredibly useful bits of gear. Allwinner is making a mint from having the A10 in a huge variety of devices, from USB-sized computers to development boards like the Rhombus. If you Google Allwinner, Rockchip or Mediatek you'll see thousands of sub-$100 devices with >GHz processors, more RAM than a desktop from 5 years ago and more imaginative form-factors than will ever exist in the Apple monoculture.
Having all this innovation out of Apple's radar means best-of-breed versions will be more likely to gain competitive advantage and prosper.
Rhombus Tech may well fail, but if it does it'll be because it's competing with better or cheaper devices like the $49 Cubieboard , not because it was sued into oblivion by an aggressive, predatory monopolist wannabe.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It's a schematic (actually, the picture shows a board layout) for an Allwinner A10 (which is a rather impressive ARM-type CPU with peripherals) board in a PCMCIA form factor. Big deal. There are many other Allwinner A10 boards. The Rikomagic MK802 is a small one, and it costs about $60 in quantity 1. It comes loaded with Android, but you can load Ubuntu. If you want this as a "media center" (it can do 1080p HDMI), it's available in various set-top box cases with power supply and remote for around $70. Those can run Ubuntu, too.
It's not clear why you'd want an Allwinner A10 in a PCMCIA form factor. The Allwinner A10 has a sizable set of peripherals on-chip. Ethernet, HDMI, etc. Usually, boards for this part have a whole row of connectors. Bringing out the pins on a PCMCIA connector means you need another board to fan out the peripherals.
The Allwinner itself is a significant product. (Boards for it, not so much.) At $7 in quantity, and requiring no US intellectual property, it's going into tablets, set-top boxes, and anything else that needs a CPU. This is a serious threat to the price points of Intel, Microsoft, and Apple.
It's an attempt to create a standardized form factor for open/modular highly portable inexpensive computing device CPUs. It intends to do for these markets what the AT/ATX motherboard/case design and ISA/PCI buses and Socket 3/5/7 did for the desktop computing market. Additionally, it is doing this with openness (libre open source software stack) clearly an important design criterion, besides the technical/performance ones.
Will it take time to mature? Yes. But less than one might think. It's farther along than might appear.
Will it therefore fail, by missing out on the window for Cortex A8? No. It's modular enough to continue even after the Cortex A8 CPU is obsolescent. The Allwinner A10 was chosen in part because it is currently available and cheap.
This will open up niche markets which the major manufacturers are not servicing. High-resolution debian ARM netbook? Can be done. 7" Netbook? Can be done. Pixel Qi Tablet? Can be done. Desktop ARM terminals? Can be done.
I've been following this project for a while now, and it is going in a direction which I believe in. I am getting tired of proprietary ARM hardware and software.
Chill out you fucking psycho Aspie.
I used to be an Apple fanboi. From 1990-2000 I was all about Apple. Then, I got tired of making excuses.
Now, I'm platform agnostic. I have three macs, one Linux, one Windows and one Solaris machine under my desk.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
be kind, please! he made a mistake - it's ok. i've made enough, god knows... :) that's how you make progress.
Yeah I've been following this for a while as well. I was originally confused by the purpose of the PCMCIA card, but it eventually came through in my mind the idea that the PCMCIA card shaped object is just a REALLY EASILY replaceable motherboard that plugs in to a host device. Granted it's not a PCMCIA card, and it's not called a PCMCIA card.
I like the premise. Buy a barebones laptop shell, plug in the EOMA-68 card device, and boot up. Or plug it into some other type of form factor. Inside of a TV. Inside a media player device. Inside a tablet. So many options. This could be big.
Assuming this uses the Allwinner A10 chip, What is the status of decent hardware video decoding support?
Frankly the fact that they put gigabit ethernet on board is pretty awesome. That's not something that comes with the SoC.
If you did put it in a device shaped like a laptop, would you be able to add more ram, upgrade the wifi card, etc, like a normal laptop or are you stuck with what's on board? Not sure how the card deals with expandability.
Still, if this catches on, maybe RMS will finally be able to move up from his yeeloong lemote
obvious troll is obvious. get bent.
It wasn't always so. They were nearly bankrupt at one stage and still managed to become one of the biggest companies ever.
That's too many boxes...I have a mac running a windows and a Linux VM via VMware Fusion... So far don't have much of a need for Solaris, but if I find I need it I can easily spin up another VM.
Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place
Allwinner Tech is the company behind the ARM-based SoC that have powered many many tablets and smartphones
And they only charge $7 per Cortex A8-SoC
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Lkcl xià dÃfo:ÃoeLÃfngxÃfng jÃfshÃf de dÃf yÃgÃf CPU kÃZ shÃf jiÃ"jÃfn wÃfnchÃf©ng hÃfn kÃyÃfngxÃfng: YuÃfnlà tÃf yÃjÃng bÃfi wÃfnchÃf©ng de zhÃfhuÃf, jÃfshÃf, suÃrÃfn tà chÃ...xiÃfn qÃfguÃfi dÃfo kÃyà shÃyÃfng yà gÃf 1GHz de pÃfzhÃf A8 de dÃf yà gÃf CPU kÃZ, de zhÃfliÃfng, liÃfng jiÃf de A10 dà bà qÃftà chÃZnpÃn. BÃfjÃn zÃfi A10 guà lÃfi wÃfi ÃoezÃfgÃfu hÃZoÃ(zÃfi yÃ'ngyÃ'u 1GB de RAM de zÃ"hÃf©), dÃfn Allwinner jÃfshÃf shÃf yà zhÃ'ng fÃ"ichÃfng hÃZnjiÃfn de yà zhÃ...ngguÃf wÃfi jÃdÃf de SoC gÃ...ngsà yuÃfnyÃf yÃ" ruÃZnjiÃfn (zÃfyÃfu bÃfo) kÃifà rÃf©nyuÃfn mÃf©iyÃ'u qiÃfngzhÃf zhÃfxÃfng (GPL, wÃf©ifÃZn)NDA dÃf dÃffÃng. ZÃ'ngtà Ãf©r yÃfn, tà de de dÃf yà gÃf bÃfzhÃfu zÃfi zhÃfngquÃf de fÃngxiÃfng hÃf©zuÃf zhà jiÃn de ruÃZnjiÃfn (zÃfyÃfu bÃfo) kÃifà hÃf© zhÃfliÃfng - tÃjà zhÃ...ngguÃf gÃ...ngchÃZng. YÃ'u jiÃfng shÃf gÃfng duÃ... (gÃfng kuÃfi, gÃfng hÃZo de)EOMA-68 CPU kÃZ: ZhÃf shÃf dÃf yà gÃf.Ãoe
OK, Joe?
What the eff is that?
I know slashdot doesn't support anything else but ASCII, but the above is absolutely, totally lame !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
imagine how many slashdotters heads would have melted if i'd done all their work for them by putting in some extra backstory links? :)
Don't worry, just list them all out here
I've been here for a long while, and my brain has yet been melted
List them here, so at least you'll provide us with melt-proof brains a trip to the search engines
Thanks in advance !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'm so sorry to dredge up such a tired meme, but you know it has to be said here.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
In all seriousness, though, I'm really enthusiastic about the philosophy that seems to be behind this project. I'm all about replaceable parts. This would be nothing special if it was another "all in one" SoC, but the fact that it is explicitly a swappable *component* really appeals to me.
I love the open architecture, and I love the open hardware. The PCMCIA form-factor, along with the choice of "lowest-common-denominator" interfaces, give me the warm-fuzzies inside; the last thing we need is another homebrew data bus. I can think of tons of things that cards like these would be good for.
So is semantic nonsense better or worse than syntactic error?
And if you give me some argument about how "It's putting forward the idea that you think about the concept of differentness", I'll strike you across the face with a PowerMac 8600 and garrot (garrot is being used as a verb, not a noun) you with an ADB mouse.
OTOH, if the exhortation is "when you think Apple, don't think 'better' - just think 'different'", I'll only drop a Mac Plus on your foot.
They do, I admit, make hardware of excellent build quality. But the strength of the company is, as you say, in their branding. They don't sell hardware, they sell a lifestyle and an image.
VM's are very useful for some things but they still are not a replacement for an actual box. I love them for modelling network infrastructures where I need multiple OS's talking to each other. For a lot of things I still like to rely on a physical computer.
In other words, your mileage may vary.
"Sure they're "twice the price", but for many people thats still spare change in reality."
for most people on this planet, $25 is a large amount of money
They do, I admit, make hardware of excellent build quality.
Meh. I've experienced direcely, or through friends, numerous build flaws.
They have a bit of a fetish for thinness and style, and this often trumps build quality. The examples I can think of off the top of my head:
Around 2006 I used to live at altitude (7200 feet). The air is thinner and the fans have to work harder. Pertty much everyone on site with a MBP had the fans conk out after a year since they were underpowered for the job. The on-site mac repair team had a huge stock of apple fans since this was such a problem. Pretty much all other laptops had no problem.
The 1st gen air had a tendency to blow out the back hinge because the bit of metal they used was simply too thin.
The 2x previous generation of magsafe adapter was made too small (WTF it was tiny already) and the cable mount was not secure enough and they had a tendency to break.
The towers are very solidly built with excellent thermal design, which I approve of. The main problem with normal PCs is that ATX motherboards are very poorly designed from a thermal perspective, and it's hard to get good air channels etc. However, they are dense and the penalty with a Mac Pro is that you can't fit very much stuff into the case.
The monitors are just plain poor IME. I had oldish twin 30" cinema displays at work (before I changed jobs), inerited from a guy who left. They were bad in a variety of ways. One is, astonishingly, that they seemed to suffer from some kind of burn in (I didn't think LCDs did that). If you put a constant colour background on them, you could see huge variations across the screen. Also, in the irritating fetish for design, they had only one single VDI input on the end of a long cable. That made switching between laptop and desktop an exercise in crawling under the table. Not cool.
Also, for some bizarre reason, nulike every other manufactuer under the planet, they decided not to bother with the analog pins on the DVI cable. Bear in mind that when the monitor was sold, they were still shipping Mac minis with intel graphics and therefore analog only output. This meant that my laptop (before I switched) was unable to display on the monitors.
Frankly, having experienced quite a bit of mac and other hardware, I think the "excellent build quality" think is a bit of a myth.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The thinness thing annoys me too. It wasn't always like this - I think it started with the iPhone, and from there spread through all their other product lines. It's now reached the point where their top-of-the-line laptop has lost not only every possible route of upgrade but also the possibility of recycling, battery replacement and even the ethernet port in the name of shaving just a few millimeters more off the thickness.
There is a big effort in progress among well-known SoC manufacturers to work towards a unified ARM kernel, as a result of Linus Torvalds's crictics last year. Today, we see Texas Instruments, Freescale, ST/Ericsson and Samsung working to integrate their existing platforms into this new model, whereas the newer platforms - CSR's prima2 for example - are required to use all the new features: Device tree for ARM, the unified clock framework, pinmux, etc. must be used to get a new platform accepted in the mainline.
But for now, there is no sign of integrating the sunxi platform, supporting the Allwinner A10 chip, in the mainline. The available repository for the kernel is based on Linux 3.0.x with Android patches, before the implementation of many of these new features, and there were no attempts to submit the new architecture to the ARM Linux mailing list. This means that there is no chance of getting the A10 supported by Linus's tree before a long time.
Another problem is the sign-off for the commits that need to enter in the mainline. If the A10 support code was written by Allwinner employees, it will be necessary to get their sign-off, as it is required for any code integrated in the kernel nowadays. This means that no third party may commit their code until this is done, even if it is correctly marked as GPLv2. This was added in the wake of the SCO fiasco, to ensure that all source code lines could be attributed to their original writer, and thus have the author's word that it is not copied closed source code.
As long as all these issues are not resolved, the Allwinner based devices will remain second class citizens in the Linux world.
Sounds a little like a modernized version of the Rex5000 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_5000 )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Serious question. Why would vendors support such an approach? Especially in the consumer portable market which is growing every day and eventually will end up being most of the 'computing devices' we have in our homes and businesses.. Their revenue stream counts on devices being totally replaced every x months. If you could swap out inexpensive components like this instead they would be cutting their own noses off.
Nice technological idea ( and reminds me of some things done in the 80's ), but the marketing people will never let this get out in to the world beyond being a plaything.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Schematics are good for future developers and to get the ball rolling for fabrication.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You do realize that life isn't only the present? But the past makes the present what it is?
Apple's "Think Different" advertising started when they still tried to compete with IBM and the ThinkPad line with their MacBook Pro.
The fact ThinkPads are now being built by Lenovo is irrelevant, the reasoning Apple went that way in marketing however is. And yes I'm typing this on a Lenovo ThinkPad, all my laptops have been ThinkPad's since the 600E series.
Mind you I do love the comment moderation on my post. Mention any history of Apple trying to break into a market and copy someone else and its automatically a -1 around here.
It is a lot of boxes, but I have a big desk.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Serious question. Why would vendors support such an approach?
we have one vendor who *is* fully behind it. it took them a long time, a whiteboard and a lot of hand-waving but they got it. it was an amazing meeting, after 2 years of them not getting it, where they suddenly got excited and went, "hey! we have an all-in-one PC product: we could... we could... convert that to a TV or upgrade it by just changing the CPU Card!" and it was a eureka moment - such a relief :)
but the key for them is that they are an assembly company rather than a manufacturing company. a whopping half a MILLION square metres factory space screwdriver / assembly company. the modularity of the approach we've come up is absolutely perfect for them. other companies supply the EOMA-68 PCBs (a million at a time); they put them into the cases. other companies supply them with the parts needed for a laptop (a million at a time); they put them together.
one absolutely jammy coincidence for us is that they'd *just* been asked to assemble 20 million+ PCMCIA 3G modems for a customer of theirs. note: PCMCIA modems. exactly the same size and form-factor and even exactly the same components (PCMCIA connector) as the EOMA-68 CPU Card.
the problem for them right now is that their "assembly" approach, combined with the well-known *insanely* low margins in the x86 laptop business, leaves them completely unprofitable. all their suppliers of the parts make the margins; they don't. this is the situation that has to change, and we're privileged to be able to offer them a solution that they've accepted.
ultimately, i see this approach empowering smaller 3rd party companies to be able to re-enter the markets that they've been squeezed out of by the ever-decreasing margins of the PC business. the hard part, technically is the CPU Card. the most expensive part is the casework. not exactly sure how to deal with that: 3D printers sort-of spring to mind... anyway, just a thought.
Do try not to feed the trolls. That's why you got modded down.
This sounds so great! Personally I would go for two boxes, since I may want to have the router running 24/7 but not the file-server/backup-server. I find all-in-one solutions also to be more and more a pain to administer. Maybe even three, since a media-client is also a need, though I backed the OUYA, so I will see. What about Linux? Is this simple? Possible at all?
It's great to see such a product targeting this at the home market.
What about video? I am not set up, yet, but I plan to use some networked DVB-receivers (you may know them, all they do is grab the signal from the antenna and offer them on some port for the network to get). I don't know the technical background, but I think this is not as simple as supporting the four major condecs in two major cotainer formats, like most Chinese boxes do. Also, they have performance problems with real HD, meaning bitrates >20Mb/s. I guess this is also one of the problems, the XBMC guys are facing for their Allwinner A10 port.
Am I right in the assumption, that, as a consumer, I could not simply order or even use your product, since it would still require some hardware work to be done, mainly the I/O and require orders >1 piece?
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?