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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

Too bad none of these various hobbyist boards come with socs that support gigabit and sata. my $400 512mb single core synology nas is very jealous.

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Agreed, this is all too common. Not to mention these supposed developer boards should not have audio, or half of the USB ports on offer. I would actually prefer dual gigabit LAN, as I'd guess most of us would prefer using these boards for headless operation (accessible via a browser for an end user). From what I've seen, most hobbyists aren't planning on making a mobile device, but more something like this:

http://www.marvell.com/solutions/education/cloud-computer-fo...

Not to worry, they are coming. The current SOC vendors are targeting 'phones' and there isn't a market for a sata port and GbE on a phone yet. However Texas Instruments and others have seen the "Chromebook" light (which is so say that its not suicide to make a more general chip using the ARM instruction set architecture) so they are baking new chips as we speak. I'd expect that early next year, or at the latest summer 2013 we'll start seeing samples of the first chips that have these capabilities.

I'm interested too to see what happens there with TI after their decision to refocus on embedded. The Omap5 is an interesting chip as it contains a highly deterministic Cortex-m4 as well as an A15, though so far documentation is hard to find, so I'm not sure how they've tasked it, or how it's plugged into the peripherals. It's not a massive success, and the Imagination GPU is just as closed as the Mali, but its a way forward.

Lots happening.

and the Imagination GPU is just as closed as the Mali

Imagination is much, much worse than Mali. Mali has been pretty much fully reverse engineered (see limadriver.org). Given that libv will finally publish his new Lima driver version with textures support etc, an oss GLES driver for the Mali is pretty close. The remaining difficulty is the shader compiler (especially the vertex ISA is a bit esoteric).

The PowerVR devices on the other hand.. their drivers (and hardware) are very byzantine, layer upon layer of obscure interfaces. Even the kernel drivers are closed/obfuscated. Therefore the reverse engineering project is going very slow. I don't understand how it is a way forward.

Freescale SoCs support gigabit ethernet and SATA, not many others do.

So i.MX6 based boards like the Sabre Lite and Nitrogen6X have both paired with quad core A9, at $200.

I don't think gigabit Ethernet is common ( yet ). 10/100 is. The Arnedale board, with an Exynos 5 has sata and 10/100. Samsungs on a push in South Korea with partners. It's happening a little in the US too with TI partnering with Phytec and others.

This som doesn't have sata either.

http://www.phytec.com/products/som/phycore/omap5.html

The chip has sata but no Ethernet so that's connected via USB. Hence not enough bandwidth for gigabit, plus the power consumption is much higher. These socs are designed for tablets and phones so Ethernet is not a priority.

Exactly this. I wonder what the factor is that hinders gigabit ethernet and especially multiple sata ports. My pogoplug actually has an onboard sata port so it should be possible to integrate those without choking the arm board or running up hardware prices.

It depends on the SoC used. Some will have 1 or 2 SATA controllers on board. This board is based on the Exynos 4412 which I don't think has SATA controllers on board (can't find a full datasheet). This means adding them externally, not big deal right? But, 99% of SATA controllers today are built to talk PCI-Express, and the Exynos SoC doesn't speak PCI-Express! We're screwed...

Basically the same thing happens with gigabit Ethernet (and USB 3.0). Unless the SoC has the controller on-board or has PCI-Express (few do) there really isn't a way to plug the external controller into the SoC. 10/100 Ethernet is slow enough that you can pump its data in and out of the SoC using a SPI port and get most of the speed and many SoCs now have a 10/100 controller and USB 2.0 controllers on board. There is no spec limit to the speed of SPI but its a single ended 2 wire protocol limiting its realistic usage to the several tens of Mbit/sec.

The problem is that there is no commonly accepted, generic, very high speed I/O protocol for embedded devices so if they choose not to implement PCI-Express your left without a way to pump information into and out of the SoC at fast enough speeds to support these new interfaces.

Exynos has one sata according to block diagram I saw and the Arndale board supports it. Ethernet is via USB. Mine hasn't shipped yet though...

Exynos is a brand name of the family, not a single product. The Arndale has the Exynos 5250 SoC (dual-core A15) not the Exynos 4412 (quad core A9) which is used on the board mentioned in this thread.

Ah yes. 4412 does not appear to have sata or ethernet according to this http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

You need to include the numbers when you're talking about these parts :-) Arndale is Exynos5, which has a different CPU and peripheral set to Exynos4 (which is what this board uses).

I think it's simply that most of these devboards are produced by the SoC manufacturers with the idea of popularising/making it easy to develop products for their SoC. So the peripherals you get are the ones the SoC has, and traditionally most of these SoCs are aimed at the mobile space, which doesn't have SATA or ethernet or PCI (ethernet on these devboards is often USB-ethernet). As the A15-based SoCs (eg exynos5) appear I'm hoping to see more SoCs aimed less solidly at the mobile market, and with a wider mix of onboard devices.

allwinner a10 does support sata and gigabit.

but not all boards have the ports

Interesting. I'd love a link to a board that has either or both Sara or gigabit eth if someone has one handy.

the mele stb series has 10/100 and single sata port:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mele-A2000-TV-box-Allwinner-A...

boxchip/allwinner a10 is just single core though, and the mele series seems only ship at 512mb.

There's Pogoplug 4 with those. Amazon seems to have them for $59.

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