The Linux support of Pine64 was terrible when it came out. Is this still the case?
I bought one without looking too closely into it after seeing it mentioned somewhere online by someone who said it was cheap and it was ARM64. Only after it'd arrived did I learn that it had very poor Linux support. I've got mine laying around without ever having bothered to even boot it due to this.
For example, here's a key quote from what Hackaday had to say about the Linux support of the Pine64:
> The Ubuntu experience was tremendously slow on the Pine64 and I suffered several reboots. As of this writing, I have tested all of the software distributions on the Pine64 wiki. Only the Ubuntu distribution works poorly, and right now I consider the Pine64 to be a waste of $15.
Not to diminish this feat, but I wonder how the Phoronix benchmarks compare between an ARM cluster and a single x86 chip. Consider the OpenSSL benchmark.
A Sopine A64 compute module costs $29 and performs 15.05 OpenSSL signs / second [0].
An AMD Ryzen 1700 costs ~$300 and performs 986.73 OpenSSL signs / second [1].
So, if you spent $300 on 10 Pine64's, you would achieve approximately 150 signs / second, but for the same cost you could just buy the AMD chip and achieve approximately 6.5x better performance for the dollar.
I've recently been fantasizing about something like this, but in laptop form. Have a dedicated console/display node, a few compute nodes, a 'router' node, and a gige (or 10gbe) fabric connecting them.
> To not waste the 24W on the 12V I will probably use the DC/DC converter in the pictures and go from 12V to 5V for efficiency reasons...
The more common converters "burn" the voltage difference times ampere. So 14W will be emitted as heat by the converter, a matching heatsink would be somewhat important.
Instead of 24W wasted it is now 14W wasted. I am not sure if this is worth the effort.
[+] [-] bringtheaction|8 years ago|reply
I bought one without looking too closely into it after seeing it mentioned somewhere online by someone who said it was cheap and it was ARM64. Only after it'd arrived did I learn that it had very poor Linux support. I've got mine laying around without ever having bothered to even boot it due to this.
For example, here's a key quote from what Hackaday had to say about the Linux support of the Pine64:
> The Ubuntu experience was tremendously slow on the Pine64 and I suffered several reboots. As of this writing, I have tested all of the software distributions on the Pine64 wiki. Only the Ubuntu distribution works poorly, and right now I consider the Pine64 to be a waste of $15.
https://hackaday.com/2016/04/21/pine64-the-un-review/
Has Linux support improved recently? Anyone here doing anything useful with a Pine64?
[+] [-] trendia|8 years ago|reply
A Sopine A64 compute module costs $29 and performs 15.05 OpenSSL signs / second [0].
An AMD Ryzen 1700 costs ~$300 and performs 986.73 OpenSSL signs / second [1].
So, if you spent $300 on 10 Pine64's, you would achieve approximately 150 signs / second, but for the same cost you could just buy the AMD chip and achieve approximately 6.5x better performance for the dollar.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pine-64-...
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-ryze...
[+] [-] dboreham|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subway|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus
Makes a guy somewhat nostalgic of when computers were a collection of boards rather than a single chip.
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jand|8 years ago|reply
The more common converters "burn" the voltage difference times ampere. So 14W will be emitted as heat by the converter, a matching heatsink would be somewhat important.
Instead of 24W wasted it is now 14W wasted. I am not sure if this is worth the effort.
[+] [-] ansible|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatboth|8 years ago|reply