Re: Rock64

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>]

---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 3:56 PM, Luna Jernberg <droidbittin@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Just saw the BoF on the Debconf stream and has a small question:
>
> Anyone know hows the support for the Rock64 is?
>                 https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=7147 Pines new Board
> thinking
>                 of maybe buying one?

 the main source of libre info about these will be #linux-rockchip on
freenode.  that's your "beeline" direct to people who *will* know what
they're talking about.

 the RK3388 is pretty awesome, it's basically an upgrade to the
RK3288, so a max of 4GB RAM.  the RK3288 was used in a chromebook by
Acer and google ABSOLUTELY INSISTED that rockchip make FULL SOURCE
CODE AVAILABLE.  that trend now seems to be continuing, as they move
forward with near-identical SoCs that the engineering teams go, "huh.
uhm.... our source code seems to be mainlined.. um.... well... we'd
better base our new SoC off of that, then".

[unlike allwinner's engineers who just.... fuck everybody off because
they just don't care, their shares are about to vest in 6 months and
they'll be millionaires...]

anyway.

 TL's team managed to get the rock64's LPDDR3 RAM up to some
ridiculous speed (1600mhz) - _way_ above what rockchip's own EVB team
managed.  they also managed to get the HDMI 2 interface correctly laid
out so it'll do 4K HD.  and it has one *full* USB3 Host interface.  so
no bullshit about "waaaa, waaaaa i want my SATA drives connected to a
low-cost ultra-low-power ARM board but i don't want them limited to
480mbit/sec, waaaaaa"

 .... :)

 basically it's a deeply impressive bit of kit.

l.