Re: affordable arm boards with plenty of ram.
On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 01:18:25PM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> peter green dijo [Thu, May 19, 2016 at 12:43:29PM +0100]:
> > I'm looking for an arm board/box to add to my collection of buildboxes.
> >
> > Critera (in roughly descending order of importance):
> >
> > Reasonablly affordable (upper limit ~£200)
> > As much ram as possible.
> > Plenty of CPU power would be nice.
> > A good storage interface (in order of preference SATA is better than USB3
> > which is better than USB2).
> > Support in Debian kernels would be nice.
> > arm64 support would be nice.
> >
> > Currently looking at the cubox i4x4. Anyone have any other suggestions?
>
> I'm curious nobody else has suggested the Banana Pi M3.
>
> http://www.banana-pi.org/m3.html
>
> It has 2MB RAM only, but 8 ARM cores (A83T, so Cortex-A7), nominally
> at 1.8GHz. 8GB on-board eMMC (appears as mmcblk0; the traditional SD
> card interface appears as mmcblk1). It has on-board wireless
> connectivity as well, and a supposedly 1Gbps Ethernet port.
>
> I have not really used it much save for testing it. It does *not* run
> on standard Linux kernels (they provide a 3.4 kernel, with the
> now-famous "rootmydevice" debug roothole^Winterface open). Some users
> report that submitting it to moderate loads make the thermal
> throttling system shut down 4 or 8 CPU cores; probably a dissipator or
> fan could help it run stably and reliably.
I lack personal experience with the Banana Pi M3, but comments
from linux-sunxi developers have mentioned various issues with
the board (using the vendor-provided kernel and fex files):
- Thermal throttling:
A quote from https://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M3#Thermal_behaviour:
"Without a heatsink you won't exceed 1.2GHz when running CPU
intensive tasks, when choosing a good one and enough airflow
you might get up to 1.6 GHz and everything above needs an
annoying fan."
Tests with a small passive heatsink (and no enclosure around
the board) didn't reach more than 1.2Ghz with a multi-core
load.
- If the cooling issues are solved, running the board at full
throttle might cause power supply instability issues. The
board uses a Micro-USB socket as power input, but this type of
socket is rated for a maximum current of only 1.8A, which might
not be enough under certain circumstances:
https://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M3#Sudden_shut_offs_.2F_maximum_consumption_.2F_cooling_vs._consumption
- The A83T SoC on the board doesn't have a SATA controller. The
SATA-port on the board is provided by a GL830 USB-to-SATA
bridge that seems to provide only limited throughput:
https://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M3#SATA
To make things worse, it has to share the bandwidth with the
external USB ports as all of them are connected to a single USB
controller on the SoC via a USB hub.
Regarding support in the Debian kernel: mainline support for the
A83T SoC is being worked on, but that will probably still require
quite some time.
Regards,
Karsten
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