A tiny white puck with a single usb-c plug for power and data. Inside, an A12 running OS X.
Education and “enthusiast” market. GPIO as a dongle, of course.
They can release the A13 version in colors the next year :)
But I do feel that without extending their business what they're going to do with their massive cash just sitting around doing nothing.
Or, an eGPU enclosure, which also delivers power over the cable and has a USB hub built into it. (You just need to plug a monitor into it.) These exist, and are surprisingly cheap if you buy them bundled with a graphics card.
I tried 2 times -- granted they weren't very honest attempts, I hoped to have it done in 5 minutes, but failed.
I am looking for a no-BS quick guide if you have one lying around.
2. Make sure your MacBook is plugged into power and an external display
3. Close lid
4. Your main desktop should show up on the external display. If your computer goes to sleep you can wake it up by clicking the mouse or typing on the keyboard.
Will that wake the internal display though? That would warm it up and that can be pretty bad when the lid is closed.
If your mouse is laggy and display looks fuzzy it means your external is mirroring your internal display and that your internal display is on. Turn mirroring off if that happens.
If you’re worried about heat (lid shut mode blocks the vent that runs the width of the keyboard) you can leave your lid open and use your external display normally.
I have not noticed a heat problem using my 2013 MBP Retina in lid shut mode after my two year old threw a phone at the screen (kids! Lol)
[Edit]I would then stock the labs with docking ports like something from CalDigit and LG displays.
That's before you consider that all the stuff Apple did to that poor ARM probably means you can't even boot Linux into a terminal on it today.
Not anymore, Apple switched to in-house GPUs recently.
In many ways the kernel part of a GPU is arguably the least important part and it's the userland where the shader compiler sits and produces the magic, but if you start from nothing it's very useful to have a working kernel interface that initializes the hardware and accepts command streams to run.
Apple’s commits to the LLVM (where the shader gets compiled into GPU executable code) states the A11 GPU target is “PowerVR Rogue” ISA. Which is identical to how it compiles for the A10.
So it’s still using foreign IP for the instruction set. Maybe Apple moved things around/optimized internals? Get better path optimization, or improve IPC?
But it’s weird they didn’t add optimizations specifically for that A11. So an A10/A11 GPU just run the same opcodes.
Make a version of iOS that companies can build off of; maintain the OS patch cycles but let them put their own app / front end on it.
Tons of smart devices exist now a days; TVs, refrigerators, bikes, etc... There's a market for an Apple based system for sure.
But yes - I'll taking a flying unicorn also in the interim.
No devices are "forced" to use "Android type hardware / Android OS". They use it because it's free. That's... important. Right?
The important bits (hardware drivers and core applications) aren’t open source (AOSP doesn’t include the new default apps or standard libraries.
Also, the important stuff is tied to google services that spy on you.
I think it’s completely reasonable to reject that stack, and lament that no one offers a high quality, supported alternative software stack at a reasonable price.
They are still not making Apple TV set.
With WatchOS and the Apple S3 chip already includes 90%+ of the features needed. I bet the S3 cost less then $20, and Apple could have sold it at $50 along with WatchOS to specfic market that Apple do not intend to compete. Fridge, Fan, Lamp, bikes, TV set, radio, kitchen appliance or what so ever.
Apple currently charges $1 for the controller of Lightning Cables regardless of volume. They could have just offer similar program.
The upboard fits that description perfectly - http://www.up-board.org/up/
The CPU is an Intel Atom which turns out to perform very well. The internal storage is blazingly fast eMMC. It has an Intel GPU which means complete open source driver support. (I can't comment on the GPU performance as I use the serial console.)
They also put a 40 pin connector on it that is hardware compatible with the raspberry pi - ie the same pins, voltages, and functions. You do need kernel patches for full support of the pins because the pins are specced at 3.3V while the Atom is 1.8V. There is level shifter hardware that fixes that, which the patches control. The patches are public from Emutex (in github) and there is also a PPA if you just want to play with Ubuntu and not worry about it.
It uses an AMI UEFI BIOS. You can compile the kernel with efi stub support and the upboard can boot straight into your code.
With Etnaviv drivers for GPU you can be pretty much covered. And I think it will get better.
I'm hoping that someone will make a netbook with i.MX8M. Or maybe even Chromebook - it would be then easily repurposeable.
I'm eyeing WandPi 8M [0], armstone mx8m [1] and Nitrogen8M [2].
[0] https://www.wandboard.org/products/
[1] https://www.fs-net.de/en/products/armstone/armstonemx8m-with...
Releasing the chip plus a nice users manual of all of its registers and assembly instructions might pose a security threat for device jail-breaks that they probably aren't interested in either.
1) No one has been particularly dedicated to developing an open-source OS for these things, despite the fact that used phones are steadily becoming some of the most common devices in the world, to the point where we have to treat them like waste. 2) Apple's treatment of ports of any kind as a blemish.
Solve these problems, and you have the board in a slick package. :)
I'm less than half kidding. #2 is obviously solvable, as there are lightning dongles/docks for just about everything on your list. #1 gets harder over time with security measures but it has to be possible, it's a question of resources.
NVIDIA Jetson is the closest you can get in terms of performance, but the price is closer to $500.
DX2 specs:
GPU: NVIDIA Pascal™, 256 CUDA cores (1302MHz)
CPU: HMP Dual Denver 2/2 MB L2 + Quad ARM® A57/2 MB L2 (1.4Ghz/2Ghz)
Video: 4K x 2K 60 Hz Encode (HEVC) and 4K x 2K 60 Hz Decode (12-Bit Support)
Memory: 8 GB 128 bit LPDDR4 (59.7 GB/s)
Display: 2x DSI, 2x DP 1.2 / HDMI 2.0 / eDP 1.4
CSI: Up to 6 Cameras (2 Lane) CSI2 D-PHY 1.2 (2.5 Gbps/Lane)
PCIE: Gen 2 | 1x4 + 1x1 OR 2x1 + 1x2
Data Storage: 32 GB eMMC, SDIO, SATA
Other: CAN, UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, GPIOs
Also it has a student discount to only $300 which imo makes it much more compelling if you're eligible.
Still at $49 it's cheap enough I'm going to see if it'll work as a wall-of-ceph appliance. Would love to have an SBC designed to be an OSD node but Western Digital never put theirs in the channel and there's not much else comparable AFAIK.
They have open-source initiatives, they like to be open like that when it doesn't interfere with those mandates. It's just that usability is such a huge thing that it impacts every step of their process.
Right now one can buy an Exynos5422, which CPU wise (I've never tested the GPU) is 4/5+ times as fast as an RPi 3b, for the price point mentioned (<100$, board only).
For me, this is effectively a "high power SBC at a reasonable price", however, at the same time, users interested in SBCs (or micro-PCs) seem to have a wildly different array of requirements (I've read virtually everything: (very) low price, GPU, kernel support, open source drivers, arch, ports, form factor, etc.etc.), so a desirable SBC seems like a pipe dream due to the fuzziness of the requirements.
(For reference, the CPU performance ratio is calculated on single-core performance of a generic RPi 3b core vs. a fast Exynos5422 core, on OpenVPN maximal bandwidth).
Btw imho the worst part about RPi is that it has poor ethernet performance. This improved a bit with RPi 3+, but still meh.
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1805276-FO-1703199RI52
It's hard to asses a generic ratio, since the performance increase is wildly variable. I think it can be reasonably assessed a "base" 3x performance ratio against the RPi 3B (with an outlier of 8x).
Likely outcome of the unlikely discovery of some lost ancient document that somehow makes The Woz indisputable CEO for life.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=raspberr...
I might buy one depending on what feedback I get on it. Anyone here tried those out for Linux or BSD projects?
Apple has been doubling down every year on the "we can make it go faster", and the rest of the ARM chip makers have responded with a "meh". It's so bad that people get really excited for a Samsung chip that is no slower than a two generation old A series chip.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=march-20...
Note that the first benchmark in the mentioned article is an outlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6y4atVl-mc
And when it comes to GPU compute, it's much more powerful than all the alternatives.
However, it's not a "clearcut no" or "very powerful in comparison", due to the number of cores (no doubt about the GPU, I had made this explicit in the parent post).
I've run the Phoronix test suite (which uses a set of real-world applications)[⁰], and, excluding the outliars for both parts (Redis/OpenSSL), we're talking about 10 to 40% advantage for the TX1, and little more for the TX2; XU4 has even the edge in one case.
They're definitely faster for the majority of use cases, however, I wouldn't classify them as "very powerful in comparison", at least, when considering the performance of an RPi 3B.
[⁰] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1805276-FO-1703199RI52
So you're correct, they're "comparable" in that if you take twice as many 40%-as-powerful cores, you might shrink the gap. But for any fundamentally single threaded tasks, a massive gap exists. And if/when you leverage the GPU (which can't be ignored, despite your handwaving), it becomes a canyon.
I still run a 2008 Mini with Manjaro Linux..still good for Kodi
Here is somehing that costs around a hundred dollars (a bit higher) called Zynqberry.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0726-03M-ZynqBerry-Zyn...
I would also like a flying unicorn.
Seriously, a high power SBC at a reasonable price point would be insanely useful for projects like portable MAME cabinets, video transcoders, scene displays, etc... I love the Pi but it's so old tech, especially the video cores, that it's annoyingly limited for some applications. Worse, the competitors with faster cpus often have worse video acceleration support, making them worse for this than the underpowered Pi.