You own a 40nm process fab? Are you a multi-billionaire?

Face the facts, you'll either be stuck running your hardware on very very expensive $1000+ FPGAs in order to get 1/10th of the performance of a $10 Allwinner SoC, or you'll be getting 1/100th the performance on a mere $200 FPGA dev board.

In the mean time, most people are happy to just use free software on the hardware. The software enables the hardware, but it's important that it is free so that problems can be fixed, code can be made more efficient, etc, by the people who run the hardware. This board is "open" in the sense that the aim to have no binary blobs for the functional units.

As a comment above says, they still have work to do on the GPS unit, the GPU (open source LIMA driver) and the VPU (can currently play H.264 only). In addition there is a boot ROM that is very much a ROM and which scans the various buses for a boot image.

I thought the RPi had hard float. In addition the Broadcom GPU on the RPi is going to significantly outperform a Mali-400 MP2 - the GPU on the RPi is a beast, the poor little ARM11 is just a controller for it (except in the RPi where it's the main CPU!). But yes, the A20 is otherwise a far better SoC for a computer system - if only because the RPi is a two year old design now.

Was there any real reason for choosing the form factor you did, apart from it being quite neat? I know this was also asked over at Phoronix.

You should get an account, so your comment started out at +1, not 0 - your useful reply may be missed. Someone with moderator points please mod the parent up.

I think I'll settle for foraging for rich landowners. Plenty of meat on them, well marbled with fat! Yum! Is there a George Foreman grill that does whole human legs?

They want the credit report fixed. Paying the $3500 now will not do that. And it is also the wrong thing to do.

How can such a case cost the consumer? Surely they can claim for costs after winning the case?

Again, if there is no legal resort, then firebombing the company's premises and killing the owner's parents is a fairly understandable reaction. (j/k, NSA dudes)

Or get a Notice Of Correction on the credit report, which at least tries to explain why that black mark is there.

But seriously, they should be trying to get a lawyer to deal with the case.

Or a hitman.

Can't you find a lawyer that will take the case on a pro-bono basis, it looks like a slam dunk.

Please look up the bathtub model of hardware failure - most failures will happen right at the beginning of a product's lifespan, or after a period of time where failure rates are very low.

On the other hand 0.4% failure on the first day doesn't look great. 0.4% failure in the first month is good. 0.4% failure in the first year is excellent.

It looks like a dodgy HDMI connector is a common issue.

Isn't the key here that Visdom, which he wants to open source, is alleged to include source code from Sophia? Surely the case is about ascertaining whether or not Visdom includes Sophia source code? They wanted the computer seized because they thought he would Open Source it as soon as he caught wind of the impending court order, and that such open sourcing, even if only temporary, would cause irreparable harm to the owner of Sophia.

If Visdom does not include such source code, then the whole case is without merit. But now it's in the legal system it could be years before he is allowed to release it, which is surely the aim of the owner of Sophia.

Most likely the developer has the source code online in a private source control repository somewhere anyway, so he can still release it if he wanted to. Most likely as a professional software engineer contractor he was never going to be doing anything

???

There are high end Mali cores - things have moved on in the three years since Mali-400 MP4 was on the market in the Galaxy SII. Sadly it is still a popular GPU core in the low-end market (ARM actually recently created Mali-450 to cater for this area), but there is the Mali T6xx family for higher end uses - e.g., http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-plus-gpu-compute/mali-t678.php

Agreed R.e., NVIDIA - Tegra 4 is an outdated GPU core, even by mobile standards, but there's a lot of it to get good performance, and most games don't use the more advanced OpenGL ES 3 yet.

AMD's ARM products aren't out until next year. They'll presumably be an ARM version of their low-end Jaguar-based APUs.

This would be a very good idea for Imagination to work towards - a "Raspberry MIPS" based around this MIPS core, a low-end current-gen Imagination GPU, and some other standard features. Get it out into the market at a cheap price, support it (the ecosystem is as important as getting it out there in the first place) and you could get a lot of people using their hardware, testing software by using it, etc.

ARM got the mobile phone market early on - very early on (late 90s) - presumably due to a very hard working sales team and an established pedigree in mobile designs (Apple Newton, for example), as well as proven low power (MIPS wasn't there then, Hitachi was with SH3/4 which was used in early Windows CE fliptops). They also had Java support (hardware assistance) which was very big on the client at the time.

ARM clearly has very good engineers who work with their customers - this means a lot when you're licensing cores to integrate, not buying ready made chips. And they went for the cheap licensing and hope for bulk option. I'm sure early MP3 players using it helped too.

And clearly since then they took the ball and ran with it, by delivering updates on time meeting what their customers need.

MIPS has languished for a long time, it's like the company didn't care to target what was to become a massive market - and by the time they did it was too late. They probably didn't see it coming, kept on selling into the embedded market, and have kicked themselves ever since. Until Imagination bought them that is - Imagination's established sales team (from GPU sales) will be able to get this core (which will be Android compatible) into SoCs - maybe not many initially.

It's nice to see a decent CPU architecture possibly re-emerging.

This is one of the annoying things about Android (and iOS) on a tablet.

I know there are some third party windowing solutions, and Samsung have their own (or licensed one) for side-by-side apps.

But yeah, for apps that are happy running on a thin phone screen, why can't they run on the side on a tablet whilst another (or two more) are also running on the screen? In a way, Windows 8 supports this in the Metro view, because apps have to support a narrow view as well as a wide view (I don't know the specifics).

Hopefully Lenovo have also licensed one of these window managers for Android, at least for side-by-side/tiling view if not a windowed interface. And hopefully Google are working on this for Android 5, at least for when it is running on a tablet.

I was wondering about open source CPU cores to go along with this GPU - thanks. A better bet than the T80 or T68 core!