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- Hacker News
- Title critique:
RaspberryPi is not an SoC vendor. They take proprietary SOCs from Broadcom, use proprietary firmware and build a product around it. They obviously upstream what they can, but they fundamentally are a system integrator, not an SoC vendor.
by bangaladore - Thanks for covering the software support side of things; that's always been the worst part of the ecosystem, and annoyingly hard to get info on.
On which note: Oh, wow, the Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great! Mainline support, good hardware, good price. Once it's back in stock I may have to buy one:)
by yjftsjthsd-h - This could be improved a lot IMHO.
NXP's IMX6/8 family is dominant in the market, really should have presence there.
And TI's ARM series, still popular in beagleboard family and used widely in the field.
And Intel's N100/N150, though I'm unsure if they're still "SBC" boards.
Allwinner, ESP32 are also major players from China.
Now apparently Qualcomm is entering the fight with new chips on Arduino UNO Q.
NXP and TI are both open source friendly, unlike broadcom. My first choice will be NXP.
Never heard about CIX.
by synergy20 - In this format I go deep down the Mailing lists, news articles and more to summarise what exciting hardware has been published and software has been merged into Linux. Also breaking down rumours and developer conferences about future SoC‘s. Hope you all find it useful!by HeyMeco
- Lovely snapshot in time view of the small computers that drive a ton of product innovation.
One major gap I'd really like to see covered better is power consumption. We've started seeing unboxing and reviews for the Arduino Uno Q for example, but no one seems to be breaking out a simple USB power meter to get some idea how much power it takes, headless or sitting at desktop.
Pretty nice that so many chips have pretty good Linux support.
- Nothing about NXP? They are a pretty big player in this space, and mostly do a great job contributing upstream to the kernel, but I guess they don't have a hobby-level entry point readily available.
I've used NXP-based embedded Linux hardware from Toradex, Gateworks and EmbeddedTS in previous projects, lots of vendors out there.
by jpm_sd - Huh. It mentions neither Intel nor AMD, and I am seeing _a lot_ of N100/N150 industrial SBCs right now (outside the hobbyist space). Intel in particular seems to be replaying their approach of flooding the market with Atom chips and making N-series available to OEMs in volume and relatively low price.
Full marks for Rockchip coverage, yes, they're filling in the gaps below the RK3588, although some of those chips aren't that interesting in terms of power budget and have apparently low yields.
by rcarmo - Something I'd be very interested in seeing summarized is the current state of fully open source software on SoCs and SBCs. I hate how common the situation described in the nVidia section where SoCs that require vendor kernels get abandoned on ancient software, so it would be very useful to know what SoCs are supported to a useful level by mainline kernels.
I feel like there are three tiers of support that most people would be interested in:
1. Usable for headless appliances (serial console or unaccelerated graphics, wired networking, storage, USB)
2. Usable for interactive use (accelerated graphics, WiFi/BT)
3. Fully supported (all major hardware works)
by wolrah