New Boards incoming

I've been mad busy with work and website and demos and and and...

So aside from the funded long ago Kickstarter LibreH5  which still does not have a graphic OS yet

I've not been chasing many new boards.  :(

Which is a shame as I think we're in a bit of a new phase of board releases, with lots of new generation SBC's being released, H5's starting to take hold, H6's on the market (though poorly supported) and Rockchips mighty RK series of chips starting to grab a big share of the market and it seems also having some GPU support.

The lovely people at FriendlyArm are sending me 3 new boards. One of which I probably wouldn't buy normally but wanted to compare it with its precursor, the M1.  The M1 was one of my favorite dirt cheap boards, they cost $10-11 and were pretty much usable out of the box even had some graphic acceleration, though only ran at about 75% of the speed of a Raspberry in single core mode. for $11 though....bargain, 3 times the power of a RpiZero when used properly.

They are sending me the M1+, which is basically the same under powered board  but with extra features like wifi, eMMC and more memory, but its $38 so can't honestly see it being worth that price...unless you MUST have wifi and eMMC... but I am happy to try it out and check it all still works ok. I had noticed that later versions of Debian didn't work so well on the old M1. So we will see.

More exciting though they are also sending a K1+ which is an H5 version of their K2 android unit.  I haven't had a lot of luck getting a Linux OS running on it, but as an android machine its quite a lovely bit of kit.  But an H5 version has a Mali450 on it...hmmm and the wiki suggests it has OpenGLES on board ready as it can run GLMark2-es2  . That will be great to play with and in theory should comfortably outperform the Rpi. Perhaps I can use it as a benchmark for the other H5's in my drawer of shame.

It does seem that following last years release of Allwinners GPU binaries, there do seem to be more Allwinner systems comming to market with GPU enabled.

And very generous of them the T4, and RK3399 board, which is over my $100 limit so very excited to get hold of one and not have to spend pennies.


Yes for sure this is a new phase in SBC's there seems to be a lot of new, much more poweful chips coming on the market, as phones and tablets have upped the power outpuit, making their current chips less desirable and opening them up to the SBC market.

Soon as I can get all my work uptodate I will have to dig out the sleepers in the drawer of shame and see what can be done, especially the Allwinner and Rockchip based ones.