Linaro announced the 96Boards initiative at Linaro Connect Hong Kong last month, and in collarabation with Huawei announced Hikey development board following this new standard. Qualcomm has now joined the Fray with Dragonboard 410c, a 96Boards board powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad core Cortex A53 processor.
Dragonboard 410c specifications:
- SoC- Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (APQ8016) quad-core ARM CortexA53 @ 1.2 GHz with Adreno 306 GPU @ 400MHz
- System Memory – LPDDR2/3 533MHz, Single-channel 32-bit (4.2GBps)
- Storage – eMMC 4.51 + micro SD 3.0 (UHS-I)
- Video Output – HDMI up to 1080p
- Connectivity – Integrated 802.11 b/g/n, BT/FM, GPS
- USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG port.
- Camera – Support for 13 MP camera with Wavelet Noise Reduction, JPEG decoder, and other post-processing techniques done in hardware
- Expansion:
- 1x 40 pin low speed expansion connector – UART, SPI, I2S, I2C x2, GPIO x12, DC power
- 1x 60 pin high speed expansion connector – 4L-MIPI DSI, USB, I2C x2, 2L+4LMIPI CSI
- Analog expansion connector – Headset, Speaker, FM antenna
- Arduino compatibility through mezzanine board
- Power Supply – 6.5 – 18V DC input
The board will support Linux and Android, and target embedded computing and Internet of Everything (IoE) products, such as robotics, cameras, medical devices, vending machines, smart buildings, digital signage, casino gaming consoles, etc…
That’s about all we know for now, except it will be launched in summer 2015. You can register your interest on Qualcomm’s DragonBoard 410c page.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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this looks like very promising 🙂
I think we can even expect a good GPU support thanks to Rob Clark’s reverse engineered opensource driver called Freedreno.
Very cool that there is more than one 96Boards, hopefully there will be more…
But… Yet again 32-bit only memory, to feed quad Cortex-A53 cores… The memory bandwidth is one of the biggest bottlenecks when doing serious processing (by empirical experience) of almost all ARM chips, they need to start make serious designs if they want to get the ARM chips doing anything beyond playing silly/simple Android games.
Saying an quad 64-bit channel memory would “take too much energy” to run, is absolutely BSing, the amount of energy my own “ASIC” (actually non-optimized 3D printed thing) uses for that (using DDR3 @ 1600) is using only about 0.3W per channel, so quad of those use only 1.2W or so… sure the DIMMs eat anything between 3W to 5W each, but that doesn’t get used on the SoC itself, the RAM chips get to dissipate that.
Of course on ARM the CCI-500 finally fixes the few braindead design choices ARM did with their CCI-400, so hopefully memory bandwidth goes up with Cortex-A72 era chips.
This Snapdragon is actually labeled as Board number 3 out of 96. Who is the mystery Board #2?
More to the point, anon, “taking too much energy” is BS on other fronts. The higher-end designs are aiming for super set-top boxes, etc. Power profile on the board is less relevant there. (Otherwise, why BOTHER with this design in the first place. There’s not so much to be gained by 64-bits by itself if you’re just going to cripple it in a half*ssed RAM implementation)
@madscientist_42
Yeah, one can somewhat understand if the SoC is using PoP memory (as the energy usage of the RAM is stuffed into the SoC’s overall energy usage), but even then Samsung Exynos line have had dual 32-bit LPDDR3 for years, so there really is no excuses for singular LPDDR3/4 memory on even heavily integrated PoP, but as there are “conventional” packages using separate RAM chips too, those have no excuse at all (except being cheapskates (Cheap Chinese Cr*p Clones)).
At least these developer board manufacturers should stop using too integrated mobile phone chips, and start looking into doing actually useful (server/desktop replacement) systems, for both the memory bandwidth is the biggest bottleneck on ARM for now (especially as it’s shared (UMA) with the GPU, maybe HSA brings help with that (Mediatek Radeon SoC with HMC/HBM?)).
@miniNodes
Maybe the board by Marvell or Action Technology, since both companies are expected to launch 96Boards soon.
@cnxsoft
It’s Actions, confirmed.
> too much energy
It’ not about energy. It’s about money. Your money. But fear not – 96boards comes in 2 editions – Consumer and Enterprise (or whatever it is called). With this 2nd edition, you will be offered a choice to shell out few hundreds for 5.376 jigabytes of 189.14 bit memory (all numbers approximate).
The board will also get Windows 10 support – https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2015/03/18?sf37062399=1
WinHEC presentation about Snapdragon 410c:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/WinHEC/2015/WPS101