Cubieboard: A small, high-performance ARM box

by bound008 • 14 years ago

136 110 14 years ago

Moto74512• 14 years ago

This is really cool. Seems like this could be turned into a really nice little web/file server and screams to be used in car AV/carputer setups.

viraj_shah• 14 years ago

Great board. Great price. Heard about this through the Homebrew Robotics Club.

wittrock• 14 years ago

It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application. I'm very curious though about what appears to be a SATA port on the Cubieboard.

Also, the RasPi has a huge initial advantage in that it was in the space first. They have a leg-up in publicity, marketing, and simply an initial user-base. If the Cubieboard benchmarks don't absolutely trounce the Raspberry Pi for almost every type of computation, I don't see the Cubieboard overtaking the Pi anytime soon.

Still, a cool board nonetheless.

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

In this space, I wouldn't be too worried about publicity/marketing just yet. Also, if the cubbie has less demand/quicker manufacture lead time, it will sell VERY well. Especially because of the huge backorder on the pi. At that price point, if I can order and get the cubbie now, or get a pi in 6 months, I'd get both. Also, in the hacker/hobbiest world, having one (or more) of each isn't infeasible.

zokier4• 14 years ago

> It looks like the GPU on the RasPi is still more powerful, so the cheaper board might still be better for things like a media center application.

Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers? At least Mali400 has "limadriver" project going on, quick googling didn't find anything for raspi.

Overall I'd love that Allwinner A10 got more attention, it seems fairly popular chip in cheapo chinese tablets. Getting GNU/Linux instead of Android for those would be neat.

protospork• 14 years ago

>Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers?

I have to ask, what is the preoccupation with FOSS GPU drivers? Not just with boards like this, but even standard desktop hardware. Does anyone seriously think a firm like NVidia is going to illicitly slip spyware or something into their binaries?

ekpyrotic• 14 years ago

The amateur quality of the website (esp. the prose) worries me. Do we have any further information on the owner? Or, the location of the company?

I could quite easily imagine cubiebox being no more than an amateur scammer's effort to cash in on the uptick in interest in ARM boxes.

In particular, the grammar on the parent Company's website (http://cubietech.com/) is horrific. Plus, it has a newsfeed populating from god knows where: "Missing NY teen found safe Marriage doesn't make people happier, it just stabilizes the happiness they already have. The research shows that the married people surveyed weren't any happier than..."

Not encouraging.

ghost91• 14 years ago

It seems to be a small chinese company.

I've no reason to believe they are scammer.

After a google search this "http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Tom&last=Cubie profile belongs to the cofounder.

trotsky• 14 years ago

90% of the 2nd/3rd tier arm market is like that, they certainly have their problems but they're almost all legitimate companies that deliver a product.

orangethirty• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've worked with some of them (with the mini2440), and a lot of their websites are just ugly, and out of date. They are mostly used as a place to post their phone numbers, and not as a business front. Keep that in mind.

hundchenkatze• 14 years ago

Also all of the generic comments on the buy page(http://cubieboard.org/buy/). Most of which are asking "Please keep me updated when its available for shipping." and getting the response "ok, we will inform you when ready to ship." Seems likely the Q and A were posted by the same person to give the illusion of popularity.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

Would be cool if it had two SATA ports on it so that you could build a NAS with mirrored storage.

maglos• 14 years ago

yes... a 100mb/s NAS...

notimetorelax• 14 years ago

Well my ReadyNas Duo isn't any better...

greyfade• 14 years ago

Not all NAS applications require a gigabit LAN.

aaronpk• 14 years ago

I don't see any mention of the power requirements for the board? Is it powered by 5V DC? (i.e. USB)

duskwuff5• 14 years ago

Looks like there's a cylindrical DC power jack on the board.

zokier4• 14 years ago

The power jack is labeled "DC5V@2A", but I doubt that the board would actually pull that much current as the SoC is commonly used in tablets.

duskwuff5• 14 years ago

Nasty gotcha: It's using the Allwinner A10 SoC, which is primarily aimed at running Android tablets. The documentation for the chipset is extremely limited, so trying to use it for applications outside the norm may be quite difficult.

zokier4• 14 years ago

Indeed. Interestingly they do mention Ubuntu quite prominently on their front page, so I guess they have managed to get it to run?

edit: Some people at least are managing to run Ubuntu on a similar hardware, so I guess it'll work. http://liliputing.com/2012/07/linux-distributions-that-can-r...

stusmall• 14 years ago

Which the SoC in the pi isn't perfect on either. IIRC They redacted everything about the graphics from the datasheet.

neurotech14• 14 years ago

The Mali400 GPU is used in the A10/A13 is used by numerous other SoCs, and was developed by ARM Ltd.

angusgr• 14 years ago

Actually the Allwinner A10 is pretty well documented by the vendor and by the community, has a bunch of standard linux distributions running already. Much better than most ARM SoCs in the cheap Android tablet market.

AFAIK the one exception is the video decoding hardware, where the Linux libraries are apparently sub-par.

Some jumping off points for resources: http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ https://www.miniand.com/forums

duskwuff5• 14 years ago

Perhaps things have changed since I first heard about it; initial reports were less than positive:

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/0...

khakimov2• 14 years ago

Btw, BDTI Benchmark Results for the ARM Cortex-A8 http://www.bdti.com/Resources/BenchmarkResults/Processors/Co...

erichocean2• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if the Mali400 supports hardware acceleration with Google Chrome?

UPDATE: It'd be great if ran Chrome OS, too.

randallu• 14 years ago

It supports GLES2 very well, so probably. It's used on various Samsung SoCs so was in some GS2 and GS3 variants.

steevdave5• 14 years ago

Chromium maybe. I'm not sure there are any Chromebooks based on ARM yet although there seems to be a profile for building tegra2 devices. I know the Trimslice is supposed to be able to run it but I haven't actually seen a software release of Google Chrome for it. Hexxeh does seem to be working on it for the Pi but I haven't used the Pi so I can't say (I personally need a little more power than armv6 has)

SnaKeZ• 14 years ago

502 Bad Gateway

khakimov2• 14 years ago

looks like they nginx runs on their cubieboard =)

zhobbs• 14 years ago

Are any of these ARM solutions open source for the full stack?

Arduino is nice because I can use it to prototype something, and then if I want to mass produce it I can take the open schematics, rip out what I don't need and produce custom boards. Is that possible with any of these ARM solutions?

Zuph2• 14 years ago

Take a look at the Olinuxino: https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO https://www.olimex.com/dev/imx233-olinuxino-maxi.html

They've got one version running an admittedly slow i.MX processor, and another coming down the pike running an Allwinner chip. As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips.

duskwuff5• 14 years ago

> As a bonus, though, it's all reasonably easy-to-assemble TQFP chips.

The A10/A13 require memory which is only available as BGA, though.

brigade• 14 years ago

BeagleBoard/BeagleBone have full schematics available (http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design)

beambot• 14 years ago

I'm really keen to try out the Carambola, a $22-EUR device with built-in wifi. It's really barebones in terms of peripherals, but that's perfect for many internet-of-things apps.

http://shop.8devices.com/carambola

Anyone have some experience with these?

steevdave5• 14 years ago

There are no ARM with complete open source because they all have the GPU integrated. The Mali is probably the closest to open due to the LIMA project with the Freedreno project backing Qualcomm's Adreno (and maybe work with the Freescale mx5x) getting access to the sources isn't particularly hard (but does require an NDA) but you still won't get the most important part, which is the source to the shader compiler library in there

vyrotek• 14 years ago

How well would this work on a TV as a basic HTPC? I'm looking to play with something simple that would only need to really run a browser with Flash.

oliwarner4• 14 years ago

I would be suspicious of this. It's not just one alarm bell ringing.

- The website. Jesus. With all the templates and content management you can pluck out of thin air, the result is very shoddy. Apparently that isn't a warning sign enough for some people.

- No corporate history. The company has another site but their blog there is empty. No news. Dodgy RSS listings. The whole thing is even shoddier than the product site.

- The payment is through Paypal. Address was visible yesterday (now encrypted) as mr.hipboy@gmail.com. lolwut? What a handle. Very professional. Real name appears to be Luffy Wang of Hesseney Road, Hubei 150, HK. (hipboi@qq.com) This guy really likes hips.

- The product is $49. Less than the price (delivered) of two Raspis with a SATA controller and port. This was what made my eyes light up. The phrase "too good to be true" exists for a reason.

- And while I'm talking about specs, why do the pictures and words disagree so much? How many card readers are there? Are they SD or MMC?

- Oh and it's available almost without delay. Despite that there are no reviews, no tester units in the wild. No videos of on working. Not even the hint of a fart from a prototype.

+ There is a GitHub page: https://github.com/cubie-tech This is probably a detail I wouldn't have bothered with if I were running this scam.

Yesterday my acquaintances on G+ and I decided that this is most likely a scam. I really hope it's not and I'll be the first in line for the second batch, but please be careful.

cantankerous• 14 years ago

I'm a bit suspicious, too. Googling the name of the board turns up maybe 10 results all in the same domain. Immediately following are things not related to the Cubieboard. I'm probably gonna sit this one out for now.

EDIT: Using some different terms brings up a ton of articles about the board from popular sources, yet they're all new within the past few days. I dunno, it might actually be real, but it me a bit uncomfortable, but that may just be me.

oliwarner4• 14 years ago

This is typical of the technology-journalist-circle-jerk you see when a new product is announced but nobody has hands on yet. No news older than a few days old. Same photos over and over again.

steevdave5• 14 years ago

Wow. As someone who is actually active in the A10 community, I know Tom and this is not a scam. Some people focus more on developing cool shit than on their website.

oliwarner4• 14 years ago

Well if people want to sell their cool shit, they probably aught to spend 20 minutes making sure all the media around their product doesn't look like a giant con.

Seriously other than the handle hipboi/hipboy in an email address that was removed from the site yesterday, there's nothing definitively linking Cubietech/Cubieboard to Tom Cubie.

And I can't see anything about the Cubieboard on Tom Cubie's Facebook or G+. That also strikes me a little odd.

zachinglis2• 14 years ago

And yet he's selling it. So he obviously does care somewhat - otherwise it would be just a video of it working and maybe some assembly instructions. (Something my grandfather did with the Williamson Amplifier: He published how to create it in Wireless World rather than patenting it and making tons of money from it.)

The point is: he built a business, whatever his intentions before he started, his intentions are now in selling.

wissler• 14 years ago

They are probably just small, idealistic, and prioritize producing actually working hardware over producing marketing fluff.

rektide3• 14 years ago

This is, foremost, not at all too good to be true.

The Mele A1000 http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/hacking_the_mele_a1000... is $70, a mere $20 more: it's 2x the board real-estate, another $4 in connectors, it has a case, and it's been around for ~1 year now.

What's interesting is how lagged the development world is from the consumer electronics world. If you want an Allwinner A10, or a Marvell Kirkwood/ ARMADA 300 piece of kit, and you want it at the best possible price, possibly before dev kits show up, you need to scope out consumer electronics, not dev boards. The Mele was a product, this lack's the consumer experience of a product, is just a platform, and it, like many dev kits, show lag v.s. what the consumer boys are up to.

This is simply a small board exposing a very cheap ARM A8 SoC that does everything (just add ram+flash): hold on to your fucking pants and get used to the future. Course, may not materialize. My OpenPandora hasn't. ;)

primitur2• 14 years ago

I have two Open Pandoras that say you Just Need To Wait A Little More (tm). ;)

And yeah, seems like every few years we get more and more college grads who seem to be surprised that there is, in fact, a lot of very cheap hardware out there to be had. I've been running and using micro-scale Linux hardware like these new-gen things for decades. Gumstix, BananaBoard, et al.

Okay, the <$50 pricing is pretty nice, but not entirely unexpected given the trend over the last 10 years of having these things get cookie-cut around. The whole point of ARM in the first place was to get to this position ..

HeyLaughingBoy6• 14 years ago

I don't know anything about these guys, but I don't think it's too good to be true.

Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork. As expected, now there are projects on vWorker (ex RentACoder) asking for engineers to design such computers with state of the art specs with a maximum bid of $499. I can't make this shit up! $499! At least toss us a bone and add a zero so we don't laugh quite so hard!

Anyway, aside from that rant, this is a Great Thing. I predict an array of products that are now possible due to a flood of dirt cheap, physically small computers that can run Linux. One off industrial controllers that would have taken a week of development time can now be pushed out in a day, etc.

joezydeco• 14 years ago

"Ever since the Raspberry pi shipped, credit-card sized computers have been coming out the woodwork"

No, they've been here all along in the SBC and industrial spaces. They're just on your radar now because they're cheap.

Is Gumstix a line of "one-off industrial computers"?

http://www.gumstix.com/

salem• 14 years ago

I agree, this is fantastic price point and an awesome trend. Try hitting this price point with a COTS Arduno + ethernet shield!

neurotech14• 14 years ago

[citation needed]

I'm thinking it would cost at least $150-$200 to prototype, per PCB revision. If it was design only, I wouldn't trust a random freelance designer to get it working first go.

I remember one weird case where bunch of EEG units acted weird, well noisy. The highly experienced MSEE couldn't explain it, because it wasn't the high sensitivity input amp or anything on the board. I eventually figured out it was the off-board battery, and it turned out to be the impedance would climb causing a noisy EEG, as the battery was wearing out in fairly short time from abuse (excess low discharge in SLAs will damage them). Perhaps a few extra capacitors might have help.

It would be the same for these A10/A13 clones, weird glitches can crop up, and even with an experienced engineer, the design could require a PCB revision and a new prototype.

primitur2• 14 years ago

Raspberry Pi is just the new, "hipster", eval board.

There have been cheap, affordable, fun eval boards like the Rpi out there for years. Gumstix, Beagle, and so on. Prices are coming down, sure, but don't kid yourself that the RaspberryPi is something new and ground-breaking: its just a surface feature of a rather larger industry.

forgotusername• 14 years ago

You do realize basically all these rules applied to the ras. pi when it was first announced too? Considering that was over a year ago, and comparable parts have been regularly available from China (e.g. Allwinner A10) for many months, it's quite hard to find any surprise in this project at all.

neurotech14• 14 years ago

Olimex is working on an A10 design, and is already shipping A13 based board. This would be quite doable for another small team.

http://olimex.wordpress.com/ or http://goo.gl/5v26a to the post.

Allwinner will reduce minimum shipping quantities for open hardware projects. Closed development OEMs have a 100k minimum order quantity.

Datonomics• 14 years ago

"more" link goes to an incomplete page.

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

The main homepage doesn't look all that bad, does it? A nice product shot, some specs, and a buy button.

Clicking on things gives varied results though. For example clicking the buy button brings you to a page that indicates you can't actually buy it yet.

ww5202• 14 years ago

They look like a hardware company, not a web design company. Why do you care about their-not-the-latest-hip-web-theme website? I rather they save the web design money to deliver a lower priced product. Every company starts with no corporate history. You are welcomed to buy from Intel if so choose. Hardware price drops all the times. The price point is not too far off.

HN has been big on launch early and get feedback. How shallow it is to have negative feedback based on look. Let's wait and see how the product turns out, rather than commenting on their web design.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

You obviously have absolutely no idea what a true startup is. Do you understand the concept of most viable product? How long did you spend collecting all this information? Are you a disgruntled competitor with a bit of jealousy perhaps?

The guy is working on physical hardware. Do you know how difficult that is? To ship a device like this? A lot of the issues you mentioned are the last of his worries.

polshaw• 14 years ago

cnx say it is expected to be open hardware.[1] if true this would make it a pretty big deal. sata also.

also this is no 'scam' project..

>the cubieboard (intended as BeagleBone competitor) and that aliexpress shop are both from Tom Cubie (aka hipboi). Also the author of the initial u-boot/mmc for sunxi and the software engineer at Allwinner Tech who GPLed the code released by QWare.[1]

assuming this is accurate, this puts him in a pretty good position to support it.

Fwiw, I have Linux running on my a10 tablet and it runs pretty well.. obviously a light weight desktop.. ff runs well on most sites, although there is slow down on complex sites eg. engadget

there is some linux support for the gpu, but not the video acceleration (hopefully, 'yet').

1. http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/31/49-cubieboard-allwinn...

Sauce1971• 14 years ago

About the price of the chinese Android mediacenters. Probably nice, but the great thing about the Pi is the community support.

regehr• 14 years ago

Speaking as the instructor for a class that is using raspberry pis: at this point the most important thing about the raspberry pi is the community and mindshare. It's going to be hard for a new board, however awesome, to replicate this.

rektide3• 14 years ago

I thank you, in the same way I thank Ubuntu for existing:

Someone needs to draw away the popular attention from those with the will to get stuff done.

If I can re-furl my barbs & continue, if the Cubieboard were taking orders right now it would be a shit show of people coming in from Engadget and HN and all over buying these things up then being extremely aggravated they A) don't just work B) require some fairly serious willingness to chase out the good information on uboot, the sunxi platform, & to get your OS installed: there's not much in the way of authoritative, well compiled references for doing so.

I was pretty shocked seeing this board on Engadget today. There've been a steady stream of similar-ish boards, such as the $60 Hackberry, also A10 based, which too is still in "prerelease" form.

malkia• 14 years ago

Ditto. The community, 40,000+ posts, the idea, the talks that's what matters sometimes. There might be 10x more powerful devices in a year or less for the same price, yet they have to gain the same momentum as Pi. And nothing stops the Pi folks from concentrating on these. My understanding is that they (Pi) are not doing it for the money, they simply want kids to learn programming as many of us did back in our Apple ][ prompt, or BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, etc.

  ] HGR
  ] HPLOT 10, 10 TO 20, 20

aortega2• 14 years ago

I can't believe the level of raspberry pi astroturfing present here. This board is so much more powerful that it can run full Ubuntu fast and the same chip is actually used to build very competent android tablets. I read things like "mindshare" "community" "The site is wrong" "the GPU is better in the raspberry" (Ha! sure, games will run better i suppose) , well the site looks perfectly OK for me. I gonna burn points for this, but the u$s 50 Raspberry pi is overpriced since you can get a u$s 67 complete android tablet (http://goo.gl/Misru)

tlb• 14 years ago

A key advantage would be if you could actually buy it. Raspberry Pi is still "due to extreme demand the estimated delivery time is uncertain and may exceed 12 weeks."

Gumstix are more expensive but easily available in any quantity, so that's what I'm designing with now.

catch232• 14 years ago

If you buy on element14, I believe you can get it in a few days. Supposedly these guys can ship immediately: http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi

I bought one last week and it arrived no slower than amazon.com so I think it's safe to say orders are no longer taking forever.

dillona• 14 years ago

I bought one on element14 over the (holiday) weekend, and it shipped today.

It's not that bad

catch232• 14 years ago

The RPi already has add-on boards and a relatively large community compared to new competitors coming to the scene. In a way, it's like comparing the msp430 to the arduino. The msp430 is arguably better than most of the AVR chips, but they just don't have the hobby mindshare of the arduino community.

voltagex_2• 14 years ago

Can the A10 run Linux-proper (not Android) yet?

ktizo6• 14 years ago

Is this chip - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllWinner_A1X

It can run a variety of linux variants. But all ARM processors that I am aware of can, even going back to the chip in the old Acorn Archimedes from the late '80s. Also, I have personally never heard of a chip that is able to run android but not able to run linux and I am not entirely sure how you would even go about making one.

someperson• 14 years ago

Yes it can: http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/35910-desktop-linux-ubuntu-r...

ww5202• 14 years ago

Spot on. The childish criticism on the web design really sounds like competitors are feeling the heat.

ktizo6• 14 years ago

Either you are confused about the definition of astroturfing, or you are confused about the nature of the raspberry-pi foundation.

We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children.

From here - http://www.raspberrypi.org/about

aortega2• 14 years ago

I'm not agains the Raspberry pi foundation. I'm against the stupid old SoC they used and the low amount of memory. If they want to build a personal computer then add more memory, Raspberry PI now is an expensive microcontroller.

sciurus• 14 years ago

There's so much great, cheap hardware based on the Allwinner A10 out there right now!

I just ordered a Mk802 II for $65. It has a 1GHz Cortex-A8 single core processor, Mali 400 graphics, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a microSDHC card slot, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 1 full-sized USB port (usable for power), 2 micro USB ports, and a full-sized HDMI connector so you cna just plug it in to your TV.

It ships with Android 4.0 on the internal storage (with access to the Google Play Store) or you can run the linx dustro of your choise from a microsd card.

http://liliputing.com/2012/08/mk802-ii-android-4-0-mini-pc-n... http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=305

BitMastro• 14 years ago

I have one, too. Yesterday I tried Ubuntu with LXDE, it's a little bit slower then expected and video decoding is not fast enough. I guess I'll use android and maybe try CM10. I use a powered USB hub to plug external drives (the power may not be enough for some USB drives)

sitkack• 14 years ago

Make sure you are using hardware decoding which is more than fast enough. I doubt these systems have enough cpu capacity to decode HD streams w/o assistance.

ktizo6• 14 years ago

This looks really cool. Will have to get one to talk to my r-pi as I think it is a bit lonely.

I love the fact that more people are building these kind of devices at this price point. I have been looking at pc104 boards for years but they were always far too expensive for anything with some decent kick.

Give it a few more iterations and a few more people trying to build similar devices and then there is a proper marketplace for essentially a new consumer device class, in much the same way as the OLPC project was the catalyst for the emergence of dirt cheap netbooks. There will be tonnes of people working on this after witnessing the demand for the r-pis.

And anyone who thinks that the r-pi lot will do anything other than welcome things like this is off their head. They are a non-profit with the stated aim of getting as many of these kind of small cheap devices out there as possible.

Remember, you don't compete against an organisation like that in the normal sense of the word, as if you put them out of business by doing it bigger and better and cheaper, then all you have done is helped them to achieve their objective without them having to do as much work.

Personally I suspect that it is exactly the kind of development the r-pi lot were hoping for.

erichocean2• 14 years ago

I wish Samsung would sell a similar product using the board and chip from the Galaxy S3.

whyenot• 14 years ago

I think the ODROID-X is about as close as you can get. Significantly more expensive, but quite nice.

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

mmphosis• 14 years ago

VGA?

rolak• 14 years ago

I wish manufacturerers would make thse boards with VGA output. There's no sense in buying a 35 of 50 dollar computer if you need a $150 monitor to use it.

ssamuli• 14 years ago

Still waiting for someone to make this kind of cheap little board with 2 ethernet ports.

With OpenBSD it would work well as a home firewall or similar mini network appliance.

Maybe some day! :)

Cubieboard: A small, high-performance ARM box

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