Upcoming Marvell Boards - ARMv8

[sfx2000]

Lot of folks know perhaps about the low-end A53 based Armada board...e.g GlobalScale's EspressoBin board...

https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-72-marvell-espressobin.aspx

SolidRun is doing the higher end MacchiatoBin board - based on the Armada 8040 (Quad Cortex-A72)

https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/armada-8040-community-board/

It's a beast... spent a couple of days with a pre-production sample...

 

[joegreat]

Wow!
Very impressed by the 2.5 Gbit and 2 times 10 Gbit interfaces on the 8040 outline!
...and the 4 times SATA 3.0 as well! But where is the 4th connector - I see only 3 of them near the battery?

 

[swetoast]

@sfx2000 nice board! havent seen that one only seen the solidrun boards before, are you looking at these boards for your project ?

 

[Jens Bauer]

I believe that the SolidRun board will be very well suited for a router.
* Logging can be done to a harddisk instead of flash/SD/MMC.
* A 10Gbit port can used as uplink to a 1Gbit switch which has a 10G SFP; this would eliminate 1Gbps bottlenecks.
* Power usage would quite low.
* If you need even more network ports, there are 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes on the PCIe slot.
* Status LEDs can be easily connected to GPIO ports (remember the resistors).
* A whole bunch of customization is possible (buzzers, TFT-displays, etc, etc.)

SolidRun's products are high quality products; I'll probably purchase one of these boards myself, but I wonder if I have enough discipline to use it as a router and not be tempted to using it as a compile-farm and "all the other things it can be usd for".

Compare it to a Gbit router; it's the same price as some of the best consumer-grade routers and lower price than a 10Gbit switch. You'd probably be able to make a 10Gbit router with this board.

 

[sfx2000]

They're both pretty interesting... challenge here is that SolidRun can be a challenge with actual shipping devices - and GlobalScale is similar - these are dev boards, and part of the problem is they don't scale to retail numbers...

EspressoBin - nice little unit that can do some serious bandwidth routing in the sub-1G space, and the price seems to be right.

MacchiatoBin - like I mentioned earlier - it's a beast - with the multiple 10Gbe/SATA3 options - and it's damn fast - challenge there for consumer routers - it's probably a bit on the high side, and that's without wireless - with Wireless - there's the problem with drivers/kernel/ARMv8-A, which there aren't many outside of (NDA stuff)

I do see Armada 8040 in the consumer/SMB NAS space on the higher end - the little Armada 3720 at some point might replace the Armada 385/388/XP - it's a stout little processor and a fast bus - and it works with both Topaz and LinkStreet SOHO...

(I'm replying to this thread - at the risk of this post/thread being deleted (@thiggins) - I have a fair amount of experience with the 3720 on a science project - it's a very capable chip)

 

[System Error Message]

looks interesting, i hope its not expensive to get a sample, i'd like to get my hands on the higher end one. Reminds me of the dev boards from qualcomm and nvidia.