[Arm-netbook] A10 server dreamboard

[krasi gichev]

Maximum number of USB HOSTs (native ones), SATA, 10/100 ( and maybe wifi
module on board but it will eat out one of the USB hosts).
I think that uSD slot is mandatory for flexibility - somebody may feel good
with 2GB SD card, somebody might want to place 1000GB HDD. So they should
be free to decide the size of the "aftermarket" card - 0 .. 64GB, just like
they are free to select 0 to 1000GB HDD.
Having NAND on-board is nice but only in case that it attracts more
clients, than it pushes aways because of several USD more.
If NAND access is faster that this is a real benefit. Reliability is
questionable - having 4 times bigger SD card means lower wearing of the
cells. If Tsvetan can give some reference pricing for NAND chips than we
can compare.
I know that A10 has multiple SD interfaces - does it makes sense to bring
out 2 separate uSD slots (or probably uSD + full size SD)? Rootfs on first
one, home on second one or anything like this?
Power-over-ethernet might be good addition to that local Li-Po battery. It
is not very useful if the server board keeps running after power failure,
but the switch that it is plugged in goes dead. Having battery backup is
good to keep 3G connection alive to report the failure, or to continue
logging of some serial data. Just not so high priority for server use case
scenarios.
12V input will be nice too.
Reading over the replies, I would say the A10 is not the proper chip for
this applications. Freescale, Atheros, Ralink, Marvell, Broadcom do make
chips with dual Gigabit, they have NAT HW acceleration and other HW
offloading. But some of them are limited to 64MB of RAM and probably not
comparable the 1GB of A10.
So I think that Tsvetan should fix some features based on capabilities of
A10 - like single 10/100 Enet, single SATA (1.5Gb/s or 3Gb/s?). Suggestions
like multiple gigabit interfaces, SATA3, mini PCI,  PCI-e and so on are
just day dreaming. If some of this "limitations" are deal breakers for
readers, that this have to be declared.
What about the physical size - if all can tolerate somehow bigger PCB, that
its clear that it can host multiple footprints and Olimex can sell various
assembly variants with common PCB.
About display - does anybody needs HDMI? If not, does it makes sense to
route a VGA header (or something like mele)? KVMs for VGA monitors are
cheap and useful in case of racks with multiple boards.

At the end - how much different will this be from A10-olinuxino with 1G
RAM? :-)



2012/5/29 Enrico <ebutera at users.sourceforge.net>

> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Tsvetan Usunov, OLIMEX LTD
> <usunov at olimex.com> wrote:
> >> that again depends a lot on what sd card. What I am seeing is uSD
> >> cards being cheaper than raw NAND for sizes ~8GB...
> >
> > this is always true as SD cards are sold in millions, while if I want to
> put
> > NAND on board will buy 1K and my price for NAND flash will be x10 if we
> > compare same sizes :-)
>
> The use-case for nand is already questioned, you don't want to put 8GB
> in it! For that size it's better to go with uSD (and let the user the
> responsibility for a good or crap uSD).
>
> Enrico
>
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