[Arm-netbook] The A64-OLinuXino laptop idea

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

I see that Luke's friends/rivals at Olimex are considering the idea of a 
laptop based on their "64-bit" development board:

"A64-OLinuXino OSHW 64-bit ARM DIY Laptop idea update"

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/a64-olinuxino-oshw-64-bit-arm-diy-
laptop-idea-update/

Their blog post about the board:

"We work on A64-OLinuXino the first Open Source Hardware 64-bit development 
board"

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/we-work-on-a64-olinuxino-the-first-
open-source-hardware-64-bit-development-board/

The baffling thing about this "64-bit ARM" stuff, apart from the apparent lack 
of vendor cooperation for Linux kernel development...

"One of the problem is that A64 is quite new and no any Linux-Sunxi support, 
as nobody have seen A64 development boards yet. SO it may pass several months 
until A64-OLinuXino run anything else than Android 5.1"

...is that the principal benefit of bringing "64-bit" to ARM - addressing more 
than 2GB RAM - is absent from this design. Indeed, I've only seen one ARM-
based board - and not even a "64-bit" one [1] - which had 4GB RAM, let alone 
more than that. And I imagine that the 4GB RAM is divided between the cores on 
that Freescale i.MX6 board. (From what I've heard, Freescale is somewhat 
better than Allwinner with regard to support and documentation, contrary to 
claims in comments on the Olimex blog.)

Anyway, I thought this was worth a quick perusal.

Paul

[1] http://solid-run.com/freescale-imx6-family/hummingboard/hummingboard-
specifications/