Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Socionext Inc., Linaro and GIGABYTE have jointly built a software development environment that complies with Linaro's 96Boards open hardware specification. Under the collaboration, GIGABYTE manufactures the 96Boards-compliant hardware with Socionext's SC2A11 processor, and Linaro provides support through its 96Boards community. The companies expect the new development environment to help the expansion of ARMĀ®-based software in a broad range of applications including IoT gateway, edge computing and servers. The environment will become available to customers starting December 2017.
The rapid growth of IoT (Internet of Things) has led to an increasing demand for processing large amounts of data at high speed, in each phase, from data collection at gateways to edge computing to large-scale cloud servers in data centers. With these applications, the ARM architecture becomes a promising option for improving energy efficiency and reducing costs. In order to address these requirements, Linaro, GIGABYTE and Socionext have built an environment with a power-efficient processor that enables easy development of highly-versatile software using the ARM-native instruction set.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Sunday October 08 2017, @06:05PM (1 child)
They announce they will have a product without actually saying anything important, the things that might induce a customer to buy. What does this do that other products don't?
We can see it has some interesting bits on the photo of the board, which is more informative than the ad copy. MicroATX form factor and power supply offered in a small form factor MicroATX case has potential. An ARM with four DIMM sockets, PCIe slots and SATA plugs is interesting. But how weird is this new chip, how closed is it, how fast is one chip? 5W dissipation and no connector for a fan on the heatsink imply not very. Combine with the lots of cores and single threaded performance is likely to stink.
Then there the interesting looking subboard connector right beside the debug connector. No clue what is intended for that.
Pretty safe to assume we are talking about a 'developer' system priced out for the high end corporate market, locked with a dread EULA, a supplied set of development tools and no further docs. Not targeted at the hacking end of the market. The only mentions of "open" is a quick reference to an open standard and Linaro's boilerplate at the end.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 09 2017, @02:14AM
Exactly. There is nothing about this chip that says desktop save for the fact that it's on an ATX board. All those cores and what, two channels of memory? Clearly this a chip for web serving or other networking tasks where the majority of the system load is short bursts of I/O and mainly integer operations. Basically anything not working with large data sets. This thing would suck for any type of compute or memory intense operations so no good for gaming, rendering, graphics, HPC, etc.