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Pinebook Pro Update: The $199 Linux Laptop is Almost Ready to Go

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 08 2019, @05:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the does-it-come-in-a-pine-box? dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

After unveiling plans to launch a $199 Linux laptop with a Rockchip RK3399 processor earlier this year, the folks at Pine64 have been hard at work designing the hardware and software for the upcoming Pinebook Pro.

Now the team has posted a YouTube video showing off the latest prototype, and demonstrating that it has improved hardware, and support for 4K video playback (something the company's original Pinebook couldn't handle).

Pine64 still has some kinks to work out — audio isn't working on the current motherboard, and there are problems with charging, suspend and resume. But it looks like the Pinebook Pro could be ready to ship within months.

Source: https://liliputing.com/2019/05/pinebook-pro-update-the-199-linux-laptop-is-almost-ready-to-go.html

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 08 2019, @08:20AM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday May 08 2019, @08:20AM (#840685) Journal

    https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/22/14691396/google-chromebook-arm-laptop-op1-processor-apptop [theverge.com]

    It's considerably better than previous ARM SoCs that were used in Chromebooks. So past bad experiences with ARM laptops may not apply here.

    I wonder how well the 2-cluster design is handled. Here's a comment by one of the Pine devs:

    https://www.pine64.org/2019/05/06/may-2019-news/ [pine64.org]

    I think that in real-world use – a mix of browsing the web, watching youtube, listening to spotify, playing some game/emulators, the unit sitting idle for some-time, etc., – with brightness set to 50% (btw, the screen is plenty bright) and the governor set to on-demand, you’re probably looking at solid 6-7hrs. The current PCB has some issues, and software probably needs some more tweaking, so its a rough but educated estimate.

    Remember, if you want to really preserve power, then you can switch off the big cores and drop the brightness to 25% (still OK for indoor use); that could even result in 9hrs (or so) of run-time I imagine.
    Please take the above with a grain of salt until I test a closer-to complete unit.

    I doubt I would switch off the Cortex-A72 cores just to get an extra 2 hours of battery life. Although maybe they should switch off automatically at 15% battery.

    Core clusters are probably set to get a lot more attention in the near future now that Intel is toying around with big/small cores [anandtech.com]. I think that even high-end desktops could benefit from something like that (e.g. 1-4 small cores used primarily when the system is idling).

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