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Pine64 Pinebook


hojnikb

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28 minutes ago, Xalius said:

have a look at this

Well, have a look at this ;)

 

Pinebooks.jpg

 

The problem is... just looking at pictures IMO isn't enough if it's about this device category. At least I have to use keyboard and touchpad for some time and have a look at the screen from various angles and in specific situations (if the panel is glossy then driving in a train at a sunny day is the best use case to decide whether to keep this laptop or throw it in the bin ;) )

 

Apart from that this would be a nice journey through time (my 14" PowerBook's display 15 years ago had already more pixels than the Pinebooks now) and for the stuff I could do with this laptop (no real work) I already have an ARM based solution since 5 years now ;) 

 

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Just now, hojnikb said:

Did you do any thermal testing with pinebook ? Once would wonder how it performs given how it's enclosed in a plastic case.

Enclosing it in plastic is not a problem if you transfer the heat to a large enough surface that contacts the outside environment - for example the keyboard base or a big chunk of aluminium foil glued to the back of the case can be a good heatsink in this situation.

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28 minutes ago, hojnikb said:

hopefully pine isn't dumb enough to not do this

 

If you look through the above links it's pretty easy to spot the thermal pad on AXP803 PMIC:

Pinebook_prototype_open.jpg

 

I guess a similar thermal pad will be between A64 and the bottom case (maybe with another metal plate for stability). We'll see soon since TL Lim contacted me in the meantime and will send out samples to a few Armbian devs too. Since the enclosure can be opened easily it's up to tinkerers to improve heat dissipation as shown here for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhtgUHZYjZ8

 

 

BTW: According to Olimex' Tsvetan Usinov they chose with their A64 designs to let the PCB do the job (claiming heat dissipation through the BGA into the PCB would be more efficient compared to adding heatsink stuff to the SoC's top). At least their laptop assembly instructions don't mention any heatsink at all: https://www.olimex.com/Products/DIY Laptop/resources/TERES-I.pdf

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48 minutes ago, hojnikb said:

pine just slapped a sticker to their prototype

 

Flooding threads with BS again and again. Why? Are you able to click on links and compare specs? Do you spot the difference between 1GB DDR3L and 2GB LPDDR3? Dimensions of an enclosure? 1.3MP vs. 0.3MP?

 

TL Lim is in constant contact with linux-sunxi guys and @Xaliusfor example managed just recently to convince him to reroute PCB stuff that makes debugging more easy.

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2 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

 

Flooding threads with BS again and again. Why? Are you able to click on links and compare specs? Do you spot the difference between 1GB DDR3L and 2GB LPDDR3? Dimensions of an enclosure? 1.3MP vs. 0.3MP?

 

TL Lim is in constant contact with linux-sunxi guys and @Xaliusfor example managed just recently to convince him to reroute PCB stuff that makes debugging more easy.

 

That stuff can be replaced by the ODM. It's not like these specs are final. If you're ordering a lot of units, you can easily request to swap those at will.

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Afaik the plastic cases are not unique (but customized) and used a lot by cheap ARM and x86 based laptop designs since making own injection molds for volume production would blow up the price considerably. The cases come in different configurations more like a contruction kit and the components like LCD, keyboard and camera are up to you to select/integrate. There were some iterations of the protoypes regarding the cases too, the first ones were a bit wobbly and got replaced by another model... As for the PCB that is a Pine specific design based on one of the Allwinner reference designs that basically all the A64 devices use, like the Olimex Teres, Azpen Hybrx, etc.... 

 

My prototype PCB came with a metal shield cover plus thermalpads for the AXP and A64 to connect those to the cover. I did not do extensive testing, but while building a kernel using all cores I didnt manage to get over 80C so far and no throttling below 1Ghz. Not sure if the production units also will have the metal cover on the PCB...

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26 minutes ago, Xalius said:

Not sure if the production units also will have the metal cover on the PCB...

 

Well, at least it seems easy enough to fix this stuff yourself and to improve heat dissipation if needed. Though I'm really bad at hardware I already started to have a look whether there's a 1920x1080 14" IPS panel available to replace HB140WX1-501. The RGB-to-eDP converter is said to support up to 2560x1600 so it should work if panel dimensions are nearly identical?

 

 

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1 minute ago, tkaiser said:

 

Well, at least it seems easy enough to fix this stuff yourself and to improve heat dissipation if needed. Though I'm really bad at hardware I already started to have a look whether there's a 1920x1080 14" IPS panel available to replace HB140WX1-501. The RGB-to-eDP converter is said to support up to 2560x1600 so it should work if panel dimensions are nearly identical?

 

 

 

Maybe ask Tl about that, I think he was looking into different display options and maybe knows which fit in the case...

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16 hours ago, Xalius said:

Maybe ask Tl about that, I think he was looking into different display options

 

He answered that a 1080p IPS panel is possible without hardware changes and that they plan to build a prototype with such a panel later (prototype due to performance concerns I do understand in the meantime -- see below -- since 1920x1080 is twice the pixel count compared to current resolution). So let's wait and see and consider 1366x768 as reasonable max resolution for now.

 

BTW: When reading through technical details of last year's large iPad Pro I was somewhat impressed by the memory throughput of the SoC used. Apple's A9X got a 128 bit memory bus and is able to achieve 51.2 GB/s with LPDDR4 memory. My first thought was: 'Are they crazy? This is just a boring tablet!' ... until I realized that's necessary to feed the 12 GPU cores with data to get good performance displaying 5.6M pixels. That was the moment I understood correlation of display resolution, memory bandwidth and for some use cases count/performance of GPU cores.

 

 

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GPU performance heavily depends on memory performance, because GPUs need crazy amount of bandwidth to do their work efficiently. There is a good reason why fast gddr/hbm is used in desktop gpus.

Btw; any rough  ETA on pinebook public release ? 

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