02-04-2018, 04:16 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2018, 04:36 PM by Brian Beuken.)
One of my favourite of the clones, mainly becuase it comes with all drivers and fully working pretty much out of the box, it does not take a lot to get this very cheap quad core up and running.
Of course being cheap it does not have much in the way of performance, its ancient Mali400MP2 mean it has much less power than the Raspberry, and it only has an H3 running at 1.2ghz its also a little prone to overheating but not too much.
Its a game little beast, comes with Debian and Ubuntu, I tend to use Debian, and GLMark2-es reports a modest speed of 72, so it is accelerated, its just not fast.
Setting up is pretty much the standard case of installing all the additional libs, locating where the standard libs are, they are not the same as Raspberry, check the generic build demo to see what it does.
And then simply compile and run as usual, it runs about 80% the speed of a Raspberry which is a good excuse to practice some GPU optimization concepts we never covered in the book.
Sadly FriendlyArm seem to have discontinued this very cheap fun board and replaced it with a more expensive M1Plus version with more RAM, eMMC store, Wifi and BT, but at 3 times the price....not sure I can justify the extra cost for the same cpu and gpu.
Of course being cheap it does not have much in the way of performance, its ancient Mali400MP2 mean it has much less power than the Raspberry, and it only has an H3 running at 1.2ghz its also a little prone to overheating but not too much.
Its a game little beast, comes with Debian and Ubuntu, I tend to use Debian, and GLMark2-es reports a modest speed of 72, so it is accelerated, its just not fast.
Setting up is pretty much the standard case of installing all the additional libs, locating where the standard libs are, they are not the same as Raspberry, check the generic build demo to see what it does.
And then simply compile and run as usual, it runs about 80% the speed of a Raspberry which is a good excuse to practice some GPU optimization concepts we never covered in the book.
Sadly FriendlyArm seem to have discontinued this very cheap fun board and replaced it with a more expensive M1Plus version with more RAM, eMMC store, Wifi and BT, but at 3 times the price....not sure I can justify the extra cost for the same cpu and gpu.
Brian Beuken
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's