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Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop

pine64.org

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Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop

#51

Linus Tech Tips put out a video this week on Floatplane about the Pinebook (not the Pro edition) and it was woefully underpowered. CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference. It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running) and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video fullscreen without noticeable frame drops. The hardware in i…

I own one of the original Pinebooks, and for $99 it is a great little machine. Comparing it to my MacBook Pro... it's terrible. It has some flaws, and it may be underpowered for things like YouTube, it works flawlessly as a small note taker that has an extremely long battery life and a decent screen/keyboard. It's also really nice for having a Linux machine around that most dongles/serial consoles just work with when…

> extremely long battery life

How long? The reviews say around 6 hours; that's not long and definitely not extremely long. My X220 from 2011 has a lot more than that while being cheaper and a lot faster (really a lot; I am often surprised how fast this almost decade old machine is).

Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop

#52
post #38

The thing that I was missing in the last version, and most of why I didn’t buy it, was that the GPIO present on the Pine SOC boards (and Raspberry Pi’s, etc.) were not exposed in any way, shape or form on the last version. I think it would be really neat to have some flavor of internal GPIO (exposed pads on the edge of something are just fine, a low-profile connector with a fanout cable would be great for repair, too…

We used to have GPIO ports in all computers including laptops via the parallel port.

That thing is so big, though, and doesn't really work when laptops are really thin (which, to a certain extent, I really appreciate).

Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop

#54
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware. No one said this was a problem, the commenter was simply stating the comparison. > How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all? The commenter explained that in literally the second part of the sentence: > > It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running) >With which software? Did i…

> It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10. There's a lot more to a system than the CPU. For the Raspberry Pi, someone bothered to port EDK2 and write ACPI tables: https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg And Microsoft themselves were interested in the Pi (fo…

> There's a lot more to a system than the CPU.

I said SoC, not just the CPU, but even there, no, there isn't much difference as you yourself state:

> If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :)

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