[fedora-arm] rhombus tech eoma-68 a10 cpu card *early* orders

[luke.leighton]

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2013-April/007158.html

i thought people on here might appreciate knowing that very early
"test" / "engineering" samples are to be made available for those
brave people who'd like access to them.  fedora 18 is already
available for allwinner a10 devices so despite this being early, it's
been designed to be similar enough to the pre-existing products out
there that android booted up on HDMI and USB-OTG first time; getting
any other OS up and running, although you will need to do it yourself,
will be a very straightforward task.

*please note the list of conditions at the above link*.  if this is
not for you, you'll need to wait for the next phase, which will
involve a large enough batch order to warrant payment of $7k to $15k
worth of FCC/CE certification fees, aside from anything else.  so the
decision is up to you.

for those people who may not be familiar with the EOMA-68 standard and
the rhombus tech project, the goals are several:

* invite free software communities to participate every step of the
way in the production of mass-volume hardware
* help terminate distributor, retailer and factory GPL violations by
pre-vetting CPU Cards and SoC vendors, with a very simple rule: no
source, no sales.
* properly stabilise the hell-on-earth situation in the linux kernel
wrt ARM products [*1] which device tree was *supposed* to solve [and
hasn't, and won't - ever]

so this A10 CPU Card is the very *first* CPU Card - the plan is to
continue to upgrade CPU Cards over the next 10 years *without*
requiring that a single product that's EOMA-68 compliant needs a
redesign *EVER*.  i.e. in 10 years time if you buy a flying squirrel
now [*2] or any other product that comes after it then in theeeory you
should be able to get an arm64 8nm 32-core ARM Cortex 1234  EOMA-68
CPU Card with 64gbyte of RAM running at 4ghz using only 3 watts of
power and it should *just work*.  ok, maybe not 8nm, maybe not 4ghz
but you get the idea :)

ok, enough blurb.  if you're interested and already have a preorder,
please modify it to "1stbatch".  if you don't already have one and
would like to help support this project then please create an order
at:
    http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/orders/

l.

links:

[*1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/9/617
[*2] appx 35 mins in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHvboGQ8d6I
[*] http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/04/12/1833222/rhombus-tech-2nd-revision-a10-eoma68-card-working-samples
[*] http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/hacking_the_mele_a1000/
[*] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/AllwinerA10
[*] https://github.com/jwrdegoede/sunxi-fedora-scripts