>Marvell Armada 3700 (1.2 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A53) >integrated Topaz networking switch >512MB, 1GB, and 2GB DDR3 options >2x Gigabit Ethernet LAN >1x Gigabit Ethernet WAN >1x SATA interface >1x USB 3.0 >1x USB 2.0 >1x mini-PCIe for Wireless >2x row of GPIO headers >suitable for NAS and home router workloads
How do you feel about this? It costs $49 including shipping.
Adrian Ross
what do you wanna do with it?
John Foster
Host an imageboard
Blake Harris
How is this better than an orange pi plus 2, or an odroid c2?
Charles Torres
that will do it probably.
Aiden Russell
More memory 3 Ethernet ports 12V power for 3.5-inch hard drives on board mini-PCI-e slot
Jordan Rivera
Both have 2GB ram too though, but the onboard mpcie and sata is sweet
Luke Sanders
Can it do live packet sniffing?
Aaron Jenkins
Can this run Plex server? It's about the same price as a RaspPi, but it has SATA for an HDD.
Chase Roberts
>57331231 In their kickstarter promovideo they talk about media servers, including the use of Plex.
Blake Cox
Thanks.
Justin Williams
>Marvell
Alexander Williams
>Marvell
lol
Tyler Evans
Does it have a non-free bios??
Wyatt Allen
Probably.
Very few ARM SBCs have open bootloaders.
Even RPi has locked bootloader.
Connor White
Depends on how well supported the chipset is, the firmware, etc. The raspberry pi 1 may stuck compared to the banana pi, but they have ok support, and the banana pi has awful firmware support. The beaglebone, OTOH, has amazing support.
Julian James
The raspi is insane about booting. Literally, it uses the GPU to boot. There's no possible way of booting it without their blessing & closed source firmware.
Jose Gonzalez
Looks pretty good
Jose Wood
i see we have some nvidia users in here lol
Joseph Ross
So basically it's overpriced 3x Pine64 with 512MB (15$) RAM (+ 1 Sata - 2 CPU - 1G RAM + 4$ = Marvell ESPRESSOBin with 1GB)?
Elijah Hughes
There is a massive premium for SATA and Gigabit Ethernet.
See pricing for Banana Pi-M1 or Cubieboard 3.
They both have underpowered Cortex-A7 processors, but command $40+ even on AliExpress.
Jeremiah Butler
Pine A64+ has Gigabit Ethernet so 2 Pine A64+ or 3 + 8$... Sata of course serious + for me but not totally for such board really need pci-e/m.2. Also it's 5x-8x C.H.E.A.P. or 9 RPI zero for home automation/IoT...
Christopher Bell
Great for pfSense
Nicholas Smith
>no quad-core >2016
Aiden Johnson
wheres the LED gaming lights?
Connor Parker
It has GPIO headers.
You can add as many LEDs as you like and flash them however you want.
Adrian Lewis
>pfSense >ARM
Pick one
Although it its great for a firewall.
Brandon Lee
What would someone use three ethernet ports for? I understand two... one for incoming server traffic and another for dedicated remote etc... but why three?
Nicholas Gonzalez
A DMZ or guest network if they were using it as a router
Zachary Adams
Can I install a lightweight linux district and DE and use it as a regular computer?
James Parker
FreeBSD is support ARM64(Aarch64)
John Perez
>ethernet
dumped
what is this 1995?
Parker Brooks
Have two networks with a different level of access. Or have two ISPs (more common than you would think).
>It costs $49 including shipping. >Kickstarter Too bad it won't deliver, then.
Dominic Howard
Actually... >For networking applications it acts like an ethernet switch with 2 LAN and 1 WAN. So it's actually only two controllers, and a 2 port switch on one of those. So apart from connecting two devices without using an external switch, there's no point.
Joseph Smith
>why three
Because it's literally just the Armada 3700 home router dev board/reference design.
The SOC has two 2.5gbe ports, one goes directly to WAN (using a 1gbe PHY most likely) and the other is split into the two 1gbe LAN ports by a seperate switch chip to demo one of the SGMII ports running in 2.5gbe mode.
Matthew Gray
Not true.
BCM2835/6/7/8 has no eFuses for locking the bootloader, or any sig verification. The boot ROM just boots off the VPU running a proprietary ThreadX RTOS blob with a mailbox interface, because it's a VC4 with an ARM bolted on as an afterthought.
Broadcom even recently documented the VPU, not to mention the reverse engineering efforts, including a toolchain, and the in-progress open source firmware with an engineer from Broadcom working on it.
Logan Smith
This.
+ How does it compare to the Raspberry Pi3 ?
Jason Rodriguez
It's not 'open' if the only toolchain available is barely functional and cobbled together from patents and guesswork.
That's like saying the PS3 is an open system. Obviously, patently false.
Robert Martin
Media acceleration is questionable.
Christopher Wright
I didn't say open: I said not locked (which the PS3 and its isolated SPU, symmetric keys and failed ECDSA system very much is). No ARM SoC meets my criteria for open, I'm afraid.
ARM is a troubled world sometimes, particularly with the out of tree kernel patch sets needed for many SoCs.
Besides this is a thread about Marvell. I'm a reverse-engineer: I fucking know Marvell, not to mention MediaTek - not exactly paragons of transparency themselves. Nor are Broadcom, which is why its surprising to see them opening anything at all.
Andrew Foster
add a AC1200/1750 adaptor and that'd make a neat little router.
Noah Rivera
The premium might be worth it for the pcie connector. I don't know of any other commonly available boards with that. (and if there are more, please share!)