Intel-based ARM-SOC hardware alternatives

I once bought the Raspberry Pi 400 hoping that I could run Haiku on it one day,but meanwhile I don’t think that Raspberry devices are a good target for porting anymore.
Their highly proprietary Broadcom hardware gives you a hard time running anything but Linux,for which proprietary firmware blobs exist,on it.
Yeah,FreeBSD can boot,but it’s usefulness is quite limited there and don’t think you’ll ever get working Wifi on that thing,you won’t.
Broadcom Wifi has given free operating system developers headaches for ages on x86 and it’s not any better on ARM.
There are many other manufacturers of similar boards now,which have a similar price and similar form factor,but more open hardware that we could more easily port to.
I think Pine64 with their RockChip-based boards is rather open,but I may be wrong.

Personally,I’ve finally given up on the illusion of using my Raspberry Pi 400 for anything useful and ordered a Pentaform Abacus last week.
It’s basically the same thing,but with an Intel Atom CPU inside it and if nothing goes totally wrong,it should just work out of the box with the x86_64 edition of Haiku.

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The Abacus costs as much as my PineBook Pro! My PBP at least is a laptop with a 1080p screen.

The specs on the site say it runs a rockchip (ARM) CPU, not an atom, so unable to run haiku at present. I guess it runs the ARM version of windows 10? Did they previously have an atom model?

The shop page mentions it only indirectly:

The Abacus offers USB ports for accessories, a slide-on trackpad for ease of use, 4K output for amazing picture quality and it runs on the Intel quad-core X86 64-bit processor ensuring smooth operations with no lagging.

But there’s a pretty detailed review on Techcrunch that reveals that it’s an “Intel Atom x5-Z8350 Cherry TrailQuad-core processor running at 1.44 GHz with a 1.84 GHz Turbo boost available”

It’s a bit strange because on the “Tech Specs” page it says:

Thanks to an ARM RK3588s, a 8-core 64-bit processor, the Abacus Basic can run Windows 10 natively and become a real PC.

I saw that too and it’s really confusing.
I really hope that the shop page and three different reviews that I found are still correct for the latest model,otherwise I’ll have to send it back as I have no need for yet another useless ARM toy…

I also have a quad-core Atom machine. It has Win7 Starter installed on it and it sits under a pile of boxes, unused. It’s equally useless to the RasPi 2 I gave away to somebody as a gift. Of course I think that my Atom system has 32-bit addressing and 3 gigs of RAM and therefore, is an older Atom. I suspect that once Haiku starts implementing GPU support, your Atom-based system will sit under a pile of boxes, unused as well. ARM and Atom machines are no more useful than their corresponding equivalent of the other, except for the instruction set.

Can we please move the non-ARM stuff off of this thread?

Edit: Thank-you.

Keyboard layout is terrible on that Abacus. I always wonder what they thinking when creating such keyboard layouts…

I see considerable difficulties on sustaining your position on this.

Most x86 microarchitectures since williamette are still performant for daily tasks which do not involve 3D rendering. There are reports of people running light versions of linux and browsers on them, such as gnome web. gnome web runs even in tualatin, which has not the SSE2 instructions.

In regards of low power architectures, most people who know the mobile atom CPUs of the era mentioned by Nipos know Cherry Trail was and is still comparatively as fast or faster than a raspberry, uses as much or less power, and has a powerful gpu for the time and for smartphone and mobile chips. Providing a driver would not be dramatically harder than providing a driver for other intel GPU microarchitectures. There are also new fanless atom designs which are fit into industrial boxes with 32gb of ram, 8 or more cores, running below 15w, although they are more of a niche expensive device.

I use a pentium 4 524 with a i945G on haiku, which is an ancient graphics chip. In terms of GPU rendering, that is a thing. But, isnt haiku mostly focused on software rendering? How fast is it? Gnome Web runs far, far faster, in my pentium 4 machine, than in linux, no matter which distro (im not interested in LFS so i`m not able to test that)

I mean, i do understand why RISC enthusiasts like their chips. Easier development in some kinds of applied software or computer engineering scenarios, more registers, better to write low level stuff such as compilers, cheap, commodity hardware. But how much junkyard hardware is available that can run haiku (even on 512mb RAM !!!) on 32-bit x86 CPUs? And how good are in fact old x86 microarchitectures, especially the low power ones such as in this post, or any kind of them? how widespread are development tools and framework maturity on x86? aren`t assembly otimizations are still ubiquotous on x86 compared to other instruction sets? i see my P4 doing ultra-light office work about as fast as my ryzen laptop on haiku, what if netburst due to being so unorthodox has a deal with that? What if someone one day wants to port Haiku to old itanium/VLIW machines (god forbid the insurmontable and suffering tasks involved) or SPARC to try and see what would happen, should we also consider that exccentric and disencourage asking for help on development or support?

I think asking to move things is a little (with all due respect) very biased and detrimental to x86 users and developers in any sense, development, support, or information for new users.

The posts in this thread originally appeared in a thread about ARM development status and was off-topic for that thread. It is now in its own thread now so my request to have the Atom related posts moved has been answered already. Is that the position you were referring to, @Eduardo1 ?