Hiya
This popped onto my news feed this morning and I thought I would share it here for future reference. It’s the new Lenovo Leez LP710 SBC.
What caught my attention was not just the impressive CPU spec but the fact that it has 8 i2s channels which makes it a bit of a rarity in the SBC world.
Of course I understand that this sort of thing is the last thing on anyone’s mind right now but if you do decide to release a board with a lot more IO this might be the SBC for the Job.
Looks good! We´ll see what the future brings.
Hi guys,
thanks for the tip but we generally try to stay away from SOCs like Rockchip due to their bad Linux kernel support and lack of long-term HW support.
The datasheet you linked cites “8-channels I2S”, which is different than “8 i2s channels” and is pretty much the same we have on the Elk Pi. The Broadcom SOC on the Pi only supports stereo I2S but we used the CPLD to trick it into using 8 channels.
A SOC that we already support that has many I2S channels, but only for companies evaluation at the moment, is the i.MX8M Mini which has 20 I2S serial ports, each one with 8 audio channels available! However, to my knowledge there are no SBCs that expose more than 1/2 at the moment.
Hi @Stefano, do you plan to support Amlogic SOCs?
Support for more high-end boards with more performance and less ports would be great for products (rather than generic jack-of-all-trade boards like RPi3/4). Just to put an example, Oodroid N2 come with an A73+A53 Amlogic and a good DAC, with a decent community behind and constant updates.
If that’s not the case, when will the OS be on github to try to port it?
HI @jgalt91,
The ODROID N2 is a very powerful SBC but not in our near-term plans. For products, you generally want to use something like a system-on-module (SOM), or design your PCB directly around the SOC. There are many variables to take into account, like availability of modules, long-term support, how easy is to get the part in low-mid quantities (1-10k), price, Linux Kernel support…
The Amlogic SOCs are generally found in SBCs, smart TVs, Android devices & so but they are not very common on System on Module (SOM). We chose NXP i.MX7/8 and RPi because they also come in SOM format, easy to source for even small companies and with long-term support. We are working on another ARM SOC that will be ready next year but it is less powerful than the Pi.
Next week we’ll start publishing the core repositories, it will take some days for having everything there. For the Amlogic, the vast majority of the work will be to get Xenomai / IPipe running on it as to my knowledge it is not currently supported.
This is something that you can start straight away now but just a warning, it is not a trivial job… you can look around at Xenomai docs & mailing list but I’d recommend a good, solid Linux kernel knowledge before starting.