Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra is a development board powered by Allwinner R40 quad core processor with a native SATA interface, as well as Gigabit Ethernet. If you are a developer, and would not mind getting a free sample, Allwinner is giving away boards to people uploading a 1 to 2 minutes video to YouTube.
The rules are detailed below:
Dear Developers of the World,
Allwinner Technology would like to thank you for your outstanding contribution to our open source community and invite you to join our video-shooting program. Please cover the following topics in your video:
- Who are you and why did you choose Allwinner in the first place?
- What did you do with your Allwinner powered development board?
- What are your expectations for Allwinner’s latest open source platform, the R40?
It needs to be:
- Shot in a video resolution of 720p or above
- 1-2mins in length
- Submitted between Apr 20th 2017 and May 1st, 2017
Please upload your video to Youtube and then send the link as well as your contact phone number, post code and address to [email protected] so that we can send you our latest R40 development board as a thank you gift.
The videos will be used both to get feedback, and in some cases they may be used in promotion materials. The video should preferably be in English, but I assume if you shoot it in your native language with subtitles in English, it’s also OK.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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The R40 is a Cortex A7 (32-bit)…
For the price of the Banana Pi M2 Ultra, why would you not just buy the ESPRESSObin? $49 from Amazon, releasing in May.
You’ll get a newer processor (ARMv8), SATA, USB3, Mini PCI-e and more Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. As a Marvell design there should also be excellent Linux support (you cannot say the same for Allwinner).
I’m not a Marvell shill, just wondering why anyone would spend the money on this outdated Allwinner board when you can get the ESPRESSObin?
Still, $50 board for 2 minute video…
Thanks for the hint! I will try to upload a video this evening. Normally the board would be too expensive imho for ARM, but for free it might fit my criteria.
@Mum
Where do I get the ESPRESSObin for free (or where do I have to upload a funny video to get one for free)?
@tkaiser
> Still, $50 board for 2 minute video…
I think I addressed this 😉
Do you want a free BPi M2 Ultra so Armbian can fix up BPi/Allwinner’s crap?
I don’t think you want to waste your time with it. BPi/Allwinner clearly don’t care, they’re just handing these out so other people can fix their shit. Much cheaper to give away a dozen of these boards than pay a kernel developer.
I’m still happy to make a video if you want to have an extra one… shipping to Munich will be cheap 🙂
I wonder why my comments to this website usually disappear…
not very motivating, maybe best to came back next year !
Anyway I just said that “Mum” for sure will get a *banana* from Allwinner, but probably not the Pi one he/she expects…
My video will be:
while true; do echo “mainline kernel!!!”; done
Can I post a video of my Orange Pi, Turing a Led on and a Led off, will that count?
@Theguyuk
The video must have three parts:
1. Presentation: “I’m theguyuk”
2. What did you do: “I blinked a LED”
3. Expectations for R40: “Blinking two LEDs”
That should qualify 🙂
@Mum I’m intrigued why one would want something from Marvell. Seriously. The Plug units from Globalscale and Marvell never QUITE fulfilled their promises they made and they were harder than hell to obtain save with semi-crippled PogoPlug units. Marvell’s ARM offerings have been…heh…entertaining in the power/performance domain, where they consume more power than a Sitara or OMAP3/4 for only three fourths the performance. Some things about this thing you **ARE** shilling here: 1) Dual core. For many instruction mixes, they’re going to perform similarly…unfortunately. 2) The price you’re quoting? It’s for the base RAM system. 512MB vs. 2GB. Hm… Upshots… Read more »
Guess I need to finish up my little project with the A80 board I have and video it. >:-D
Free is free, to be honest and snark in regards to Allwinner and BPI in the thread, it makes for a board I didn’t have to buy for putzing with.
@JotaMG
X-D
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
Ha ha ha,:) 🙂
Nobody of Import : if you’re trying to make a router or mini-NAS is that it’s got hardware features for PCIe devices for wireless, etc. expansion that the Allwinner based solution has. Huh? So Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi and there’s exactly no difference between this crappy 1T1R 2.4GHz AP6212 onboard thingie on all those Bananas and a cheap dual-band/triple-antenna AR9380 mPCIe card (called ‘AirPort Extreme’ on ebay to be combined with the usual patch to unlock regulatory restrictions / 5GHz AP mode in ath9 driver)? Less than 5 Mbits/sec are the same as +100 Mbits/sec? AP crashing when more than 4-5… Read more »
@Nobody of Import > 1) Dual core. For many instruction mixes, they’re going to perform similarly…unfortunately. How is 2 Cortex A53 cores (ARMv8) is worse than 4 Cortex A7 (ARMv7) cores? Sure, it’s fewer cores, but the A53 benchmarks much higher than the A7: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8718/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4-exynos-review/4 > 2) The price you’re quoting? It’s for the base RAM system. 512MB vs. 2GB. Hm… The base model ESPRESSObin ships with 1GB of RAM, not 512MB? I only see the 512MB model available from Kickstarter, and there it is $39: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espressobin-board?ref=nav_search So yes, it does depend on your use case. For anyone who actually… Read more »
” ‘SATA’ on R40 is as crappy as it was with A20 already ”
Tkaiser is another strong candidate for *bananas* from AW… rsrs
More seriously: where from in the R40 that bandwidth bottleneck comes?
@tkaiser Heh. I misstated myself. Allwinner has it’s own set of features and functions and the ESPRESSObin has it’s own as well. For some networking functions, the ESPRESSObin is ahead by leaps and bounds over the Allwinner/BPI board. For some things, though, that role flip-flops. With PCIe capabilities on the ESPRESSObin you can add (magic word there) whatever WiFi you opt to do that supports AP mode in the Linux world. On board WiFi for the Allwinner equates to IoT devices and similar lower-end consumer things like internet Radio tuners, etc. You don’t NEED more than 1×1 performance for most… Read more »
JotaMG : where from in the R40 that bandwidth bottleneck comes? Neither know nor care. I would believe Allwinner added a SATA IP block to A10 and A20 later since back at that time SoC vendors tried to sell ‘one size fits it all SoCs’. For whatever reasons performance (especially sequential writes) isn’t stellar, Allwinner simply re-used that SATA IP block in R40 now and trusts in clueless people still thinking this SATA implementation would be worth a look. After spending quite some time on NAS topics the last weeks I’m not that convinced any more: forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/3953-preview-generate-omv-images-for-sbc-with-armbian/ Some A20 boards… Read more »
There’s a reason I periodically grouse about people doing “device comparisons” and then trash-talking something because it’s got a “crappy” this or that, including the “design of the RaspberryPI’s” with that “crappy USB”. As an observation, AGAIN, if you can’t make your actual application (By that being unless you’re doing traffic generation, iperf3 and the like *ISN’T* your application) saturate the interface, be it SATA, Ethernet, or WiFi, at PEAK loads, you aren’t doing any more than checkboxing and you aren’t buying or describing ANYTHING of what you think you are. Can your application do what needs to be done… Read more »
@JotaMG
X-D
@tkaiser
Connected SATA disk and battery? Hope that’s with an SSD instead of spinning rust. 😀
The latter is…questionable of value…in the context you gave… >;-D
Again… Free is just that…Free…
If they hand me one, I’ll take them up on it and do a proper evaluation and provide the feedback to the whole world.
My question on the SATA performance on the A20/R40- how is it coupled to the CPU on the SoC? I strongly suspect the cores in question aren’t the problem- but rather how they coupled it to the SoC. If it’s internally USB…well…
@Nobody of Import Thanks for the update, understood your point. But to be honest: I really don’t give a sh*t about anyone’s claims AKA marketing BS and think I know what to expect from ESPRESSOBin based on experiences with Clearfog (though Solid-Run’s support is really great and I never dealt with Marvell directly — but some things might change over time?). Regarding ‘stable’: please just have a look into M2U forum on forum.banana-pi.org. So many threads about stability problems and freezes and (as usual) zero response from famous manufacturer. I don’t think it can get worse than that. Wrt feature… Read more »
Nobody of Import : Connected SATA disk and battery? Hope that’s with an SSD instead of spinning rust. 2.5″ HDDs work fine with Olimex A10/A20 boards this way (even too good: you tell the customer to simply power cycle the mini server and you’d have to wait 20 hours on average with Olimex largest battery) but of course not with Bananas since the latter don’t care about such details. So the ability to use battery on Bananas while having the ‘full feature set’ in mind is questionable (since it’s either SATA or battery). And no, SATA in A20/R40 is not… Read more »
Many people highlighted about Allwinner Main line kernel issue .. So far this chip is available only to the customers in China , if they bring it to digikey /mouser /element14 or other distributors with a fair pricing (like NXP i.MX / TI AM335 series )then they could attract many industrial users , in the long run that will help to standardize the kernel ..
The R40 is 40nm instead of 55 nm for A20. ( hardly a Hugh speed jump )
Allwinner aim it at intelligent digital signage and intelligent development boards ( their words ). INMO they aim to make the money from
intelligent digital signage. So all the SoC has to do is show adverts from storage, or based on camera assessment of people passing, a advert targeted at, the potential customer.
Nobody of Import : @Mum I’m intrigued why one would want something from Marvell. Seriously. People buy Marvell when they want : – strong I/O performance. – multiple ethernet – USB3 – real SATA – PCIe – and all of this in mainline People don’t by Marvell when they want : – something very cheap – video output – many high frequency cores In short, Marvell is for entry-level servers where others are for tablets, toys and set-top-boxes. All my network-oriented devices use Marvell chips. I picked a Marvell-based NAS (dual-core at 1.866 GHz, SATA, USB3 and true gigabit). The… Read more »
https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/4089-chosen_kernel-vs-resulting-kernel-package-deb-name-mismatch/ 🙂
So the tl;dr of this is:
– Allwinner are a joke when it comes to mainline support and good SATA performance
– only @Nobody of Import is going to make the video because the rest of us won’t touch this
Looking forward to follow up comment/video from @Nobdy of Import saying how great this BPi M2 Ultra is and we’re all stupid for buying the ESPRESSObin instead. 😀
Somehow my comment didn’t get published the other day: @Nobody of Import Marvell is actually contracting Free Electrons for kernel upstreaming and is also contributing to U-Boot. Allwinner hasn’t to my knowledge. So instead of focusing on the freebie aspect or arguing about individual boards, I suggest we all embrace the opportunity that Allwinner is asking for our “experiences” and has named a contact. So let’s politely tell them in videos and/or emails how bad our experiences were initially and that things only got better due to the awesome linux-sunxi community of volunteers and that we all wish Allwinner would… Read more »
i have nothing good to say about allwinner at all. a bout the first allwinner hdmi dongle A31 it never worked wright nothing allwinner worked wright.
” – only @Nobody of Import is going to make the video because the rest of us won’t touch this ”
Ah, I think my BPi M2U is already on its way, because of my good behaviour… 😉
Hello,
Do you think they will select a few of the applications or give away the devboards to anyone?
@Olek
Based on the text of their email, I understand they will give a board to anybody who uploads a video to YouTube with answers to the three questions asked.
Did anyone get the board already?
@manuel
Well, i have asked per Email, and it seems that my board is on its way. Hopefully it is useable^^
@manuel
Already curious in which thread you’ll share your experiences over there: http://forum.banana-pi.org/c/Banana-pi-BPI-M2-Ultra
Will you choose the ‘Is my M2-U defective?’ thread? Or ‘Frequent freeze-ups of M2U’? Or will you already be happy since only affected by ‘Blinking screen with HDMI connection’? 😛
@tkaiser
Haha, yeah we will see. Actually i had similar experiences with my OrangePi One, e.g. no video (bad power source), booting only from one specific image (also bad power source), freeze-ups (mainline kernel on archlinux arm). And i still got not rid of occasional reboot (at high(er) loads) in armbian. Ordered some heatsinks, just in case, but the cpu does not seem hot just after a reboot..
@manuel
Hawe you got some tracking number?
I have just got mine BPI 🙂