Water Cooler > General OpenPOWER Discussion

Arctic Tern user manual posted

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MPC7500:
Same here. But for me it's way too expensive for only speeding up the boot process.

Woof:
Yup, it's a big pile of cash, but for my tinkering machine I can kind of justify it to myself...

AdamJoseph:

--- Quote from: MPC7500 on July 29, 2022, 10:01:28 am ---Same here. But for me it's way too expensive for only speeding up the boot process.

--- End quote ---

I agree.  But I think it's better to think of Arctic Tern as a dev board rather than the final "make the boot fast" commercial product.

Although the software/gateware may not currently support it, the Arctic Tern was clearly designed with a lot of other neat features in mind (*).  It's priced with margins appropriate for a low-volume development board.

I can definitely see a future stripped-down bare bones "just speed up the boot process" version consisting of just the AT1MB1, the FSI adapter, and a $10 adapter PCB.  The expensive component on the AT1MB1 is $73 if you buy a whole tray of them.  Note also that DigiKey is sold out of *all variations* of that chip, so Raptor likely needs to cover their entire NRE out of whatever allocation they were able to get from Lattice -- I wouldn't be surprised if this was as small as 100 chips.

Anyways, I ordered one, since I want to use it for development purposes.  I'm totally okay with the pricing for that purpose.  OpenBMC is an nice piece of software, but we shouldn't be forced to use something that is so heavyweight.  I'd like to help with the task of offering a leaner option.

(*) I have some wild speculation on why there are two module slots... especially if they can run from a common clock.

Woof:

--- Quote ---I have some wild speculation on why there are two module slots...
--- End quote ---

Wild speculation is always good! ;D

MPC7500:

--- Quote from: AdamJoseph on July 29, 2022, 01:11:44 pm ---I agree.  But I think it's better to think of Arctic Tern as a dev board rather than the final "make the boot fast" commercial product.

Although the software/gateware may not currently support it, the Arctic Tern was clearly designed with a lot of other neat features in mind (*).  It's priced with margins appropriate for a low-volume development board.

I can definitely see a future stripped-down bare bones "just speed up the boot process" version consisting of just the AT1MB1, the FSI adapter, and a $10 adapter PCB.

--- End quote ---

Absolutely! No blame from my side. A development board is for developers. I'm also hoping for a striped-down version in the future. It was also the right decision to release the DB first.

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