The LX2160a has a 50Gbps crypto accelerator and a 100Gbps compression/decompression accelerator built into the network packet processor to help offload some of the processing. The 16-cores are useful for the high speed packet processing in userspace with DPDK.
The core count and network processing is the same, but the number of SERDES lanes is half. This allowed the SOC's die size to be much smaller. You can fit 4 SOMs in the space of a single CEX7 module.
We have a growing lineup of SystemReady ES certified hardware that will make good OSS upgrades. New platforms on our LX2162A based SOM will be especially good for this application.
I very much doubt it. Apple's M1 SOC is not a standards base design and the OS is very specialized to their hardware. As far as I know they don't even support external PCIe GPUs on the platform.
We don't make the SOCs, just implement them. The only other available SOC that is N1 is the Ampere Altra and you will not be able to provide a < $1000 system with that. Also the SOC itself is almost as large as the entire CEX7 module. This system was never meant to out perform the latest CPUs on the market. It is a developer tool to fill a niche and help advance the SystemReady ecosystem. We liked the fit because after faster more desktop ready SOCs are available this doesn't become ewaste, but can easily re-purpose into a micro-server or other network development platform.
The LX2160a can handle up to 130Gbps of network traffic. That is what it is designed for. You also have the benefit that the Quad SFP+ ports can be configured as a network switch completely offloaded from the CPU. That is what this SOC was designed for after all. :)
Typing this right now a HoneyComb running Fedora 34. RX560 gpu, nvme, 32GB of DDR4 3000 XMP memory. Are there rough edges with Aarch64 on the desktop, sure but without platforms like HC this will never change. There are lots of core OSS devs using HC to help solve these problems. Here is a video presented at the last Linaro Connect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tloLT4EPSpo
socketed Arm SOCs are very unlikely because there are so many vendors making them. This works on the x86_64 side because you basically have Intel and AMD and they each have their own manufacturing ecosystem and target sockets. That is why we chose CEX7 since it is a standard that allows the motherboard to be customized to the use case.
No it is not setting records, but we felt that it was capable enough to help crack the existing chicken and egg problem. We could provide a SystemReady Arm platform that could help bridge the divide and provide developers a native Aarch64 platform that wasn't $3000+ HoneyComb has helped bring better Aarch64 support to many OSS projects getting things ready for better SOCs once they become available.
Currently any GPU that supports an in kernel OSS driver will work, so mainly using the amdgpu or nouveau driver. We are working nvidia on some issues regarding using their binary Aarch64 Linux drivers. That is kind of the point of HC, if the platform didn't exist then Nvidia would never be looking at these issues.
Don't forget about our Marvell series of boards :) While HoneyComb is our flagship for SystemsReady ES certification, We will also have our Armada 8040 and CN913x based products that will also be fully supported UEFI + ACPI systems.
Porting is not necessarily the issue. As Linus pointed out earlier in the year, platforms that aren't native to the developer generally have issues that fall through the cracks. I recommend you look up the series of posts that CloudFlare did when reviewing the Qualcomm server. There are many obvious optimizations that are just not done because currently all the ARM hardware is targeted at small embedded applications. I have run into many others since I started running benchmarks on the HoneyComb.
Absolutely. The HoneyComb is targeted as a developer workstation / desktop. The ClearFog CX LX2K is the higher end board aimed at networking and edge compute applications. We are collaborating with most the major distributions making sure we will have the board fully supported as soon as possible.