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by hthtegr 2243 days ago
This is so frustrating to hear.

I have a bin full of ARM single board computers, and while the hardware on all of them is pretty much up to the task, the software support from all the vendors has been terrible. I'm in the process of switching to Nvidia hoping it would be the exception.

If anyone from Nvidia is reading this, please do everything you can to convince the bosses to allocate the resources required to support a linux machine properly. It takes much more than it seems.

These devices are designed to be in production for a long time, so heavy investments now on the software support are going to give value for a long time. Rather than dragging the feet and slowly getting it right over time and devaluing the product in the process.

Fingers crossed!!

2 comments

For what it's worth I've been pretty happy with Freescale. Not sure how they are now after NXP bought them, but the documentation of that hardware was the best I had seen. This translated into an easier time for me as a software guy, because it was easy to look things up.

Additionally it seemed like there's a decent ecosystem around it of board suppliers, which then translates into pretty good software support.

But again, not sure if that's still the case. I chose them for a project in 2015 and have not regretted it since - but have been able to use the exact same IC since then for other projects so I'm not sure if the experience would be different if starting from scratch today.

The dev box system they are selling looks like it might be the best non-x86 workstation in a while, where you really get $700 of computer for $700 as opposed to the bad old days with PA-RISC, Sun, etc.

Also I can see something close to that being a competitor to the XSX and PS5. NVIDIA made the Shield and that led to a design win with the Nintendo switch -- wouldn't it be nice to play Nintendo games in VR?