Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com) on March 1, 2019 11:56 pm wrote:
> Peter E. Fry (pfry.delete@this.tailbone.net) on February 28, 2019 6:31 pm wrote:
> > As for the HiKey 970, four A73 cores and 6GB of RAM looks pretty nice, but the standard CPU heat sink
> > is junk (which may not be a serious issue*) and the $300 price tag is a bit high.
>
> That price tag is ridiculous. For that price you can buy a Ryzen 2200G, a decent motherboard,
> 16GiB of RAM and a power supply... and you get something that actually works quite well.
>
Yes and no. As a devkit it's not at all out of line. You can buy decent AMD gear cheaply because x86 is so heavily commoditized in the desktop space already. Since ARM64 in this space hasn't got those economies of scale yet, this is the price.

Also, there's a wide variety of smartphones on the market with this chip. You could get the Huawei Honor Note 10 with Kirin 970 and 6GB RAM for about the same price as the HiKey 970.

https://www.kimovil.com/en/where-to-buy-huawei-honor-note-10

And then you get a cat 18 LTE modem, suite of cameras and sensors, and large 5000mAh battery all in a sleek package. Install Termux on it and you get a complete Linux software development environment, hassle-free.

AFAIK there's no Ryzen systems anywhere that are compact enough to be handheld and run on a small LiIon battery...