Howard Chu (hyc.delete@this.symas.com) on March 2, 2019 9:05 am wrote:
> 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.

That's the point of this whole discussion though, isn't it? Why should you buy something that's slower and more expensive instead of the incumbent? What's the motivation?

> 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...

No, there are none. But then again who would use that for anything that's not what it's been designed for (i.e. a phone)? We're talking about a device where you can't even replace the kernel because most of the on-board functionality relies on vendor blobs.