 And here we have a very special 64-bit development board. Yes, this is the first 96 boards product. This is an initiative that Lanaro has started. Barrow has been working on bringing up the board with Android. We're also bringing up Debian. And the goal of 96 boards is to provide low-cost hardware that's compatible across different SOCs. So the idea is to create a single community, both for software developers and for hardware module makers that will work across multiple SOCs in the ARM ecosystem. So right here you've been using this board for the last couple weeks? Or how long? Yes, I got one about two weeks ago. So everything was on a little tight schedule to get everything ready to demo and ready to release as soon as it was made public. But in the end, it's not working perfectly yet. There's still some work going on on accelerated graphics drivers which should hopefully be finished later this week, maybe next week. But overall it's working. We've shown both Android and Debian running. And the performance is actually quite good. We can compile a kernel on it in under an hour. So what's it called? So you've been busy this week working on this one and you're going to show it also tomorrow, right? The demo day. Yes. Tomorrow we are going to have two demos from the Android side. One is Android running on new devices including the high keyboard. And one is support for different tool chains ranging from the version of GCC that's shipped with Android over GCC5 to Clang. Cool. So looking forward to that tomorrow. We'll let you continue working on that. Yeah. Cool. See you later. Thank you. See you tomorrow. So what's the idea with the 96 boards? So the goal of 96 boards is to have an open hardware specification that manufacturers can build boards to. We have one for consumer, mobile and embedded devices and one for enterprise devices for the server market and networking market. And this is the consumer one. It's a small form factor board. Very low profile. So it's suitable for putting into embedded products like robots or UAVs, intelligent displays. But it's also an excellent software development platform. Multiple USBs, HDMI, SD card. This is the high silicon 8 core A53. And it has flash memory and Wi-Fi Bluetooth. And then it has these expansion connectors. This is a low speed expansion connector and carrying GPIOs, SPI, I2C. And then this is a high speed connector carrying two CSI interfaces and a DSI interface. So is it possible to convert this into something like SATA? No, so this is DSI and CSI which are the high speed display and high speed camera interfaces. So if the SOC supports it, you can have a 1080p or even a 4K display on there and also one or more camera interfaces. For something like SATA and high speed networking you'd probably use the enterprise version of the board which is a little bit bigger and gives you interfaces to things like gigabit ethernet and external SATA drives. So this is extremely compact. This is kind of like a credit card. Credit card size, yes. Exactly credit card size. Yes it is. And it's the first time that a low cost board has been created using ARM V8 until this board was available this week. To get an ARM V8 development board a 64-bit ARM board would have cost you thousands of dollars. You can buy one of these and you can order one of these today for $129 and we hope later in the year that will even drop as the volume increases. And the great thing about this is it's not just going to be one board it's going to be multiple boards from multiple manufacturers using different SOCs with different features that will all be compatible. So if you're a peripheral vendor you will be able to build a peripheral that plugs on top of any of these boards. So we're really excited by this. Does that mean the connectors will be the same place? Connects will be in the same place, same pin out so that if you design, for example, an intelligent display to plug onto this board that intelligent display can be reused on any 96 boards product. Nice. So it'll just be exactly the same place for the screws? Exactly the same place for the screw holes for the main connectors and then vendors can put on additional functionality if they like but they must have these components in these spaces. We do allow Type C connectors which is the exciting new USB connector that you can turn either way up. That will make the board even more low profile and then you can plug a module on top. Very thin. What goes on by default on the back? So on the back there's just any additional components that are needed. This is typically power supply components. There's a USB hub on the back here. This is an EMMC flash memory and there are minimum requirements but it's up to vendors how much memory they put on, for example. So the idea here is you provide a minimum spec and why do you do that? We do that so that we can support software and testing. So we want to be able to support a full Linux distribution on these boards. We want to be able to support Android and potentially other operating systems. And so this has been at Linaro you're working a bunch of engineers, right? And they've been, I guess, one of the main guys in the world asking for more affordable 64-bit development boards and this is something that's really kind of like a big deal right now. It is a big deal. I mean, if you look at the success of things like Raspberry Pi they've bought the ability for anybody to learn and use Linux and create products in the maker community and they've had a huge impact on enabling and bringing software developers into the ARM and the computing ecosystem. This is the same thing but it's for a much higher-end device. This is, on this board you have 10,000 drystone MIPS of performance. You have eight cores running at over a gigahertz. This is octa-core high-silicon. It's an octa-core ARM A53 64-bit processor with Mali 450 GPU. And there will be other vendors who will come out with different chips using the same form factor and this enables us to put these boards into test farms. It enables us to enable third parties to use these as the basis of embedded products. It's pretty cool for the lava guys because they can design kind of like racks that just fit them by default. Absolutely. So you can imagine a raise of these boards from different vendors and we can test them. And I also think for education, for higher education, universities will start to be able to have affordable access to start doing a lot of research work on multi-core power management security. So we think this is going to have a big impact on getting 64-bit ARM into the software developers in the community's hands. And you're going to host a forum, community forum on the website, 96boards.org is where you'll be able to get all the information about these boards. As more vendors create these boards you'll be able to compare them, you'll be able to get software downloads for them and there are forums for the community to ask questions, come up with ideas and we'll also be hosting software from the community. And 96boards is like 64 plus 32, right? That's right. So this is for ARM V8 boards and clearly 64-bit. But we also think that people are going to be putting ARM V7 chips onto these boards so that's 32-bit. So we call that 96. And we expect, over the lifetime of this platform which we expect to be years, we expect at least 100 boards to be in the program. At least 96. At least 96, yes. And this is board 1 of 96. So you've been working on this spec on this project for a little bit and you announced something last to connect that you were going to do something? So we started this project about six months ago and the reason we did it is because at Leonardo we have hundreds of engineers and the cost of giving them access to developer boards is very high, it's thousands of dollars per board. So we've been wanting low-cost hardware to do our work and we think that the result of this is going to help vendors get their SOCs to market faster because it will be much easier for software developers to bring up software. What's happening on SOCs is they're getting more and more complex and as a result there's a longer period, longer and longer period between the silicon being available and when the software is ready. So we hope that this is going to accelerate that by providing an easy to design low-cost board for developers which can be used for both initial bring up and longer term for embedded products and I can see these boards being used in actual intelligent displays in the displays you have on aircraft where they're all running linux just plug one of these onto the back of the display it's really really thin the whole board is less than 10mm in thickness So the idea is not just credit card size is also the thickness You want a standard for that So we want it to be so the standard for the mezzanine modules or boards is that they're only going to be 7mm separation and what that enables is you to build for example an interface to sensors for the internet of things you can imagine having for example an Arduino compatible board on top of this and still have a really slim footprint and that would give you the ability to build powerful linux computer with an array of IoT sensors for example And that's also why it's also 32 because maybe there'll be some boards as cheap as Raspberry Pi's and there'll be like a whole range from very low to mid range We expect there to be a whole range from low end and then for the higher end SOCs in the ARM ecosystem that are being used for networking and server and so on And the bigger one is still in development The spec is in development The initial board is in development We are still looking for input as to what should be on that board and we get that from a number of our members who are interested in working on boards and we're also asking key members of the community what they're looking for So that was actually the process we used to come up with the specification We talked with a number of the Leonardo members who are the RMSOC vendors and we talked to a number of potential community users of these boards And we came up with something that's a little bit I think it's different It has a different set of features It has wireless built in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as opposed to Ethernet If you want Ethernet you can go USB to Ethernet through a dongle And it is very much more friendly for small footprint products like robots and UAVs because it's so small and slim Robots is a big deal I think I'm really looking forward to robot innovation and lots of these do-it-yourself maker robots use boards Do you need a powerful processor? You can imagine having a stereoscopic camera which you need for robots for vision systems and this specification supports two full CSI camera interfaces as well as a display interface on this high-speed connector Is there a spec for the weight? Because this can go in a quadcopter This is drone We're talking drones right here But we're also talking setup boxes like a TV box This could be a bunch of TV boxes too If you think about a Chromecast it's a very small device So you can build TV digital video functionality into this footprint There is a way of extending in the specification The specification is open You can go and read it and build a board to it And there is an extended version if you need more space for more functionality So an extended version? How does that work? We expect most of these boards to be this credit card size footprint But there will be some applications for example where vendors want to put a lot more memory on or where they've got an SoC that has Ethernet outputs or they want to have an automotive canvas or something So they can actually extend this board out this way From a high-speed board? The power supply connector comes out here These connectors stay where they are so that if you have an expansion module it will work anyway But it does give you some freedom to have some higher components here in this section of the board If you look at the specification you'll see what I mean Is it also a chance that somebody wants to do one of the small ones with SATA and maybe put it on the back side? So SATA here if you wanted to or you could do the extended board and put multiple SATAs here So it's already possible to use those to do SATA with an adapter? No, so a SATA interface you'd have to have typically on your SoC and then you'd have a connector a flat mounting connector sideways mounting for the SATA interface But this SoC is high-silicon, this is kind of like a mobile SoC Yeah, this SoC is used in a top-range Huawei mobile phone today So it's the Kirin 620 8-core A53 and it's used in one of Huawei's latest mobile phones So this is a mobile phone optimized SoC but there could be some SoCs more optimized for stuff like that could be using a SATA like a SATA box or something else I mean, so most of the mobile SoCs obviously you don't typically have a big disk drive on your mobile phone, but you do have flash memory and so you can put multiple flash memory chips onto this footprint If you actually want an external disk drive then most likely you're going to be using the enterprise version of the board and on the enterprise version we expect server-class ARM chips we expect high-speed networks and we expect external storage like eSATA drives They could be sat on the back also, no? Just like the port right here Most mobile SoCs don't have a SATA port So that depends which If the SoC has a SATA port then yes you can put it onto one of these connectors So since you launched started working on this the last six months what's the response? So there's a bunch of people already The response is great This is the first board that is actually being launched At least two other companies have publicly said they're working on boards which is Action Semi out of China and Marvell and we expect other manufacturers to also announce boards to this specification over the coming few months So are you pretty confident there will be at least you were saying a certain number that you think is going to happen this year Yeah, I mean when we started this program I thought that we would maybe have five products this year in the first year I already think there's going to be more than ten in 2015 so we're very excited and we're delighted by the response and anybody is free to design one of these boards we have a in order to participate in the community certification you do need to become part of the 96 boards community but if you want to go and do a board without it being branded 96 boards you can go and do that it is an open specification, there are no license fees, no royalties And there's something about the UART and those little connectors there right here, right? Some of these are this one is also kind of like mobile spec No, so this connectors here you have, as I said this high speed connector with camera and display this is the low speed connector that carries UARTs GPIOs SPI buses I2C buses and an audio bus this is actually 1.8 volt IO which is typical for low power processors today and then for the maker community which typically uses 3.3 or 5 volt on 0.1 inch centers we expect to see third parties come up with expansion mezzanine boards that turn this into 3.3 and 5 volt maker friendly IO potentially Arduino compatibility, things like Raspberry Pi camera interfaces all on mezzanine boards that will work on any 96 boards product But can the board maker decide to do that maker directly there, that maker voltage directly to the board or the spec has to be 1.8 This connector has to be 1.8 and the reason for that is if you're making an embedded product and you want to for example put an LCD display module on what you don't want to do is level you don't want the additional cost of level shifting to 3.3 volts here and then a level shifting back to 1.8 volts on the low power module so the way the spec is defined the voltage on these signals is 1.8 volts and then you'd level shift on the mezzanine module and that module it can be cheap yes I mean I would expect you will see mezzanine modules for perhaps 20 dollars that will do the conversions and provide you a UART and possibly provides some sensors and the power connector is really small right compact one, yeah the power connector can keep the board very slim it's a 1.7mm inside pin you can get standard off the shelf power supplies for this or you can get small adapters you can also power the board through the expansion connector so if you have a module that has power or a battery module for example the battery can provide power through this connector to the board and the USB on the go so you have a USB on the go port here for Android this is used for things like fast boot and ADB and then you have two type A or type C host ports this is the HDMI and this is a micro SD can this be USB 3 and can this be a MHL yes totally possible the spec gives you a choice of displays, MHL HDMI either a micro connector or this is a full size HDMI connector and then you can use type C USB 3.0 3.1 connectors if your SOC supports it or normal USB 3 connector too yes yes and you do have to keep within the height spec the other really nice thing about the type C connectors is you'll notice there's this power supply and we've been asked why do you not use the micro USB for power the reason is that with these high power SOCs high performance SOCs you can actually exceed the available power from a micro USB port and that can result in brownouts so you do have to power the board from this external connector or from this one but when we get to type C USBs they can actually carry a lot more current and these are the new USBs that are a bit like Apple's lightning connector you can put them in either way up and you can carry a lot of power so you can actually power the board just from a USB port it could also be powered by MHL, right? yes if you've got enough power no, the board cannot so the power sources to the board can be either a type C USB or this power connector here or through this expansion bus something I haven't seen before at Lunar Connect is crazy packed rooms with people pushing the door to try to get in there's been some interesting atmosphere around these sessions that you had with this, right? yeah, there's been an incredible response to this and people have commented both positively and the fact that they would like to see different things on the board one thing I guarantee about the open source community is you ask a hundred engineers what they would put into a specification and you'll get a hundred different answers so one of the things we did as we designed this is we talked to the SOC vendors we talked to some of the end users and came up with a kind of consolidated view of what we should do with this to make it attractive to a number of different communities and our goal was to be attractive to software developers to be attractive to the maker community and also to provide something that could be used as the basis of an embedded product alright, so that's really cool and this is very interesting I've done lots of delugment board videos I don't know if I can say but it's kind of messy and fragmented and many different things happening in different ways and the support is kind of limited I guess but the idea is to get a big wave of support and a big wave of innovation the idea with this is to help us get new SOCs to market faster and have a single community around multiple vendors boards and I think that will make the market bigger for everybody, it will be the one place to come for information about this format of 32 and 64 bit SOCs from a number of different manufacturers maybe every SOC is going to make sure that they have a board like this every time they have a new SOC that would be great and it would be a great way for the hardware makers to compare the performance between different manufacturers figure out what's good for them Yes and it's not just about the number of cores or the number of gigahertz every ARM SOC that comes to market these days has different IP different differentiation and different value and for different applications different processes work better so being able to compare boards in a similar footprint will I think really help users and it's been talking about and working on 64 bit nearly since the beginning Certainly the last two years have been non-stop 64 bit even more than two years a little bit but this is it, now the hardware is coming and now the development boards are affordable $129 So this is it, now we are at the next stage of the 64 bit ARM Linux development looking forward to the results Yep, we are very excited