Beaglebone Black

[Dirk Broer]

I honestly don't know -though it appears to be so, there are not that much ARM clients around! And there were even less in the past...
BTW: The stats are not up-to-date either, when my Beaglebone is out of work I'll move to Boinc for Android, the official -and later released- client.

Which proves impossible as the official client reports 'no device' when I try to install it.

[Dirk Broer]

So smooth as the Raspberry can be brought to function in BOINC, so hard it was to hammer the bone in business.
It started with my discovery that running BOINC on an ARMv7 architecture CPU under Linux is no piece of cake. Most projects do NOT have an application, you have to compile them yourself. This I circumvented by first installing Android 4.4.4 and then installing Native BOINC.

I made a host group in BAM! called 'ARM Cortex-A8 on Android' and when starting Native BOINC first I selected BAM! as account manager.
This made all default applications come in. Lesson learned: do not make too many projects default within BAM! You might end up getting more than you want...

What is in the group?

• Beaglebone Black, Rev. C, running Android 4.4.4 on a 3.18.5 kernel
• CPU : A Texas Instruments ARMv7-A compatible processor ARM Cortex-A8, rev 2 (v7l) aka Sitara AM3358BZCZ100
• Features : swp, half, thumb, fastmult, VFP, edsp, ThumbEE, NEON, VFPv3, tls

My Beaglebone Black works standard on 1000 MHz and has an even prettier Lego casing than my Raspberry. IMG_0428.jpgIt is the grey-black, 2nd to the left (click to enlarge).

Speed in MHz	OS	Floating Point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU	Integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
1000	Beagle Debian Wheezy	184	2047
1000	Android 4.4.4	277	1607
1000	Beagle Debian Jessie	173	2173

It is stronger than the Raspberry B+ on integer MIPS performance, but a little bit behind in the floating point MIPS.
How does that translate into real-life performance?

Project	Avg. running time in hours	Avg. credit	Green light?	Orange light?	Red light?
Albert@Home	38	123	Yes	-	-
Asteroids@Home	tbd, first WU seems lost	tbd	Yes	-	-
Collatz@Home	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
Einstein@Home	44	63	Yes	-	-
Enigma@Home	3.1	45	Yes	-	-
GPUGrid	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
Moo! Wrapper	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
OProject@Home	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
PrimeGrid	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
QCN (Quake Catcher Network)	tbd	tbd	Yes*	-	-
Radioactive@Home	tbd	tbd	-	-	No*
Ralph@Home	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
Rosetta@Home	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
Seti@Home	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd	tbd
Seti@Home Beta	tbd	tbd	Yes	-	-
The SkyNet POGS	125	361	Yes	-	-
World Community Grid	11.6 (FAAH) 4.2 (OET)	-	Yes	-	-
WUProp	6	14	Yes	-	-
Yoyo@Home	1.7	10.31	Yes	-	-
] Legenda	tbd=To be determined *=Would need a sensor	- = no data/not applicable	Green light= Works out-of-the-box	Orange light= Needs some fiddling	Red light= Refuses to work

Soon to be updated too.

[Nflight]

Thanks for all your hard work on these showcasing the structure and ability of getting these all to work on multiple OS's & multiple projects. This must be a chore but you seem to appreciate the effort too.

[Dirk Broer]

Yesterday I powered up my Beaglebone Black using an undocumented feature.
As the number of SBCs I own is now greater than the number of ports (4) on my 1st HDMI hub I bought a 2nd -5-port- HDMI hub and devided the SBCs over the two hubs.
As the Beaglebone Black is painfully lacking in the USB-port department, I connected a powered USB 2.0 hub to the Bone to be able to use both mouse and keyboard.
I did so before I had connected the power. So the only ports in use were the micro HDMI (going to my monitor) and the USB host (going to the powered USB hub).
The USB client, which I normally use for powering-up the board, was still unconnected.

To my surprise I got video -Beagle Debian- and my surprise was even bigger when the video disappeared when I applied power, only coming back when I disconnected the USB client.
The board has more surprises, such as refusing to flash the eMMC -at least in the official way...

Though the BeagleBone Black is getting a bit long in the teeth, there are various efforts to prolong its useful life.
Among the better efforts is the SanCloud BeagleBone Enhanced

This has

• 1 GB RAM, as compared to the 512 MB of the BeagleBone Black, the BeagleBone Industrial (a.k.a. BeagleBone Red) or SeeedStudio's BeagleBone Green
• 1 mini-USB 2.0 client port and 4 USB 2.0 Ports, as compared to the 1 mini-USB 2.0 client port plus one USB 2.0 host port of the original BBB/BBR and the 1 micro-USB 2.0 client port plus 1 USB 2.0 host port of the BeagleBone Green.
• Barometer, Accelerometer, Gyro and Temperature sensors (optional)

...but still the anemic single-core 1000 MHz AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8, instead of a quad-core A15 or A17. Even a dual- or quad-core Cortex-A9 or A7 would have been better.

[Dirk Broer]

The latest BeagleBone Black now has Bluetooth and WiFi, but still that infernal ARM Cortex-A8:

[Dirk Broer]

The latest BeagleBone Black now has Bluetooth and WiFi, but still that infernal ARM Cortex-A8

They've heard me, there in Texas:

BeagleBone-AI preliminary specifications:

SoC: TI AM5729 dual core Cortex-A15 processor featuring 4 PRUs, Dual core C66x DSP, and 4 EVEs
System Memory: 1GB RAM
Storage: 16GB on-board eMMC flash with high-speed interface
Networking: Gigabit Ethernet and high-speed WiFi
USB: 1x USB type-C for power and superspeed dual-role controller, 1x USB type-A host
Expansion: BeagleBone Black (BBB) compatible headers
Dimensions: 86.4 x 53.4 mm (compatible with BBB)

[NeoGen]

Victory! 3 years later they finally did it!

[Dirk Broer]

Victory! 3 years later they finally did it!

And it is more than just a dual-core Cortex-A15, it has two dual core Cortex-M4's too, plus two FPUs (C66x), and a respectable GPU.
You may have to compile a special boinc-client, and special boinc apps too...

[NeoGen]

I did a quick search on those C66x FPUs, are they talking about the Texas Instruments C66x DSPs from 2011? - http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/sprt577b/sprt577b.pdf
If they are they seem to have some pretty interesting specs, but like you I also bet at least project apps would have to recompile their code to be able to use them.

[Dirk Broer]

It looks like the BeagleBone AI gets its AI from the two Dual-core ARM Cortex-M4's plus the two dual-core C66x DSPs.
Problem is getting those extra CPUs getting recognised and to work. CPU info for the BeagleBone AI only shows the dual-core Cortex-A15:

$ lscpu
Architecture:          armv7l
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                2
On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    2
Socket(s):             1
Model:                 2
Model name:            ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
CPU max MHz:           1500.0000
CPU min MHz:           1000.0000
BogoMIPS:              12.29
Flags:                 half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor		: 0
model name		: ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
BogoMIPS		: 12.29
Features		: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture	: 7
CPU variant		: 0x2
CPU part		: 0xc0f
CPU revision		: 2

processor		: 1
model name		: ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
BogoMIPS		: 12.29
Features		: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture	: 7
CPU variant		: 0x2
CPU part		: 0xc0f
CPU revision		: 2

Hardware		: Generic DRA74X (Flattened Device Tree)
Revision		: 0000
Serial			: 0901700a7b180b22

ARM itself just released a new Cortex-M, the Cortex-M55, which they claim to be the most AI-capable Cortex-M processor and that delivers up to 5x DSP performance.
Its capabilities can be enhanced by coupling it to their Ethos-U55 NPU
-which can also be coupled to the Cortex-M33, M4 -like in the BeagleBone AI- and M7.


This might be useful for e.g. the Wildlife@Home sub-poject of Citizen Science Grid
-provided they have the energy to wake themselves up and write a new application.