From what I’ve seen of these discussions, adequate cooling is a major issue (a heatsink alone is frequently insufficient). If the laptop comes equipped with a good fan, or mechanical cooling utilizes the magnesium alloy case (as the Pine64 people suggest doing with adding an NVMe SSD), it should be a non-issue. I guess only time will tell.
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It wasn’t until I installed Manjaro on my Pinebook that it was finally able to play youtube videos smoothly at 480p. Before that, it was a terrible slideshow. Proper GPU acceleration is still not supported (not really sure why), but hoping they add that in the near future.
IMO, that’s going to be a necessity for the Pinebook Pro. While $200 (USD) is not a ton of money, I would still be disappointed to find it still doesn’t have this capability.
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I’m gonna be honest. I’ve got an XPS15 that dissipates probably 25-30w of heat through the case alone. This thing is literally on fire though. I really don’t think active airflow will be needed for a rockpro.
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Progress is moving quickly to get ARM Mali (both old and new) GPU drivers in to the Linux graphics stack, with code merges already in the [unreleased] Mesa 19.1 (OpenGL) and proposed for the [unreleased] Linux kernel 5.2 (kernel direct render manager ‘DRM’ driver); more updates over at phoronix about the open source ARM Mali GPU driver project Panfrost.
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That’s an interesting option if you want a laptop form-factor, but I would go with the new Nvidia Jetson Nano myself. It’s $99 for basically a tegra X1 ARM SoC computer with half the CUDA cores, and comes with 4GB RAM.
That said, ARM in datacenters is basically dead. ARM on the edge, in self-driving cars, robotics, etc, is very much alive and thriving.
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Hi all,
Luke from PINE64 here. Not really here to argue, but when I see comments such as this …
The GPU on these chips is absolutely horrid and therefore, you’ll be hard pressed to use it for much more than a super-minimal linux workstation. Youtube videos might be too much for it.
… I cannot but scratch my head and only offer up a short clip of the absolutely horrid GPU (and VPU), on the same hardware that will be in the Pinebook Pro, running: 1080p Youtube, 3D WebGL applications, 4K playback and 3D applications … and with ease I may add.
As a side-note, both the BSP and mainline kernels are very solid for this SOC, as just about any third-party with a degree of insight will be able to confirm. And for those of you whom are not fans of blobs … panfrost has been demoed on this very board a few months back.
N.B. video of a very early OS image
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Guess that depends on if you want the laptop form factor or not.
I would get both if I could. But that’s if I COULD.
Yes exactly. I expect the Nvidia devkit to be quite a bit faster, particularly on the GPU side, but that doesn’t mean much if you need a laptop.
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Hi, Welcome!
I stand happily corrected! I’m fairly impressed with that performance. It seems I was fed misinformation, and I’m happy to see that I was wrong.
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Yes, I assume the Pinebook Pro has a Mali-T864 GPU, which while not even remotely comparable to the Maxwell in that Nvidia devkit for 3D graphics and CUDA, is perfectly capable of playing video and desktop stuff. As a relatively modern mobile GPU it has dedicated hardware devoted to rendering and encoding video.
Hmm, I think that Amazon, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Marvell/Cavium, Ampere, GIGABYTE, ARM themselves, and a slew of others would disagree…
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They’re all trying to make it happen, but it ain’t happening. Don’t listen to me, listen to Linus.
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183486
Many thanks 
I’ll gladly answer any questions you or other forum members may have. I am currently swamped with work, so may be slow to respond, but rest assured I’ll be checking in regularly.
Also, thanks to the OP for posting about the PB Pro !
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Thanks! Here’s a couple Qs for when you’ve got a minute:
I didn’t notice any info on expected battery capacity for the PB Pro. Do you have any numbers on this or is it still too early days?
Additionally, what sort of keyboard/trackpad is planned for this device? One of the main shortcomings I’ve heard about the original Pinebook was the lackluster keyboard and trackpad. I’m concerned that cutting corners on the input devices will make an otherwise excellent product fall short.
Linus makes a good point that getting more ARM machines in the hands of developers (partly what the Pinebook Pro is all about) will accelerate ARM adoption in the datacenter. But the fact that a 145,000 core ARM supercomputer sits installed at Sandia National Laboratories, and that you can provision a1 ARM servers from Amazon today, indicate that it is happening.
The battery will be 10,000 mha. With brightness set to ~60% and under [edit] low-to-moderate [/edit] load we expect it to provide some solid 6-7hrs of battery life.
The trackpad is getting a major upgrade from the regular Pinebook - for one its no longer an emulated mouse, its an actual trackpad. If all goes well, I’ll have the new trackpad in a week or two and I’ll offer my honest opinions.
As for the keyboard. Yes, we know, the discontinued 14" keyboard was bad. We’re also aware that the layout of the 11.6" model isn’t ideal - that said, I personally feel that the keyboard (especially for the price) is solid. For the Pro we’re making a significant improvement to the keyboard - and probably will go with a standard, high quality, ISO keyboard (so all you Europeans will be quite happy).
[edit 2] posted pictures of the guts here (bottom of the post), it will most likely be the same battery
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Supercomputers are a different market and largely irrelevant to what we’re talking about here.
Amazon tries lots of products, some work, some don’t. We’ll have to see if they still offer ARM VMs in, say, 2 years.
This is good news! I’m looking forward to hearing your review.
Good news!
You’re getting me hyped!
Ah, that’s what I get for not reading the whole page. It’s odd looking at such a small form factor for a laptop and not seeing it filled to the brim. 
So will the NVMe adapter support SATA SSD as well as NVMe?
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So will the NVMe adapter support SATA SSD as well as NVMe?
The adapter will fit a m.2 NVMe SSD. So no, no SATA SSDs in the PB Pro. But I think that 128GB of eMMC + option for expanding via SD and NVMe, that’s probably enough for most users.
That said… if you’re really willing to tinker … the adapter port is just regular PCIe x4 - so you could potentially hack in a SATA controller board in there, and glue a bare SSD PCB down. The one problem I see with this is powering the a SATA PCB in such a hacky setup