ARM v8 (64-bit) developer boxes

Looks like things are moving along in the world of 64-bit ARM, systems aimed at early adopting developers are now around. For instance APM have their X-C1 Development Kit Plus which has 8 x 2.4GHz ARMv8 cores, 16GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 1x10gigE, 3x1gigE for ~US$2,500 (or a steep discount if you qualify as a developer). Oh, and it ships with Linux by default of course.

Found via a blog post by Steve McIntyre about bringing up Debian Jessie on ARMv8 (it’ll be a release architecture for it) which has the interesting titbit that (before ARM had their Juno developer boxes):

Then Chen Baozi and the folks running the Tianhe-2 supercomputer project in Guangzhou, China contacted us to offer access to some arm64 hardware

So it looks like (I presume) NUDT are paying it some attention & building/acquiring their own ARMv8 systems.