Pine Delays Its Quartz64 Single-Board Computer Range Following Component Scarcity, Price Hike
A massive spike in the cost of the board's gigabit Ethernet PHY means a retool is required — and now Models A and B will launch together.
Pine has offered an update on the status of its upcoming Quartz64 single-board computer, unveiled two months ago — and admits that the launch has been delayed thanks to scarcity of a key component.
Pine, best known for its Pine64 portable devices, confirmed plans to release a Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer two months ago with the announcement of the Quartz64. "Aside from being a standalone SBC," Pine's Lukasz Erecinski wrote at the time, "it will also be used as a development platform for future non-Pro devices. We have been thinking about democratizing development for some time now, and we intend to start the process with the Quartz64."
The Quartz64 is built around the Rockchip RK3566, featuring a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor running at 1.8GHz, an Arm Mali-G52 E22 Bifrost GPU running at 800MHz, a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor offering up to 0.8 TOPS of compute performance, and between 2 and 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM. The first variant to launch was to be the Model A, which includes SATA 6.0, embedded DisplayPort, DSI, CSI, and PCI Express 2.0; this was to be followed by a Model B, which drops the SATA, eDP, and other ports and opts for an M.2 NVMe slot over the generic PCIe slot.
That staggered release plan has now been abandoned, however, and it's thanks to the scarcity of a key component. "During the model-A production we learned that the gigabit Ethernet PHY we intended to use is completely out of stock, with a projected lead time of 12 months," Erecinski explains. "Moreover, the price per unit has increased by 850% (yes, that’s right, that isn’t a typo) making it unviable."
"We obviously have no intention of waiting a year for the PHY to become available again, nor to pay nearly 10 times more for the chipsets, so we will be replacing the original PHY with a different chip. We are currently weighing in on our options and collecting opinions from developers. As a result, the launch of the model-A will be pushed back by a month or more."
That delay now means that the Model A and Model B will launch simultaneously, the former offering extra connectivity and better suitability as a development platform for Pine's other Arm-based products and the latter being closer to the footprint and feature set of the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers.
"This roadmap is, of course, based on our current understanding of available parts and present production circumstances, and therefore subject to change," Erecinski warns. "Next month, when more is known, I’ll make sure to provide a joint model-A and model-B production update."
More information is available in the Pine community update post, along with a look at some other products under development — including a prototype of a LoRa gateway.