AMD’s adventure in ARM world seems to be very unlucky. The LeMaker Cello board, based on AMD A1100 SoC, is still not in sale, despite it’s ready to ship almost since 2Q16. Why?
A huge problem about PCIe slot is not still solved, and we don’t know when it will be solved.
LeMaker recently wrote to its customers (Thanks to hyc at S|A forum):
Hi ALL,
After a long time to find out the PCIe problem on Cello, we (AMD, Linaro, LeMaker) still can not find any issue on the hardware connection, so we made a decision that we will begin to re-start the production for Cello. All the other interface including the SATA, Ethernet, LS connector can all work, only the PCIe slot can not work. So you can not use other PCI device now. We are likely to fix this problem through software update.
So here we want to ask if you want to this version Cello with only the PCIe slot not working. We will decide how many we need produce. We will send everyone the heatsink with fan for free as the compensation.
So, it seems that the problem is not about the SoC, but about the Firmware/BIOS. We hope LeMaker and AMD will find the solution to this issue ASAP, because we want to see this SoC at work.