Pine64

Pine Store Limited, known by its trade name Pine64 (styled as PINE64), is a Hong Kong-based organization that designs, manufactures, and sells single-board computers, notebook computers, a smartwatch, and smartphones. Its name was inspired by the mathematical constants pi and e with a reference to 64-bit computing power. Pine64 initially operated as Pine Microsystems Inc. (Fremont, California), founded by TL Lim, the inventor of the PopBox and Popcorn Hour series of media players sold under the Syabas and Cloud Media brands. In 2015, Pine Microsystems offered its first product, the Pine A64, a single-board computer designed to compete with the popular Raspberry Pi in both power and price. The A64 was first funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding drive in December 2015 which raised over US$1.7 million. The Kickstarter project was overshadowed by delays and shipping problems. The original Kickstarter page referred to Pine64 Inc. based in Delaware, but all devices for the Kickstarter campaign were manufactured and sold by Pine Microsystems Inc. based in Fremont, California. In January 2020, Pine Microsystems Inc. was dissolved while Pine Store Limited was incorporated on December 5, 2019, in Hong Kong. As of late 2020, the standard form contract of pine64.com binds all orders to the laws of Malaysia, while the products are shipped from warehouses in Shenzhen, China and Hong Kong. After the initial Kickstarter orders for the Pine A64 single-board computers, the company went on to make more devices. The original Pine A64 boards released in 2016 are powered by the Allwinner A64 system-on-chip. It features a 1.2 GHz Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53 64-Bit Processor, an ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics processor unit, one HDMI 1.4a port, one MicroSD slot, two USB 2.0 ports and a 100 Megabit Ethernet port. The A64 board has only 512 megabytes of RAM, the 1 GB and 2 GB versions are labeled "Pine A64+". While the 512 MB model only works with Arch Linux and Debian GNU/Linux distributions, such as Armbian or DietPi, the A64+ with more memory can also run other operating systems including Android, Remix OS, Windows 10, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu.