[HN Gopher] Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board
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Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 150 points
Date : 2021-12-01 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| volfied wrote:
| I am hoping someone can educate me. I do enjoy Jeff's articles
| and videos, but I fail to see what these could be used for. I
| concede that this is entirely due to my ignorance.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think one thing that would be interesting would be a fully
| native build environment and full native development tools for
| the Raspberry Pi.
|
| Building Ubuntu OS images from scratch on a Raspberry Pi server
| equivalent machine would be very interesting.
|
| For the non-embedded firmware engineer it is a-trivial to wrap
| your head around initially w.r.t. cross compiling Linux distros
| using ARM compilers running on an x86 host.
| mataug wrote:
| There are a lot of industrial and commercial applications. My
| interest though is in running a low power cluster at home for
| testing random applications that I build.
|
| For example I'm writing an app for hosting documentation for
| household items and integrating it with a label printer. It
| would be great if I could host this and many other applications
| locally on a K8s cluster instead of stringing together a bunch
| of raspberry pis with a network switch, or hosting it on a
| cloud service
| donkeyd wrote:
| > It would be great if I could host this and many other
| applications locally on a K8s cluster instead of stringing
| together a bunch of raspberry pis with a network switch, or
| hosting it on a cloud service.
|
| Pardon my ignorance, but why couldn't you run this on a NUC
| or a NAS? Do you need HA for testing random apps? Or is it
| just that this is more fun and a learning experience?
| mataug wrote:
| Yes a NUC or NAS could do the job as well, so my interest
| is more of a fun learning experience.
| cameron_b wrote:
| My interest in this space is in the opportunity to test
| assumptions when scaling wide. Those of us without
| University compute access or Cloud budgets ( like
| neighborhood STEM classes ) can plunk down for a desktop
| learning environment that can run k8s or slurm and you can
| learn / teach MPI programming patterns with hands-on, and
| minimal risk.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I think most of these "cluster pi" things are really just
| because some people don't want to have a cluster of VMs but a
| "real" cluster instead.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| "Can I do it with a Pi?" is very similar to "Can I run Doom on
| it?" Most of the projects exist just to see how far the
| capabilities of a tiny computer can be stretched. However,
| someone may realized that their five-figure project could be
| done much cheaply with a Pi and HAT.
| [deleted]
| geerlingguy wrote:
| A few of the most pertinent applications would be running an
| application at a live event, where you might run off battery /
| solar / small generator, and you don't have much of a power
| budget, but would still want to replicate a small K3s cluster
| setup locally for simplicity's sake. (I realize the irony of
| including Kubernetes in a line about simplicity...).
|
| But in general, it would be more focused on a lower budget /
| lower power option for exploring small cluster ideas. Much more
| fun to test things out or learn on a platform that costs $600
| all-in and doesn't suck down a few hundred watts of power all
| day, than to buy four used PCs that use more power, take up a
| little more space, and cost maybe a little less, all-in.
|
| It is a niche product, but nowhere near as niche as the
| Seaberry board I showed last week :)
| cameron_b wrote:
| Cheers for this, I really enjoy the collaboration to play
| against the "big toys" Patrick has.
|
| Maybe I missed it, but are there I2C or GPIO broken out for
| each module? I remember being really excited to the V1 Turing
| board in regard to the mashup potential with cluster-type
| things and the "Physical Computing" sensor / IO, but I didn't
| see anyone try to solder in those pins.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Each board has a UART header exposed, and through the MCU
| it can be rebooted / flashed over the network. Full GPIO is
| only exposed in a 40 pin header on node 1, though.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Might be interesting combined with VMware's ARM hypervisor
| "fling" here https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition to
| make a toy "datacenter in a box", using the third node as a
| NAS datastore.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm going to sheepishly wonder out loud if too much sponsored
| content will be to Jeff's channel's long-term detriment. I
| would be excited too to have a popular channel growing and
| being offered these cool toys but I have also seen blow-back
| of late.
|
| Perhaps it's just par for the course on HN though. Or perhaps
| we're missing the more down-in-the-kernel hobbyist Jeff.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| Why do I enjoy these raspberry pi articles so much?
| intrasight wrote:
| For me it's because of the very idea of a $35 computer that's
| as powerful as a million dollar computer was when I was at
| university.
| walrus01 wrote:
| unfortunately due to the way they're mounted, it won't fit in a
| 1U chassis...
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Jeff Geerling is one of the best tech Youtube channels out there
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Red Shirt Jeff Geerling though? Still one of the best, let's be
| real.
| aejnsn wrote:
| Except the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules for this are now 4-5x
| their original price. I have a new Turing Pi in box that I refuse
| to drop $500 on the CM3 boards for. I'd rather just buy a surplus
| lot of desktop computers to build a toy cluster. I should
| probably just sell the Turing Pi. Useless, never even got to boot
| it. My Raspberry Pi 4 cluster works just fine though
| lbhdc wrote:
| I have a turing pi v1 too, and havent been able to play with it
| because of this.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The modules are the same price... just out of stock in
| perpetuity.
|
| A few months ago I'd find some here and there at Micro Center,
| but they've been out of stock for months.
|
| If you're patient you can get them at list price, though--I
| ordered the four 8GB Lite modules I used in the video over the
| past year, from two different suppliers.
| sussexby wrote:
| I have a similar-ish setup in the form of the ClusterHAT on a Pi
| 4 with 4x Pi Zero W connected to it. It gives me 4 individual Pi
| Zero machines (each with wireless) connected over the USB-
| Ethernet gadget interface to the Pi 4 which you can then bridge
| the interfaces as you need.
|
| My purpose was to have a SFF of individual wireless clients that
| I could control over SSH to do some network testing. Added
| benefit, the whole thing can be powered from a single PSU into
| the Pi 4.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I wonder if that will take the Zero 2W without excessive power
| drain.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Other than raspberry pi, does anyone know of an even lower
| powered board which can run a very simply web server (only needs
| to return a single html file)? I have an idea for a fun hobby
| project where I want to connect my echo bike (for cardio) to the
| board which charges it everyday and returns an html with how much
| I charged it and daily cardio stats. Basically, if I don't do
| cardio, then the board won't be charged enough to keep the site
| up, so that gives me incentive to do it regularly.
| ubergesundheit wrote:
| This can be achieved with the original ESP 8266
| Uehreka wrote:
| Every time something like this gets posted on HN, my brain does
| the same thing: "Neat! I wonder what Jeff Geerling will think of
| --Oh! This _is_ him!"
|
| Keep up the good work, and looking forward to hearing about if
| you're able to get those Coral AI TPUs working!
| ianai wrote:
| Jeff thank you so much for your continued work with the Pi!! I've
| learned so much from your book and YouTube content.
| intrasight wrote:
| Neat. How would this be used in edge infrastructure? And more
| broadly, what exactly is "edge infrastructure"?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Cynically "edge" is the way to say "not everything actually
| makes sense to run in the cloud but we can't go back on the
| marketing push that on prem infrastructure is a fossil so we'll
| call it edge". Or at least that's what it's meant at the last
| couple of companies I've worked for/with that were convinced
| they were going to "move everything to the cloud" despite the
| cries that the goal should be "move most things to the cloud"
| at the start. The marketing headline that tends to go with it
| is "edge is where the users are" but really it's come to mean
| any place you have non cloud infrastructure closer to the user
| than the internet (i.e. likely every place you have non cloud
| infrastructure).
|
| Less cynically some try to use it as a differentiator for
| running cloud services dispersed as close to users as possible
| for performance reasons vs running cloud services in
| centralized locations to reap the benefits of hyper scaling.
| Leaving "on premise infrastructure" to mean "legacy
| infrastructure" instead of allowing the term to follow any
| changes in the way that on premise infrastructure is run over
| time.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Cynically "edge" is the way to say "not everything actually
| makes sense to run in the cloud but we can't go back on the
| marketing push that on prem infrastructure is a fossil so
| we'll call it edge".
|
| "Edge" is (mostly) also cloud, but with stronger guarantees
| of ntopological proximity to users than general-purpose cloud
| regions provide. On-prem is, well, on-prem, not generally
| referred to as "edge".
| intrasight wrote:
| I'd never considered "on premise" to be a type of "edge
| infrastructure" before, but technically I guess it is. But
| I'll stick to calling it "on premise" - because it's not "on
| premise" in order to have cloud services close to the user.
| It just hasn't yet migrated to the cloud.
|
| So keeping with the "cloud but close to user", where would
| this or any similar device play a role in edge
| infrastructure? Don't cloud/edge providers use the same
| hardware for both? Nobody is going to use this in production,
| and I don't see a role for testing either.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's a shitty choice for Edge device for sure but it's
| still an edge device. Just like it's a shitty Linux
| computer but still a computer. "Edge" is about where not
| what just like whether something is a "cloud" doesn't
| change based on if a Pi is used or not.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I love reading about all of these exotic Raspberry Pi projects
| and people pushing the Raspberry Pi into applications far beyond
| what you'd expect.
|
| But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that
| these things are really not great solutions in general. This
| contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a
| benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more
| powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs
| less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to
| coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers.
|
| The Pi is a lot of fun and the Raspberry Pi foundation has done
| an excellent job of bringing us powerful ARM processors at low
| price points, but the gap between Quad Cortex-A72 and even a
| cheap, low-power x86 board is still massive.
|
| But on the other hand if you're doing this for learning and for
| fun, these things are awesome.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Though unfortunately the Mini-ITX space has been left do dangle
| for a few years now; most of the affordable (<300 money) boards
| have pretty old CPUs.
|
| AMD hasn't had something new in that space for a very long time
| - E-350/450 based boards were just recently discontinued, and
| that was a 10 year old part. The only other boards still
| available seem to be re-spins to sell of 5-6 year old APUs.
| These were decent in their time, but time has moved on. The
| E-350/450 were also bundled with crappy southbridges which
| consumed way more power than the CPU itself - when you see one
| of these boards, the _smaller_ , fanless heatsink is for the
| CPU, the big one for the southbridge.
|
| VIA has been gone for some time.
|
| All the Intel boards are 14nm or 22nm parts, usually from
| 2014-2017. Newest boards seem to use the J4125 - a Goldmont
| refresh from 2019.
|
| Intel at least offers some newer stuff in the NUC form factor
| (though at much higher prices as well). NUCs are pretty non-
| standard form factor though and offer PCIe only through M.2, so
| for I/O you'll need an awkward M.2-to-PCIe adapter with a
| cable. AMD really only has that 4700S kit (which uses a PS5 SoC
| with defective iGPU as I understand it) at around 400 currency.
| The 4700S seems to have ridiculous idle power draw (~80 W -
| maybe power management for the GDDR and other parts are
| disabled together with the iGPU).
|
| There are _some_ ARM boards now with PCIe. The RPi CM4 has a
| PCIe 2.0 x1, which is not a lot but maybe good enough for some
| use cases. The RockPro64 has an PCIe _1.0_ x4 slot; the RockPi4
| has an extremely awkwardly positioned M.2 slot (same PCIe 1.0
| x4, it 's the same SoC as the RockPro64).
|
| None of these are great options.
| I_dev_outdoors wrote:
| There's plenty of Mini-ITX motherboards which accept a
| socket-ed processor though. It's less of a specialty form
| factor these days where only VIA is participating in and
| something that more mainstream manufactures are making as
| well such as Gigabyte and ASUS.
| floatboth wrote:
| The RPi4 SoC has a busted PCIe controller (can't do 64-bit
| operations), the Rockchip one has a very small BAR size
| limit, so neither can run GPUs for example.
|
| The _real_ ARM board options are SolidRun MACCHIATObin and
| SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Picking up a generic Intel Mini-ITX board and dropping a
| cheap Celeron or i3 into it can produce some surprisingly low
| idle powers. Around 10-11W is not uncommon, which is lower
| than this quad Raspberry Pi 4 board.
|
| The key is to pick motherboards with minimal features (few
| extra chips to power) and an Intel CPU. Intel historically
| has much better idle power than AMD, although AMD held the
| power efficiency crown under full load for a while.
|
| Here's a random example from years ago of a cheap Mini-ITX
| motherboard and CPU with minimal idle power:
| https://mattgadient.com/building-a-low-power-pc-on-
| skylake-1...
|
| The ITX motherboards with built-in CPUs are great if you can
| find them, but they basically disappeared when the chip
| shortage kicked in. CPU vendors put all of their production
| into the expensive money-making parts.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Indeed, the number of acceptable ITX boards is in single
| digits now for last gen CPUs.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| >last get CPUs
|
| Did you mean "last _gen_ CPUs "?
|
| If indeed that was a typo, I think it would be a difficult
| one to make on a QWERTY keyboard, because the N key isn't
| very close to the T key. Are you a Dvorak typist, by
| chance?
| bobnamob wrote:
| More likely to be phone keyboard auto correct.
| baybal2 wrote:
| That's right partially too. Autocorrect is tuned to
| qwerty for its hamming distance data used, and other
| statistics.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yes, you are right. But my current laptop comes with
| qwerty labels. Never managed to get time to move the
| keycaps.
| pdpi wrote:
| I've been meaning to build something like this for a while now,
| and "performs much better without requiring you to coordinate
| your project across 4 separate tiny computers." is pretty much
| my motivation to do it -- I _want_ a sufficiently limited setup
| where I 'll hit bottlenecks with relatively small workloads,
| because the whole point is playing with evading those
| bottlenecks.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I totally understand. This is a fun way to do it.
|
| A cheaper option would also be to run a lot of virtual
| machines on a single device and only assign them limited CPU
| and RAM budgets.
|
| You can actually do this all within a single Raspberry Pi 4
| 8GB with ESXi: https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-
| with-vmware-esx...
|
| Not going to lie: I'd still enjoy having one of these Quad-Pi
| boards to play with, though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Doing it with physical machine ls gives the real
| understsnding and ferls that you just dont get from the VM
| stuff
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm almost wondering if this might be useful for a research
| lab, to prototype HPC algorithms. Like, I don't really want
| to run stuff on a big cluster or supercomputer while running
| my code. And it would be nice to have a tiny little cluster
| that hits bottlenecks while solving matrices that I can
| easily run on my desktop.
| toast0 wrote:
| Probably not a research lab, but maybe an educational lab.
| Experience problems with multi-node systems and learn to
| work around them, but expect real application problems to
| be different.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The problem here is that the fidelity of a test run on a
| raspberry pi cluster, as compared to one run on the actual
| target hardware, is about the same as running the test on a
| cheaper and easier simulator environment of VMs.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The Pi generally has pretty atrocious power management, with
| linear regulators and no option to sleep or save power in any
| way aside from turning off stuff like USB controllers. It would
| probably cost them like $2 in parts to add switch mode power
| supplies and they'd reduce power consumption by at least half
| if not more. But no we can't afford a few dollars worth' of
| parts on an $80 product to improve quality of life
| significantly lmao.
|
| Imagine all the battery powered applications where this would
| be a night and day difference.
| bri3d wrote:
| I don't think the Pi uses linear regulators anymore - the Pi
| 1 certainly did, but for example the Pi 3B+ uses a MXL7704,
| which includes several buck regulators together.
|
| https://assets.maxlinear.com/web/documents/mxl7704.pdf
| andai wrote:
| Does anyone offer a comparable product that does that? Might
| be worth building one just to scare them into fixing it.
| foxfluff wrote:
| There are tons of SBCs out there, but none of them scare
| Raspberry Foundation because none of them have the wide
| distribution, brand recognition, and large community that
| goes with it. It's very much a popularity feeds popularity
| market.
| cpach wrote:
| What are some good x86-64 alternatives to the Raspberry Pi?
| Asking since I'm quite out-of-date in my hardware knowledge. I
| guess what I want is low energy consumption, ~8 GB RAM (or
| more) and enough CPU to run a bunch of Docker containers. And a
| price tag that's not higher than the Pi.
| scottlamb wrote:
| I don't think you're going to find anything as cheap as a
| single Pi, but you should be able to find something cheaper
| than the Turing Pi 2 ($200?), 4 of its CM4 adapters ($40
| total), and 4 Raspberry Pi CM4s ($140 total): $380ish.
|
| One option is to buy a used Intel NUC on eBay. I bought one
| for $235 (with RAM, SSD, and case) a couple years ago that
| satisfies all that.
|
| I haven't looked into a lot of the other x86-64 SBCs. I
| really liked the ODROID-H2+ but it's discontinued due to
| supply chain problems. I'm hoping an ODROID-H3 or something
| will come out next year.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Some of the modern Atom CPUs might fit the bill.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Pragmatic (as usual). ;-)
|
| I'm not so sure though that we're not seeing early forays into
| something that will in fact come down in cost, go up in
| efficiency.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| There's a lot of bad things about Intel and x86 that I don't
| have to worry about with this:
|
| - I don't have to worry about Intel ME backdoors.
|
| - I don't have to worry about UEFI at all.
|
| - I have 4 sets of cores that are physically separated, so I
| have a real defense against spectre-type vulnerabilities. E.g.
| public-facing nginx can go on one, backend application server
| can go on another, and SQL server on a third.
|
| - Doesn't look like I really need any fans.
| bullen wrote:
| I always reply to these comments because well they are simply
| wrong for regular Raspberry clusters (this one is stupid
| though, but still fun to watch):
|
| 1) The Raspberry Pi 4 is THE cheapest 2Gflops/W computer ever
| made and probably that will ever be made in the future too!
| Peak of energy/resources/lithography/architectures and velocity
| of money against that, will most likely make it so.
|
| 2) You can scale the Raspberry cluster as you want it, only
| power the nodes you need, it's modular, one breaks you still
| have a few left, same for the SD cards which BTW while being so
| slow a Raspberry 2 (2W!) can saturate them they are
| SURPRISINGLY sturdy (my original SanDisc (every other brand has
| been a complete scam) are on their 7th year of 99.999% uptime,
| down when my power company cut the electricity for an hour).
|
| 3) The Raspberry cluster is smaller, cooler and silent (if
| passively cooled, it's the most powerful device that can be
| fully passively cooled at 100% CPU (7W) without becoming too
| hot to wear early) and wont fail because of failing fans!
|
| 4) For battery backup there is nothing better because beyond
| total of 100W for 24 hours you start to see the limits of what
| is practical to manage on a individual basis.
|
| I post this picture every time:
| http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png (this is how
| you cool a Raspberry 2/4 hybrid cluster)
| [deleted]
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Expanding on #2, when thinking of things like Spectre &
| Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws, offloading or running a variety of
| services/daemons on physically separate machines can also
| improve security. We all get told to reduce the attack vector
| and this is one way to do that. The organisational hierarchy
| best exemplifies this security isolation point for an entity,
| like businesses, govts, etc etc.
| qayxc wrote:
| > when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC
| HW flaws
|
| Spectre in particular is not a CISC HW flaw. It affects ARM
| and other RISC architectures as well:
| https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-
| updates/specu...
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Know your HW. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/why-
| raspberry-pi-isnt-vulne... "Both vulnerabilities exploit
| performance features (caching and speculative execution)
| common to many modern processors to leak data via a so-
| called side-channel attack. Happily, the Raspberry Pi
| isn't susceptible to these vulnerabilities, because of
| the particular ARM cores that we use."
| bullen wrote:
| A72 is susceptible to Spectre because it has speculative
| execution I think.
|
| That article was written before the release of Pi 4: 5th
| Jan 2018
|
| https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=243416
|
| You don't get to 2 Gflops/W that easily!
| walrus01 wrote:
| > But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize
| that these things are really not great solutions in general.
| This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W
| during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up
| a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space,
| probably costs less overall, and performs much better without
| requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny
| computers.
|
| I agree with all of this and if you really need to have
| multiple separate systems (such as to test/develop some
| clustering thing) you can easily turn a 25W-35W max TDP, x86-64
| motherboard and cpu combo into a xen or kvm hypervisor, on
| debian or centos.
|
| And put as many VMs as you need on that.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful
| tiny x86 board
|
| Which is a poor solution as a local dev/test platform for apps
| to be deployed to ARM cloud platforms, which seems to be the
| selling point of this.
| justin66 wrote:
| > a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space,
| probably costs less overall
|
| It seems like it should be this way but when it comes down to
| cases, for example making a network gateway, a lot of the
| options that get thrown around are frustratingly costly. As in,
| _a laptop motherboard that does twice what this x86 SBC does
| would cost half what this does_ costly.
|
| I'd really like to know what x86 SBCs are now considered to be
| real Raspberry Pi competitors, or even considered to be in the
| ballpark. When the subject of ARM based RPi competitors comes
| up, it's usually a conversation about the level of support
| those boards offer, and in that regard being x86 based is
| obviously a total game changer.
| toast0 wrote:
| If this board is $200 and the 4 raspberry pi modules you plug
| in need an adapter at $10 each and cost between $25 (1g ram,
| no wireless, no storage) and $70 (8g ram, no wireless, no
| storage), and we consider Mini-ITX to be tiny (debatable),
| we've got a budget of $340 to $520 if I can arithmetic. And
| we need motherboard + cpu + ram.
|
| PC parts prices aren't great right now, but a AMD Ryzen 5600G
| @ $240, an ASRock A520M-ITX/ac @ $105, and a Silicon Gaming
| 2x 16GB of DDR4-3200 for $90, is $435 [1]; assuming the
| firmware shipped with the board is new enough for the CPU (i
| didn't check if you can flash this board without a supported
| CPU). You can limit the CPU power in firmware settings, and
| to hold close to the power usage of this cluster board.
|
| If you only get 4G ram, you can save some money, but not
| enough to get under the lowest pi cluster with current
| pricing. If you need it less expensive, you could maybe get
| an older AMD processor or look at intel.
|
| If you want smaller than itx, it gets hard. Maybe reuse a
| chromebox or similar, but then you don't have much choice of
| hardware and connectivity.
|
| [1] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yCj2vf
| scottlamb wrote:
| It might make more sense with the nVidia Jetson option. [1]
| Each one is considerably faster than the Pi CM4 at both general
| computational tasks and GPU-focused ones (like video
| decoding/encoding and machine learning). I wouldn't be too
| surprised if four of those outperformed a comparably
| priced/power-hungry/sized x86-64 machine for the right
| workload. YMMV. (That goes for any of the three Jetson models
| they list.)
|
| I'm also curious to see what the Turing TCM turns out to be.
|
| Though the IO is still limited to the one GbE port + one PCIe
| 2.0 channel per device for anything you cram in there...and the
| heterogenous use of the PCIe channel may or may not match what
| you want...
|
| [1] https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-v2-is-here/
| vineyardmike wrote:
| The first few lines of this article made it clear this was
| learning oriented and a "challenge" from a friendly
| competition.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I love the "lets do something just for the sake of it"
| approach in life.
|
| Too often economic thinking restrict from fun creations and
| discoveries
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful
| tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less
| overall, and performs much better without requiring you to
| coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers._
|
| I am convinced that Intel _does not_ deliver on that.
|
| What tiny x86 board is comparable to the Raspberry Pi? I'm
| looking for excellent Linux support, with well documented
| GPIO/ADC/DACs, and as few closed-source hardwares as possible
| at a similar price point. If I want to talk directly to the
| ethernet controller (for example) then I should be able to look
| at the board's documentation without having to sign any NDA.
| foxfluff wrote:
| So you have found docs for the Broadcom SoCs on the Pi
| without NDA? That would be newsworthy. The ethernet
| controller lives in the SoC btw, and talks to a phy. That's
| another boardcom chip. See if you can find a datasheet for
| BCM54210. The Pi is _not_ open hardware, even the schematic
| is a joke. Broadcom is another way to spell "NDA" and "no
| docs for plebs."
|
| I don't know about price but you absolutely can find Mini-ITX
| (and smaller) Intel based systems that idle at 5-15 watts and
| perform better than the Pi. At $200 for the cluster board,
| $40 for the adapters, and ~$50 a pop times 4 for the CM4s,
| we're talking $400-$500 and that's not far off from the price
| of some of these low end x86-64 systems that -- yess -- are
| much faster than the Pi 4.
| bri3d wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that the Pi isn't open by anyone's
| definition or any stretch of the imagination. But, it sounds
| like you want a Pi for the thing it's actually somewhat good
| at, which is not running Kubernetes on a 4-way cluster board
| with an ATX power supply.
|
| The Pi is nice because it's a bridge between microcontrollers
| and normal OS-grade computing. You can have a full desktop
| environment and also have GPIOs and SPI peripherals talking
| to the outside world. This is pretty cool and is a nice
| little niche to be in. I don't think anything really beats
| the Pi here - there are Rockchip and Allwinner based boards
| that compete, but they're all just different facets of the
| same gem so to speak.
|
| Once you stop using those microcontroller-style
| functionalities and bridges to the real world and start using
| the Pi as a cluster server, things don't really make sense
| anymore to me. I get why people do this for fun (just like
| back in the day people would set up MPI/Beowulf clusters of
| whatever cast-off vintage desktops they could find), but for
| practicality points, there's no good argument for the Pi IMO.
|
| Compared to this 4x cluster board, an Intel NUC 11 Tiger
| Canyon comes in at a similar price point, 3x+ the
| performance/watt, and at least 5x the performance (for real
| workloads that touch I/O, probably 10x or more).
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >Compared to this 4x cluster board, an Intel NUC 11 Tiger
| Canyon comes in at a similar price point, 3x+ the
| performance/watt, and at least 5x the performance (for real
| workloads that touch I/O, probably 10x or more).
|
| google shopping says not. and is the i5 3x faster than 16
| ARM cores at 25W (or any W)? (i have no idea - genuine
| question)
| nsky-world wrote:
| We are waited for this for soooo loooong!!
| [deleted]
| rsync wrote:
| What is the metal mount used for the board in this picture:
|
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/turi...
| geerlingguy wrote:
| That's a BC1 mini from Streacom.
| qayxc wrote:
| BC1 mini ITX build platform: https://amzn.to/3xHoHXt
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