[HN Gopher] Radxa Rock 5 ITX: 8-Core ARM Mini ITX Board with LPD...
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Radxa Rock 5 ITX: 8-Core ARM Mini ITX Board with LPDDR5 RAM
Author : sthlmb
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-04-15 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bret.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bret.dk)
| favorited wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by the wording on PoE:
|
| > If you choose to power via PoE you can expect to get 25W of
| output.
|
| Can you power _this_ device via PoE ( "choose to power via PoE"),
| or can this SBC power _other_ devices over PoE ( "expect to get
| 25W of output")? I clicked through some other reviews, but didn't
| see it addressed.
| jandrese wrote:
| The article says there are three ways to power it. The ATX
| power supply connector, a DC barrel jack, and some third way
| not specified.
|
| It does have a USB3 port so that might be it, or it could be
| PoE. Very unclear from the couple of articles.
| sthlmb wrote:
| Ah, you power this device via PoE and it can then draw up to
| 25W from a PoE switch feeding it. You cannot power another
| device via PoE with the ROCK 5 ITX as the source
| maicro wrote:
| Not sure if this was added or edited later, but the linked
| article clarifies:
|
| ROCK 5 ITX Power over Ethernet (PoE) Here we can see that the
| PoE module is not soldered in and connects using 8 pins which
| is quite nice. If you choose to power the ROCK 5 ITX via a PoE
| switch (the ROCK 5 ITX doesn't provide PoE power to another
| device) you can expect to get 25W of power budget for the
| system itself and any peripherals/devices you plan to power
| from the boards connectors.
|
| (my summary of that quoted section:) So, you can power the
| board with PoE, which will give the board and any connected
| devices 25W of power budget. Without looking at the specs of
| the CPU/GPU, that's probably enough to run at least one m.2
| drive and a couple USB peripherals?
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's not fast, but at least it's cool.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| When these ARM boards start coming with UEFI and I don't need to
| hunt around for blessed OS images with patched kernels I'll be a
| lot more interested, until then I've got to stick with x86 to
| maintain my sanity.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Same thing I'm thinking as well when it comes to ARM PC's,
| being restricted to a specifically patched distro is very
| limiting.
| drewg123 wrote:
| How do we know it doesn't? I didn't see any info in the linked
| page about the system firmware, though I could easily have
| missed it.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| UEFI is not enough if you don't have all the drivers in the OS
| image, especially the GPU drivers. Last year I bought a cheap
| Windows Qualcomm 8xx ARM tablet on sale and it was very nice
| for the money but I returned it when none of the ARM Linux ISOs
| I found online could boot on it despite the tablet having UEFI
| support, because Qualcomm.
|
| Booting Linux distros out of the box is such a non-issue on X86
| that we take it for granted when on ARM it's just a pipe dream.
|
| If the ARM PC future is all proprietary custom firmware blobs
| that need to patched for each SoC/motherboard for Linux to
| boot, then you can keep them, I'll stick to X86 thank you very
| much.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Part of the point of UEFI is to support a graphical
| framebuffer and HID devices (keyboard and mouse) out of the
| box, that's what powers the fancy BIOS setup screens on newer
| PC's. Hardware-specific drivers are supposed to be optional.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Can I run X or Wayland with the UEFI framebuffer?
| aseipp wrote:
| FWIW, there is a port of EDK2 to the RK3588, which is what
| powers this board. Most of the peripherals work. So that's
| nice. But the thing is, it isn't UEFI so much as the device-
| tree/ACPI distinction you need to be mindful of. ARM systems
| use both methods (whereas everything on x86 is ACPI.) You can
| use either DTBs (kernel configuration option) or ACPI to boot
| Linux on this device, though.
| https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588
| zokier wrote:
| Bingo. Basically ARM SystemReady SR or gtfo.
|
| In practice that means Ampere Altra CPU. There was a uatx board
| released recently that seems viable, if bit pricy.
|
| https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-revi...
|
| https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...
| packetlost wrote:
| RK3588 has pretty good mainline kernel support
| jandrese wrote:
| Anybody have a clue what the price point will be? This board
| seems pretty neat as a SFF PC replacement, but not so much if it
| costs $500 or more.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've been looking at these kinds of boards as well:
| https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000
|
| So far, mostly the same results, although I do have another with
| much more RAM that I'm still writing a draft on.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's always the software that's the missing element.
|
| I prefer low end Intel compatible boards because the software
| just works. I spent too many hours with weird arm devices trying
| to get them to do basic stuff that is taken for granted on Intel,
| such as booting up.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Too bad it doesn't have PCIe slots. It could be interesting as a
| low-end 10Gb/e storage/web server if it had enough I/O.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| 2x 2.5Gb/s interfaces are pretty chunky on this spec of board,
| isn't it?
| drewg123 wrote:
| I have a board with a 16 core A78 serving static content via
| 100Gb/s (encrypted via ktls, offloaded to the NIC).
|
| My arm fu is not good, so I'm not sure how a quad-core A76
| compares.
| NewJazz wrote:
| What board is that?
|
| A78 is a couple generations newer.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Nvidia Bluefield3
| dist1ll wrote:
| The BF3 is a DPU, not an SBC right? Or can it be operated
| without a host? I'm curious about your setup.
| NewJazz wrote:
| The M.2 is PCIe. 4 lanes of Gen 3. You can get an adapter if
| you want the traditional form factor.
|
| But then you give up the storage :/
| sthlmb wrote:
| The M.2 NVMe only has 2 lanes of Gen 3 on this board, the
| other 2 are given to the SATA controller
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Why Not Smaller?
|
| Why is this board so (physically) large in size?
|
| You can see how much wasted space, by looking at this photo:
|
| https://bret.dk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/radxa_rock_5_itx_...
| jayd16 wrote:
| Its as large as the IO Panel. Also that space is for an M2
| drive, no?
| sthlmb wrote:
| Yes, those are the mounting holes for the M.2 that's
| connected to the left of the photo (visible in other photos)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| But Pico-ITX boards exist with M.2 support.
|
| And those boards are about 1/3rd the size of Mini-ITX
|
| Eg
|
| https://www.aaeon.com/en/p/pico-itx-boards-amd-
| ryzen-v2000-p...
| wtallis wrote:
| That board is double-sided: the CPU and the SSD slot are on
| the back, while this ITX board has all the connectors and
| the processor on the top. That makes a difference both for
| the complexity and cost of building the board, and the
| complexity of assembling a system with the board, heatsinks
| and all.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| But there aren't really generic Pico-ITX cases are there?
| What's the point of designing a Pico-ITX board if you need
| a custom case anyways? Just use the Radxa Rock 5B at that
| point.
| sthlmb wrote:
| I don't think they were saying that it has to be that big
| to fit an M.2 drive on it, they're pointing out that in the
| picture you shared, that space is for the M.2 NVMe drive to
| be mounted in
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| This is aimed at desktop use. I guess it would be hard to mount
| if it was smaller than mini-ITX spec and/or wouldn't mount
| firmly on some/many desktop cases.
| stonogo wrote:
| Why not bigger? Why not a full-size ITX mainboard? There's no
| pleasing everyone.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Your point stands, but I don't think there is such a thing as
| full-size ITX; Mini-ITX is the largest ITXl; Mini-ITX is
| backwards compatable with ATX, so perhaps you meant "full-
| size ATX?"
| zokier wrote:
| The whole point of this product is that it is _standard_ ITX
| sized. Radxa has several sibling products with smaller
| footprints, e.g. Rock 5C https://radxa.com/products/rock5/5c/
| Findecanor wrote:
| Because the form factor is the point of this board. There are
| already other smaller SBCs with the same SoC but with much less
| connectivity.
| synergy20 wrote:
| is the board still low profile for mini-itx case? the 2USB+HDMI
| seems a little higher than I remembered.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| ATX and mini-ITX should use the same size IO shield.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| One of the big selling ports of ARM is lower power consumption so
| I'd have loved to see some numbers, particularly idle watts.
|
| Also, I can find full photos of the board elsewhere but full
| front and back pics of it would have been nice to include.
| sthlmb wrote:
| tkaiser has some additional information from his initial testing
| at
| https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/Knowledge/blob/master/articl...
| if people are curious to know more, though it should be noted
| these were early release samples and as such, software/firmware
| isn't exactly perfect at the moment
| dist1ll wrote:
| No PCIe connectivity is very unfortunate. I think these
| ARM/RISC-V SBCs are very attractive in combination with high-
| throughput NICs (or if you're into AI, things like the
| Tenstorrent cards). That'd be very nice for building smaller
| prototypes of 100G+ edge compute, CDNs, cloud, serverless
| platforms etc. without having to shell out for an Ampere Altra
| (or x86 equivalent).
|
| Nowadays there's such a big move towards heterogeneity that good
| PCIe connectivity feels like table stakes for SBCs.
| jordemort wrote:
| I'd love something like this with socketed RAM so much, the only
| ARM boards I've seen with socketed RAM so far are high-end
| expensive server stuff.
| sthlmb wrote:
| They did mention on their forums that a ROCK 6 ITX would likely
| come with socketed RAM but that's not likely to be until later
| this year sadly
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