[HN Gopher] Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
___________________________________________________________________
Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 182 points
Date : 2024-07-27 22:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bret.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bret.dk)
| metadat wrote:
| I thought the n100 would be a joke compared to an an HP G6 mini
| with i5-9xxx (small book sized computer), but seems they might be
| competitive with n100 drawing 1/6 the energy? Is that right? Can
| n100 do fast SHA256 and h265 / x265 transcoding across multiple
| containers?
|
| https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_processor_n1...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| If you want a basic idea of an N100, it's essentially a single
| Alder Lake E-core cluster (4 E-cores) with one of the low tier
| iGPUs and a trimmed down memory controller.
|
| The presence of the iGPU means it /should/ handle video
| encoding surprisingly well for what it is.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Can do several transcodes easily[1] if you get the iGPU
| involved[2].
|
| Only tried it on a single stream myself but worked well after
| a bit of fidling.
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/11vf91z/comment/j
| trli...
|
| [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/163ibyr/intel_n10
| 0_ho...
| inhumantsar wrote:
| Quick Sync on Alder Lake has hardware encoder support for
| HEVC 8, 10, and 12bit and decoder support for AV1.
|
| Anecdotally, my busy Plex server (Alder Lake but not an N100)
| routinely ends up doing 3-4 concurrent transcodes, often
| involving high bitrate 4K HDR content. The Quick Sync
| encoders take almost all of the load off the CPU and never
| have trouble keeping up.
|
| That said, I haven't had great experiences _driving_ a
| display with 4K+ HDR content on an Alder Lake iGPU. At 60hz
| it 's not too bad, but it can get stuttery past 100hz
| particularly in high contrast scenes with lots of movement.
| rcarmo wrote:
| QuickSync and its variants are the secret weapon of the
| N-series. They make excellent Plex servers.
| treprinum wrote:
| Old Atoms were able to do that. N100 is way more powerful
| (better than Skylake at the same frequency).
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm curious what your application is that needs fast SHA
| specifically, but yes these Gracemont cores do have hardware
| SHA-1 and SHA-256 acceleration.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracemont_(microarchitecture)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions
| supertrope wrote:
| The N100 is as fast as the i5-6500T.
| aappleby wrote:
| I already have a N100 mini-pc to play with, but now I want one of
| these guys too. So cute.
| tedunangst wrote:
| That thermal pad looks dreadful.
| daft_pink wrote:
| We really needed an intel based raspberry pi competitor with
| built in nvme! This looks amazing!
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| $60! That seems like a ridiculous bargain. Evidently I'm not the
| only one who thinks that, because they are sold out. Not in love
| with the reported temps, but I would probably be willing to
| throttle the CPU significantly.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Ok so no CUDA, how about OpenCL?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Haha, no it barely can process 2d graphics, you don't need to
| worry about Cuda
| snailmailman wrote:
| The n100 is at least "not awful" at 3d graphics in my
| experience. It doesn't compare to a discrete GPU of course,
| but it can handle basic games. Mine has been able to run
| dolphin at the consoles' native resolution. Although I think
| I had occasional stutters in some circumstances.
|
| I have an n100 mini pc hooked to a TV and I play couch coop
| games on it occasionally. It can do reasonably well tbh, but
| for simplicity I do end up streaming most games from a more
| powerful machine. I've heard performance is better in windows
| but I'm running mine slightly handicapped- as a proxmox VM
| with GPU pass through, and not a lot of ram. This same box
| also runs all my home automation and a few other services.
| metadat wrote:
| Isn't discrete GPU the bottom of the barrel?
| snailmailman wrote:
| A discrete gpu is like AMD/Nvidia cards. They are _very_
| capable for graphics, and essentially required for any
| higher end gaming.
|
| This machine would just have integrated graphics. Which
| aren't the _best_ but they are okay-ish. Better than I
| expected to be honest.
|
| I think AMD probably has better integrated graphics? I've
| heard great things about what the Steam deck is capable
| of for instance. But the N100's price point is very hard
| to beat.
| metadat wrote:
| Oh you're right, I was thinking of integrated graphics!
| Thanks for setting me straight, haha.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The reason why integrated graphics usually sucks is
| because the people putting the GPU on the chip expect you
| to put a dedicated card in anyway.
|
| An integrated GPU has to compete with the CPU cores for
| power budget, memory access[0], and die area. Intel
| doesn't want to risk half the die on a GPU nobody will
| use when they could sell more cores or cache instead. AMD
| instead manufactures separate "APU" product lines for
| people who want integrated graphics[1], and those have
| smaller core counts as a result. E.g. a Ryzen 8700G, the
| top of the APU stack, only has 8 cores while Ryzen
| 7950X3D will go up to 16. Apple's M-series chips[2] have
| similar core counts. The Steam Deck is even more
| graphics-specialized, having only 4 CPU cores in total.
|
| Intel would be wise to copy AMD's strategy and just
| completely omit the GPU from their desktop chips, save
| for a separate integrated graphics SKU. I suspect OEMs
| wouldn't like that, though, because it would require
| putting a bunch of e-waste GPUs[3] into high-end general-
| purpose systems. AMD traditionally has made a lot of
| enthusiast and system builder sales but I wonder if that
| will change in the future.
|
| The kinds of applications N100 is built for is going to
| be more graphics-heavy. I expect these chips to find
| their way into a lot of weird industrial shit, e.g.
| digital signage controllers, touchscreen kiosks, etc.
| where CPU performance doesn't matter but you need a
| display output and some graphics acceleration. The CPU is
| absolutely going to be bottom of the barrel anyway, so
| it's not hogging as many resources from the GPU.
|
| [0] CPUs want low memory latency since they run latency-
| sensitive code. GPUs want more memory channels and
| bandwidth since they run everything in extreme levels of
| batch processing and turn-around times don't matter.
|
| [1] AM5 Ryzen CPUs do have display outputs now, but AFAIK
| there's no hardware acceleration on it, you need a
| dedicated GPU anyway.
|
| [2] Excluding Pro/Max/Ultra. They are unique in that they
| are very large workstation chips with integrated
| graphics. They basically don't have any competition,
| everyone else just wires separate dies together at this
| scale, even in mobile workstations where this would make
| sense to do. Apple is so married to the integrated
| everything mentality that they even configured their MMUs
| and PCIe controllers to forbid external GPU access.
|
| [3] Anything in the $40-100 range. If you just need a
| display output you can buy cheaper and if you want to
| play games anything even slightly more expensive is a
| dramatically better value.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Give me a SBC with CUDA!!
| jsheard wrote:
| Nvidia makes them under the Jetson brand, but they're not
| especially cheap.
| kcb wrote:
| Jetson Nano was only $100, old now though and not sure if
| its still for sale.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Nope. And the Orin is more expensive.
| Havoc wrote:
| It is likely to be able to run LLMs via Vulkan but at speeds
| that make it near useless
| darkteflon wrote:
| The N100 seems to be everywhere - presumably it's some kind of
| major leap forward in perf/watt or perf/$ versus, eg, J4125? For
| those in the know, is an N100 mini-pc currently the best place to
| start for a kid's "my first Linux PC"?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I've been really impressed with the N100 Mini-PCs. I have a
| couple running Proxmox and then a few different VMs and
| containers to do light server stuff. For $180 the Beelink gives
| you 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD, plenty of video output. Just a
| fantastic performer.
| snailmailman wrote:
| I've got likely the exact same box as you, and I've done the
| same thing. Mine runs proxmox with a variety of services.
|
| Additionally I managed to get gpu passthrough working with
| the integrated graphics. My box is physically located below a
| TV- so I've got one VM running Bazzite for gaming, outputting
| over the HDMI. It's perfect for streaming games from my
| gaming pc to the couch. Bluetooth and USB is also passed
| through to the VM without issue for controllers.
| darkteflon wrote:
| Slightly OT but Proxmox is something else I see is suddenly
| everywhere - is it only for a container-based homelab
| setup, or do people also run a full desktop distro like
| Debian or Fedora as one of the VMs? Since GPU passthrough
| is supported, seems like a nice neat way to have your cake
| and eat it too. In which case I might splurge on an N305
| with a bit more RAM and migrate Plex and other containers
| (currently on an always-on M1 which is supposed to be my
| workstation), plus the Tailscale exit node (currently on an
| RPi4) to the same machine the kid uses as his DE.
| back7co wrote:
| This may help, and you may be surprised at how well an
| N100 can run Plex. https://www.doscher.com/gpu-
| passthrough-for-intel/
| Nux wrote:
| It's not a container-only distro, that's secondary, it's
| more like VMware Esxi, does VMs, too, but with extra bits
| (like ceph). It's good stuff, try it.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yep. Been running it for a few years, am very happy with
| it - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/12/17/2000
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| I've rebuilt my PC for Proxmox. 7950X3D, X670E, 96G,
| 18TBx4.
|
| I run TrueNAS with my storage. Give a GPU to a main
| system (Bazzite/Fedora/NixOS). Distro hopping is one VM
| away.
|
| I don't run Windows guests.
| teleforce wrote:
| Given the "good enough" performance and low power credentials
| I am really surprised that N100 based laptop is not
| commonplace. Make a 1440p QHD laptop with 32GB RAM it will be
| selling like hot cakes. The advertised max RAM is 16GB RAM
| but some say it can takes more up to 64GB.
| wwtrv wrote:
| > it will be selling like hot cakes
|
| I strongly doubt that. Otherwise premium (by Apple
| standards at least) or midrange specs laptop but with a
| slow CPU wouldn't be that popular.
|
| It makes sense in a very cheap (< $300) device but add 32
| GB of RAM, a decent screen and chassis and it would be
| competing with significantly more expensive laptops with a
| proper CPUs. Seems like an extremely niche product.
| russianGuy83829 wrote:
| Do you happen to have wall power consumption readings at idle
| for your Mini-PCs?
| sirn wrote:
| Not the OP, but my ASRock N100DC-ITX idles at around 9W at
| the wall.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| I have an Asus PN42 with 512 GB SSD and 32 GB of memory
| idling at around 7 W (default Debian install, without
| monitor connected).
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| My BOSGAME B100 is 7W idle, 19W with peak synthetic load.
| That includes a 3W external spinning drive.
| cgearhart wrote:
| I got my kid a raspi 400 a few years ago. She's enjoyed it
| tremendously, but I don't know how it holds up to more recent
| alternatives. She's still using it today, though.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| I very much like the R.Pi 400 (i.e. R.Pi 4 inside a
| keyboard). But it's much slower than the N100.
|
| Even the R.Pi 5 loses against the N100.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-
| pi-5-squ...
| 3np wrote:
| Noticed the same thing and I hope we see the N305 from the same
| generation take over or more vendor offering both options.
| Considering the rest of the platform package, it can really
| benefit from 8 cores instead of just 4.
|
| The N100 can be a fair step up compared to Rpi5 but even RK3588
| is already 8 cores. Would be a shame if many of the current
| generation of exciting hackable x86 mini-platforms lock in at
| the N100 as it will feel obsolete years earlier the the N305.
|
| I run/ran stuff on both, as well as various ARM SBCs and
| previous generations like J4125/N5XXX. Considering the core-
| count, RK3588 is still a better pick for many use-cases unless
| single-thread performance is that important. Benchmark
| comparison: https://bret.dk/intel-n100-a-challenge-to-arm/
| dmw_ng wrote:
| I recently bought an n100 and within a matter of days got
| buyer's remorse and impulse-purchased an n305 to go right
| beside it, which is currently sitting with a wildly
| overpriced 48 GB stick installed and 2TB SN850X, it's an
| absolute joy perfwise and the absence of heat it generates.
|
| The only thing I'd reserve judgement on is the tendency to
| throttle. I haven't got far enough to characterize it, but
| it's not clear how much value those extra cores will add over
| the n100 with TDP settings tweaked down in the BIOS, and if
| leaving the n305 to run at max TDP,
| heat/noise/cost/temperature-related instability may start to
| become an issue, especially when packing other hot components
| like a decent SSD into the tiny cases they come in.
| Welteneroberer wrote:
| Which N305 sbc/computer did you buy?
| adrian_b wrote:
| It really matters very little that RK3588 has 8 cores,
| because the Cortex-A55 cores are very weak.
|
| The reason why RK3588 may beat N100 in multi-threaded
| benchmarks is that the latter has a very low base clock
| frequency, due to the higher power consumption when all the
| cores are active. N100 needs a better cooling than RK3588 in
| order to reach its maximum possible multi-threaded speed.
| With good enough cooling that will prevent the drop in clock
| frequency, N100 will beat easily RK3588 in any benchmark,
| because the Intel Gracemont cores have a speed similar to the
| Arm Cortex-A78 cores and much greater than the Cortex-A76
| cores of RK3588.
|
| It should be noted that Radxa X4, due to the constraints of
| the credit card size, has only a 32-bit DRAM interface. So
| its -4800 memory is equivalent with a -2400 memory of the
| bigger N100 boards, which use a 64-bit DRAM interface. The
| good RK3588 boards also use a 64-bit DRAM interface (with a
| somewhat lower speed, e.g. -4267), so they may win in
| benchmarks that are limited by memory bandwidth.
|
| However in the applications in which I am interested for such
| a small board like Radxa X4 (like a network router/firewall
| or a controller for some custom hardware) the performance is
| almost always limited by the speed of the peripheral
| interfaces, so Radxa X4 will be better than any existing Arm-
| based SBC.
| 3np wrote:
| While I haven't benchmarked, my reasoning is that for
| parallel workloads (especially VMs but also containers),
| penalty from context-switching should be vastly reduced by
| even those slower cores.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The RK3588 doesn't beat the N100 in anything but throughput
| - I have been benchmarking a number of SBCs lately to
| consult on building custom industrial edge devices and in
| terms of bang for the buck and PCI lane availability (as in
| actually accessible lanes) the Rockchip designs work out a
| little cheaper. I have one of those 4xNVMe NAS boards to
| test next, and expect it to be pretty snappy for the same
| wattage-but it all depends on the use case.
|
| (I also have an X4, am waiting for an SSD for it for proper
| testing)
| seemaze wrote:
| I tried one of those N100 mini pcs and went back to the J4125
| purely for the thermals. My needs are not great, and the fans
| on the mini pc were quite loud quite often. The J4125 hums
| along fanless with a small heat sink no problem.
| layer8 wrote:
| You can get passively cooled versions like the Asus PN42 or
| the Zotac CI337, though not exactly cheap.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Odroid H4+ ($140 for the SBC, $10 for a case; extra cost
| for memories) is an example of a cheap passively cooled
| version. It can also use a fan, but the fan is optional and
| not required.
|
| There is an even cheaper version Odroid H4, at $100, which
| has a single 2.5 Gb/s port instead of two and it lacks SATA
| ports for HDDs (the fewer peripheral controllers also lead
| to a lower idle power consumption).
| seemaze wrote:
| I've seen these, and am intrigued. I went with an eBay lot
| of (5) Dell wyze 5070 @ $30 per unit. Tough to beat the
| economics.
| 3np wrote:
| Supposedly it should be not too difficult to downclock the
| N100 such that you get same/similar performance as the J4125
| for less heat/power?
| rcarmo wrote:
| It's a bit tricky to do that, and hardly justifies the
| effort. I have a J-series, an N100 and an N5105, and the
| biggest bottlenecks are always about I/O. The N100 makes a
| great Proxmox server solely due to the faster cores.
| 3np wrote:
| Different workloads I guess but context-switching/CPU
| (and associated increase of memory bandwidth) is/was
| holding my N5xx/N6xxx back from properly utilizing I/O.
|
| But this was in the context of someone who has an N100
| but prefers running a J-series over due to lower power
| consumption. It seems like it should be worth the effort?
| watmough wrote:
| Here's a comparison of the J4125 (Radxa X2L/Palmshell) vs
| EliteBook 8560w i7-2820QM vs Radxa X4 N100.
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3667vs5157vs885/Intel-
| Celeron-J4125-vs-Intel-N100-vs-Intel-i7-2820QM
|
| In comparison with a Pi 5, the slowest of the above, which is
| the X2L/Palmshell kicks the butt of the Pi 5 six ways to
| Wednesday. Just so much better, it's unreal. Web-page resizing
| works immediately, video plays well, it just feels like a real
| PC, even though it's a bit slower than my EliteBook, which is
| still pretty handy.
|
| Not got an X4 yet, but from the link above, it should be about
| 50% faster than the EliteBook, which in turn is 50% faster than
| the X2L / Palmshell.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The main advantage of the Alder Lake N CPUs, like N100, N97
| etc. is that they are very cheap, cheaper than the Arm CPUs of
| comparable speed, so they have made the latter not competitive
| in most cases, because they are both slower and more expensive
| and only their somewhat lower idle power consumption can make
| them preferable in certain cases (a properly configured Alder
| Lake N computer should have an idle power under 5 W, but going
| much lower than that is unlikely).
|
| A few months ago Intel has launched a refresh of Alder Lake N,
| with the code name Amston Lake, which are branded as belonging
| to the Atom x7000 series and Radxa said that there will be
| future variants of Radxa X4 that will use Amston Lake.
|
| An alternative to Radxa X4 for the cases when its minimum size
| and its minimum price are not essential is Odroid H4 ($100
| without memory) or Odroid H4+ ($140 without memory). That has
| the Nano-ITX size (5" by 5") and a big heatsink that can work
| even passively, fanless.
|
| The Alder Lake N/Amston Lake CPUs have the advantage of
| peripherals with higher speed than any competing Arm CPUs.
|
| Radxa X4 has 3 independent 10 Gb/s USB ports plus 2.5 Gb/s
| Ethernet plus 32 Gb/s M.2 PCIe socket. The best competing Arm-
| based computers, with RK3588 or with MediaTek Genio 1200 have
| at most 3 independent 5 Gb/s USB ports. All the Arm-based
| boards that appear to have many USB ports incorporate an USB
| hub, so those ports are not independent and their aggregate
| throughput is limited to 5 Gb/s.
|
| Another great advantage is that the Intel GPU is not only much
| faster than the Arm GPUs, but it has public documentation and
| it has much better software support.
| nextos wrote:
| Also, x86 is much better supported than ARM by OS and
| software.
|
| A N100 inside a fanless case is a great setup. I hope some of
| these low-power Intel CPUs start popping up in laptops, where
| competition for Apple M is truly welcome.
| paulmd wrote:
| Those things are insane value for the money. First breakout
| product intel has had in a long time, honestly.
|
| The downsides are that it's single-channel memory, which I'm
| not overly thrilled about, personally. Although I understand
| it's an important element of keeping the cost down, both in
| terms of die cost and also the systems integration around it.
| One channel = 1 socket... or soldered memory with half the
| modules.
|
| That said, the overall package speaks for itself. It's fine.
| Which is the standard to meet in this class of product. It
| costs less than $100 for a loaded rig that you plug in and run
| windows on, what are you really expecting here?
|
| And when you drive down the cost that far, a whole bunch of new
| use-cases open up. This is what the _social_ implication of
| moore 's law has always been - that eventually your fridge will
| have a computer with hundreds of MIPS of performance, because
| it's so cheap why not?
|
| And that was the argument for the RPi initially. Other than the
| "they'll use it to run computer labs!" which was silly and
| never materialized either.
|
| Been a big fan of Gemini Lake Plus for a lot of years too. It's
| cheap and good enough (and with the right modules you can stick
| 16gb or more (tested up to 32gb) of memory in it, which makes
| it totally acceptable for light desktop use. Same thing. It's
| good enough.
| loki1725 wrote:
| Genuine question, but what's the use case for this? I do a ton of
| embedded compute, but it all requires extensive GIPO/PWM, etc.
| Then I do a lot of desktop compute, but it all requires a GPU and
| a fair bit of horsepower.
|
| What's the use case for a SBC made to be embedded in a project
| box, but without extensive IO?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Emphasis on the low power. It's just a computer, but one that
| is cheap and yet still capable of doing work.
|
| Host a blog. Home automation. Dedicated SNES emulator. Personal
| Minecraft server. DIY NAS controller. Maybe good enough to act
| as a TV media player. Anywhere you might want a bit of always
| on compute without paying a ton.
| transpute wrote:
| _> DIY NAS controller_
|
| Needs ECC memory to compete with low-power Ryzen with ECC.
| kvemkon wrote:
| Intel N97 seems to support a so called In-Band ECC with
| non-ECC UDIMMs, thus there is a slight performance hit
| (both memory bandwidth and processing resources). I'm
| curious whether N100 does support it too, though
| considering a huge difference in a recommended price, it
| could support, but it would be artificially forced
| disabled.
| transpute wrote:
| Good to know, since ODROID H4 uses N97 and has 4 SATA
| ports + NVME with M.2 bifurcation,
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/ &
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/m-2-4x1-card/
| kvemkon wrote:
| Yeah, that's exactly where I've learned this from. It's
| just the very huge price if you need this board in
| Europe, which stays in the way.
| lmz wrote:
| Are there any low-power Ryzen boards in the same price
| range?
| transpute wrote:
| Are there any low-power Intel boards in the same price
| range, since this one is sold out?
| lmz wrote:
| Well, there's plenty of N100 mini PCs around, but Ryzen
| Embedded ones (which is I assume what you mean by low
| power Ryzen) are a bit more scarce.
| transpute wrote:
| There's also some 15W Ryzens for mobile, https://www.extr
| emetech.com/computing/amds-15w-ryzen-7-7840u... &
| https://cwwk.net/products/amd-
| ryzen-r5-5600u-r7-5800u-r7-582...
| lmz wrote:
| But those don't do ECC.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There are comparable (but beefier) things made by ASRock
| Industrial. I've been trying to get my hands on them, but
| it's hard.
| jsheard wrote:
| This does have provisions for GPIO, there's an RP2040
| microcontroller integrated onto the board which is wired to the
| N100s USB bus on one side and the exposed pin headers on the
| other. It's set up such that you can flash your own code onto
| the RP2040 so it should be quite flexible, you could just use
| it as a simple USB to GPIO bridge, or you could implement low
| level application logic on the RP2040 itself for stronger
| realtime guarantees.
| gary_0 wrote:
| I wonder how good the software/driver support is? That's a
| neat feature to have on an Intel-based SBC, but not if
| getting software to talk to it is next to impossible.
| pkaye wrote:
| They are connected by an UART.
| gary_0 wrote:
| What do you mean? I looked up the RP2040 datasheet[0],
| and it looks like it can be used as a plain USB device,
| and can be booted from USB. If that's how it's connected
| on this SBC, I'd imagine software support would be quite
| good since Linux probably has a built-in USB driver for
| it.
|
| [0] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-data
| sheet.p...
| 15155 wrote:
| Linux doesn't have any driver for the "RP2040" in the
| abstract - you have to design the USB device you want
| (which you could implement on any other USB capable
| microcontroller as well usually.)
|
| You can use the standard USB CDC classes with the RP2040
| to obtain Linux support without writing your own driver -
| but you still have to build this.
|
| You can only access the USB boot ROM after programming if
| you are able to toggle the boot selection pins with the
| host CPU's GPIO - no idea if that's connected here.
| jsheard wrote:
| The X4 has a physical button which is hooked up to the
| RP2040s BOOTSEL pin, if you need to force it back into
| the USB bootloader.
| pkaye wrote:
| I'm talking about how the RP2040 and the N100 are
| interconnected. With an UART port and also an USB port.
| Someone mentioned the USB port for software updates but
| maybe both UART and USB port can be used for
| communication between them.
|
| https://dl.radxa.com/x/x4/radxa_x4_v1.11_schematic.pdf
| Aurornis wrote:
| Raspberry Pi sized computers are very popular as second systems
| for experimenting and as home servers on a budget. For many
| people, it's an easy and cheap way to get a Linux server
| running in their home, apartment, or dorm, without spending a
| lot of money or having a noisy, hot, large old server box.
|
| They do okay for a lot of tasks. This board has a decent GPU
| for the power envelope. They can't keep up with a $1000
| workstation or server build, but it's a lot of horsepower for
| under $100 and around a dozen watts.
| mulletbum wrote:
| Very popular for a plex server right now.
| seanlane wrote:
| You can find versions that have 4+ NICs that make great routers
| running opnsense:
| https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topto...
| adrian_b wrote:
| There are 2 kinds of uses for this. Those that require a very
| small computer and those that require a very cheap computer.
|
| You can buy 4 or 5 Radxa X4 for the money that would be used
| for one NUC-like small computer with an AMD CPU or with an
| Intel Core CPU.
|
| Radxa X4 is much slower, but there are applications for which
| it is good enough, so there is no need for a more expensive
| computer.
|
| For example I would use it to replace an old Intel NUC that I
| am using (together with several USB Ethernet interfaces) as
| router/firewall/DNS server/DNS proxy/e-mail server/Web
| server/NTP server etc.
|
| Radxa X4 would be good enough to ensure the routing and
| filtering for four 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, while cheaper
| devices like those using quadruple Cortex-A55 cores are not
| good enough.
|
| For that Internet gateway, which must work 24/7 without
| downtime, I keep a spare unit ready to replace the main unit,
| if necessary. That means a double cost. With Radxa X4, the cost
| for two units remains very small, which is an incentive for
| using it instead of a more expensive SFF computer.
|
| The alternatives at the same price, i.e. Rasberry Pi and the
| similar SBCs that use RK3588, have a much lower peripheral
| throughput aggregated over all their peripheral interfaces than
| Radxa X4. With external USB hubs, Radxa X4 could be extended to
| 8 full-speed 2.5 Gb/s ports or more, or I could use up to three
| 10 Gb/s Ethernet ports instead of the 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports.
|
| The small size of Radxa X4 would be handy if I would use it as
| a portable firewall for a laptop. Unfortunately the modern
| laptops cannot be trusted due to the hardware backdoors that
| are implemented in them for remote management. So a paranoid
| user would want to disconnect the internal antennas and connect
| to wired or wireless networks through an external firewall, for
| which a Radxa X4, which has a published schematic, would be a
| good choice.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You need to factor in storage, cases/cooling and PSUs. Never
| consider just the bare board.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Absolutely could not help myself, preordered one. Same speed as
| my always-on i5-6500t mini-PC, and has a RPi0 on it? Neato.
| Coherent boot system & mainline kernels? Oh heck yes so much
| better than this amateur hour most cores make you suffer.
|
| Had kind of been planning to get whatever comes next, at a bigger
| tdp (more N305 class), but Radxa really nailed the price here,
| while being very fully featured.
| nirav72 wrote:
| At $60 - its able to run anything x86, plus hardware transcoding
| and a cpu about 3x more powerful than a RPI 5, not sure why
| anyone would even want a raspberry pi. Not to mention the built
| in 2.5G nic with PoE and m.2 slot. Adding a PoE and m.2 hats on a
| raspberry pi would add another $25-40 to the price. Hope they
| ramp up production on these Radxa boards.
|
| Edit: another source with better image of the form factor. It
| might actually fit a raspberry case.
|
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/07/19/radxa-x4-low-cost-cr...
| paulmd wrote:
| i've done the rant many times before [1] but frankly rpi has
| almost never made sense. there were always things like the ECS
| Liva/Liva X for $100-125 that were fully-featured, for roughly
| the same price as a rpi once you consider all the shit you'll
| need to get that $45 computer booted up. The Liva (and similar
| booksizes/net-tops, and similar things like AM1 platform from
| AMD) benefited hugely from using standard drivers and standard
| BIOS versus a massive amount of early ARM jank (the early RPi
| days a lot of things were actually soft-float, let alone
| niceties like UEFI!).
|
| the best argument for rpi has always been the combination of
| GPIO and linux. But that's a double-edged sword too, because
| linux isn't really very good at hard-realtime. And you can
| always just get a Bus Pirate or similar tool for doing just
| plain GPIO. And nowadays the ESP32 has basically completely
| displaced it for a lot of those sorts of "GPIO glue" roles.
|
| If you _didn 't_ need that, like if you just wanted a low-power
| fileserver or HTPC... the x86 stuff was better, because it
| actually worked reliably, at roughly the same price. Like
| literally just go buy an off-lease mini-tower or USFF mini-pc
| for $10 from a surplus store, even.
|
| This goes doubly when you consider all the problems with the
| early rpi. Like basically it uses USB 2.0 (unidirectional
| 500mbps) as a system bus... but it also dropped USB packets
| under load due to bugs in the firmware[0], that nobody outside
| the Pi foundation could address because Broadcom didn't release
| the documentation for like 5 years.
|
| [0] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297
| nirav72 wrote:
| yeah, even for GPIO interfacing, there are far cheaper
| options (ESP32) than the raspberry Pi out there. The Pi was
| an appealing piece of hardware about 10 years. But now, not
| sure it makes sense to use as a low cost server.
| adriancr wrote:
| There's raspberry pi pico and pi zero that compete against
| esp32.
|
| The product in title uses a rp2040 for gpio.
|
| I for one prefer the raspberry products (nice sdk for pico
| and much more features for not that much more power
| use/cost on pi zero)
|
| I do have ESP32s as well but they're mostly stuck to
| micropython.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| one big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs
| are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single
| digit watts. that advantage has decayed over time though...
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| A good number of the mini PC's idle under 12W. My i5-6500t
| does. Yeah they ramp up under load to 30W, but a before
| rpi5 to start to ramp up like that would've been way more
| compute than an RPi could offer.
|
| Also notably there are some low power options too. My first
| kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's;
| they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I
| used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram).
| But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata,
| gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would
| have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no
| turbo dual core I was getting.
|
| Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but
| there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big
| cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when
| running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with
| some additional TDP up available.
|
| Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86
| offerings. Just, not always super obvious.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| the n100 mini pc i got here runs at around 3.5 watts
| while running homeassistant with a unifi network server
| while having around two dozen devices connected. under
| debian 12 minimal.
| craftkiller wrote:
| How are you measuring that? I've been scouring the web
| for low-idle-power builds and 3.5 watts is far below the
| best builds I've found (assuming that 3.5 watts is
| measured at-the-wall).
| Semaphor wrote:
| The futro S740, popular with selfhosters in Germany, gets
| similar wattage for people [0]. On a slightly older CPU
| (J4105).
|
| I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs
| and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under
| full load.
|
| [0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_
| consump...
| weweweoo wrote:
| I've measured about 5w from the wall with Pentium J5005
| based Dell thin client which has a tiny fan, one SSD, two
| RAM modules. No idea how N100 compares to J5005.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| N100 runs slightly hotter, I've seen it more like 6-8W
| hollerith wrote:
| Apple claims that the latest Mac minis draw 7 W at idle:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
|
| E.g., Apple M2 Pro chip, 32GB unified memory, 8TB SSD.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Apple's still the only company that matches other Arm
| boards/servers on efficiency (perf/W) + idle power draw.
| AMD has been doing a little better, Intel slightly more
| so.
| paulmd wrote:
| no, the booksize pcs of the time were pretty comparable to
| what you see today in terms of power. rpi was a bit cheaper
| and lower-power... but also vastly slower. Like a factor of
| 4x if not more (10x?).
|
| Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using
| USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared
| 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory.
| Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a
| proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for
| peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory.
|
| For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva
| X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still
| sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model
| improved things a _little_ (512mb) but still, not a good
| showing for a product that competed directly with these x86
| nettop machines.
|
| And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w
| idle/12W load is not anything you're _really_ going to
| notice, _especially_ given the massive increase in
| performance it afforded.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-
| nett...
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-
| fanl...
|
| https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-
| Celeron%20N2807...
|
| https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-
| Celeron%20N2808...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications
|
| https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf
|
| Rpi team had great marketing. But it wasn't the only game
| in town even back then. Nettops existed for a long time.
| They just didn't have the full-court press in the glossies.
| fragmede wrote:
| Never understood RPis, because as a Intel user, you can
| already build such a system yourself quite trivially by
| getting a NUC, making a case locally with a 3d printer, and
| then using ZFS or Btrfs for the computer's filesystem.
| megous wrote:
| A also "Never understood why people go grocery shopping to
| make their own food for $25 when they can go to a
| restaurant for a $200 meal, or go through the gabage behind
| the restaurant to pick up some throwaway scraps for nearly
| free."
| irusensei wrote:
| RPis used to be cheap.
| k_bx wrote:
| I have a solution which was developed and tested by another
| person under rPi. I know it's working on exact model. All I
| need to do is to buy exactly the same model of rPi, install
| the same OS, and deploy that solution there, as many as I
| need.
|
| You need to be very naive to think that replacing rPi with a
| completely different thing will not bring any problems. Hell,
| even changing the rPi model does!
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The only reason the exact model matters at all in the first
| place, is because of arm and broadcom.
| k_bx wrote:
| Sure. And another thing that matters: the producer of a
| faulty USB cable that led us to waste several days of
| work. And another: shitty battery producer that led us
| waste several more days.
|
| This "little computer land" is flaky and hard, and rPi
| matters because it gives at least some common ground. I
| wish it'd be more universal, but it's not.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| What I've ways felt was a major advantage for Raspberry Pi
| compared to all of the other SBCs is that the Pi actually got
| regular updates. Maybe other SBC manufacturers started doing
| that too since I first got my hands on a Pi, but it
| definitely didn't use to be the case.
|
| The ECS Liva would cost me EUR200 (EUR278 when avoiding
| webshops that look like scams) without memory. An RPi5B is
| EUR88. I don't think I'll get more than twice the use out of
| an ECS Liva if all I want to run is Pihole.
|
| And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to bring
| a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It was
| created to aid schools in teaching kids about computers.
| They've changed their tune ever since just about everyone
| with a computer project started buying out their reserves,
| but making things easy for professionals was not part of the
| plan from the start.
|
| If you have cheap access to better computers, make good use
| of that! I still find the RPi to be competitive for cheap,
| low-power compute, though.
| paulmd wrote:
| The ECS Liva X is 10+ years old, it's a product I bought in
| 2014. You're seeing elevated prices from scalpers who are
| selling stock of a product that was discontinued 8 years
| ago, buying a new-in-box GTX 760 is going to run you a
| premium as well.
|
| At the time, I bought one Liva for $100 and then two Liva
| Xs for $125 each a year or so later. All of them were 2gb
| memory/32gb emmc models.
| nicoco wrote:
| I like to use a single remote for both my TV and Kodi, and
| the raspberry pi has the CEC HDMI thing which makes it
| possibke. It's not that common in SBCs AFAIK.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I partly agree, the RPi Zero W is my ideal small physical
| computer with a full OS. Running it only from the overlay
| filesystem (to keep those terrible SD cards from becoming
| corrupted). Pi-Hole I run from a docker container on a
| fanless NUC-a-like. But for anything that needs GPIO, the
| Zero W is great (nice that this Radxz has a RP2040 built in
| to cover that).
| paulmd wrote:
| > And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to
| bring a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It
| was created to aid schools in teaching kids about
| computers. They've changed their tune ever since just about
| everyone with a computer project started buying out their
| reserves, but making things easy for professionals was not
| part of the plan from the start.
|
| I go into this in my previous comment that I linked above,
| but I think it was a shitty product for that niche too. The
| original non-microSD version had massive problems with the
| SD cards slowly softening and deforming enough to cause
| unreliable contact with the socket, which was one of the
| failure modes that caused corruption.
|
| Another were the power brownouts, etc. People forget
| because usb chargers have gotten so much better over the
| years but 10 years ago a regular usb charger could
| generally not run a raspberry pi stable under load. Worse,
| it would _appear to be stable_ and just silently corrupt
| the SD card due to voltage brownout (writes don 't
| "stick"). Today we are seeing the same problem with the RPi
| 5s, where they have simply exceeded the capability of what
| can be delivered at 5V and aren't reliable.
|
| You could not even PXE boot them without having a SD card
| installed to provide the blobs, so there was no getting
| around this at the time.
|
| Pointing to the "you can pull the SD card and reflash it!"
| as being some kind of massive advantage is ignoring the
| massive downsides the SD card brought with it, again
| _especially_ until they finally switched to microSD so the
| cards didn 't melt and warp. I cannot fathom someone trying
| to run a computer lab on raspberry pis, that would have
| fucking sucked.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| According to your link, this board doesn't have built-in PoE,
| but requires an "optional hat". It links to a "currently
| unavailable" listing on Amazon, without any price info.
|
| However, I agree that if it costs as much as a RPI, it looks
| really great.
| irusensei wrote:
| I think hardware transcoding is a bit overrated since pretty
| much every device nowadays can decode most formats at a good
| resolution and frame rate.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I would hardly call hardware video decode/encode overrated. A
| hardware block will do the work with a fraction of the power
| that the CPU would take to do it, and in the case of
| something like a Pi 4 or Pi 5, you're now spending all of
| your limited CPU on video, rather than doing something
| useful.
|
| Maybe not a problem when you're plugged into the wall, but
| for those of us using Raspberry Pi's (and other computers) in
| mobile situations (laptops, robots, drones, etc.), the power
| consumption is a huge concern.
|
| My main usage of the Pi 4's video encoder was to record the
| video from the camera "for free" while the CPU was nearly
| maxed out doing stuff in OpenCV.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| The issue with a raspberry case is that N100 Radxa boards have
| the N100 on the bottom. That's where the heatsink has to go.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > the 40-pin GPIO header handled through a Raspberry Pi RP2040
| microcontroller.
|
| This part would be a reason why: very low GPIO throughput since
| you're limited to what can be shoved through serial and it all
| has to be must be manually processed by the extremely slow
| RP2040. The main upside with something like a Pi 4 is that it
| has zero overhead access to it via kernel api, so you can pipe
| hilarious amounts of data through its pins or address i2c
| devices directly from python with existing libraries for almost
| every sensor, etc.
|
| The Pi 5 using it through a PCIe southbridge is quite a lot
| worse, especially since it broke all compatibility and it still
| can't even drive even a simple WS2812 led strip yet a year
| after release. They've thrown away the last 10 years of
| community support and development since the layout was
| standardized with the Pi 2.
| zdw wrote:
| Two NICs and a giant passive heatsink (or huge slow/quiet fan)
| would make this a great router material.
| transpute wrote:
| ODROID H4 Plus, https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/
| brunoqc wrote:
| I wonder if I could run OpenBSD on this.
| toredash wrote:
| Same.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/start <- Looks like a
| very standard X86/AMD64 setup, with nothing which OpenBSD
| would have any problem with.
|
| Also the introduction of the H4 model line, straight from
| the horses mouth
| https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=168&t=48344 with
| all the gory details.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Just bought myself an MSI Cubi N for exactly that - 1Gbs ports
| only though.
| seanlane wrote:
| If you're feeling a little adventurous, you can find Intel N100
| boxes with 4-6 NICs:
| https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topto...
|
| Went down this route and haven't had any issues with heat or
| having to replace heatsinks, add fans, etc. that others
| mentioned, but your mileage may vary.
|
| Runs opnsense on proxmox, along with some other containers.
| It's been a great little box.
| methou wrote:
| Can't wait to have a Compute Module(CM) that's compatible with
| pi-cluster etc.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You need so much active cooling it would fall over if mounted
| on a vertical a lot.
| 15155 wrote:
| Where can I buy these N100 chips and get development material
| (reference designs, etc.) for them?
|
| Rockchip has been super easy, I have no idea where to start with
| Intel.
| adrian_b wrote:
| A new hardware project should better use the refresh of Alder
| Lake N, i.e. the Amston Lake CPUs, which are sold as the Atom
| x7000 series.
|
| Alder Lake N and Amston Lake are pin compatible, so the CPU
| model does not influence the schematic and PCB design.
|
| The development material is given by Intel under NDA, so you
| must contact Intel sales for that.
|
| Nevertheless, you can see the equivalent of a reference design
| by downloading the schematic of Radxa X4 and its PCB assembly
| drawings. Radxa is among the nice SBC vendors who provide good
| documentation for their products. All their products come with
| their complete schematics, as they should.
|
| For those who do not want or cannot enter in an NDA
| relationship with Intel, it is possible to design a product
| that uses a SOM instead of a CPU package. This greatly
| simplifies the design and the manufacturing, but SOMs are
| intended for industrial applications, so they are expensive.
|
| For example, I have looked now at DigiKey and I have seen a
| Advantech SOM with N97 (which is better than N100) at $272,
| with 4 GB DRAM, which is more than 4 times more expensive than
| a Radxa X4 SBC with 4 GB DRAM @ $60.
|
| The cheapest way to make a hardware design with Intel CPUs
| remains to integrate a small SBC like Radxa X4 into a bigger
| box, together with a custom PCB.
|
| Arm CPUs are not better. To make a hardware design with
| MediaTek Genio 1200 (quadruple Cortex-A78) or Rockwell RK3588
| (quadruple Cortex-A76), you still need to get under NDA the
| required documentation. Only for microcontrollers like those
| made by Renesas, Infineon, ST, NXP, Microchip etc. you may find
| the complete documentation on-line.
|
| For RK3588 there have been published many schematics of various
| SBC's, so for some less important project one could design a
| PCB based on the public RK3588 datasheet and on the available
| schematic examples, but for a serious project one would want
| the real Rockchip documentation.
|
| In the same way, for an amateur project one could make an N100
| design starting from the published Radxa X4 schematic, even
| without the Intel documentation. However, the Intel CPUs like
| Alder Lake N or Amston Lake are normally sold in bulk, e.g.
| 1000 pieces or at least a few hundred. It may be difficult to
| find a distributor who would sell smaller quantities.
| 15155 wrote:
| > The development material is given by Intel under NDA, so
| you must contact Intel sales for that.
|
| Any idea on MOQ? Do they still require supporting chipset
| purchases?
|
| Cost, pinout and voltage inflexibilities usually preclude my
| ability to use SOMs.
|
| The RK3588 documentation is all available without NDA, as are
| a handful of Rockchip's reference Altium designs. I've had no
| issues with the mainline RK3566/RK3568 - love these chips.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Searching now, I see that Atom x7425E (which is almost
| equivalent with N100, but it has a few extra features
| enabled, like in-band ECC, and it may happen to have a
| higher power consumption at default settings, because it is
| not tested @ 6 W, like N100; but for any Intel chip you can
| easily configure the desired power limits) can be bought as
| single pieces at Avnet for $79 (drops to $71 for 100
| pieces) and at Mouser for EUR 79 (drops to EUR 67 for 100
| pieces).
|
| The Atom CPUs, like N100 and the other Alder Lake N/Amston
| Lake, do not use chipsets.
|
| You can look at the Radxa X4 schematic to see what may be
| needed for power management and clock generation, besides
| the CPU package.
|
| If you only need small quantities, the Atom branded Alder
| Lake N are easier to find than those branded as
| N100/N97/N200/i3-N305, which are normally sold in large
| quantities to the big manufacturers of computers. You can
| see the available models in Intel Ark, at the Atom x7000
| series (Atom x72xx are 2-core, Atom x74xx are 4-core, Atom
| x78xx are 8-core).
| 15155 wrote:
| $85 - ouch.. Very tough pill to swallow with the RK3568
| at $10-13 including an RK809 PMIC.
| adrian_b wrote:
| RK3568, which is a quadruple Cortex-A55, is in a
| completely different class of products. Any price over
| $20 would be unacceptable for such products.
|
| The chips competing with Intel are only RK3588 and
| MediaTek Genio 1200.
|
| Those cannot be cheaper than Intel, because the SBCs made
| with them have prices from the same price as the Intel
| SBCs to much higher prices than the Intel SBCs.
|
| Radxa, which buys N100 in bulk, must pay at most $50 for
| one (the Intel list price is $55), but probably much
| less, perhaps as low as $30, but when you want only a few
| pieces you cannot buy at that price.
| 15155 wrote:
| The RK3588 is $35 with PMIC at MOQ 1 from two different
| CN parts people I deal with.
| adrian_b wrote:
| That price was for RK3588 or for RK3588S?
|
| (The latter uses a smaller package where many of the
| interfaces of RK3588 are not connected to external pins.)
| 15155 wrote:
| RK3588 in BGA-1088 with the metal heat spreader
| dvdkon wrote:
| LCSC has the RK3588S at 60 USD, so the high Intel prices
| on Mouser might just be artefacts of general parts
| suppliers selling specialised high-cost parts with high
| markup.
| bpye wrote:
| > Arm CPUs are not better. To make a hardware design with
| MediaTek Genio 1200 (quadruple Cortex-A78) or Rockwell RK3588
| (quadruple Cortex-A76), you still need to get under NDA the
| required documentation. Only for microcontrollers like those
| made by Renesas, Infineon, ST, NXP, Microchip etc. you may
| find the complete documentation on-line.
|
| Perhaps less interesting, but there are a handful of Cortex-A
| SoCs from TI [0] and NXP [1, 2], at least, that have non-NDA
| datasheets and reference manuals.
|
| [0] - https://www.ti.com/microcontrollers-mcus-
| processors/arm-base...
|
| [1] - https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-
| microcontrollers...
|
| [2] - https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-
| microcontrollers...
| adrian_b wrote:
| True, but all those are really obsolete Cortex-A cores.
|
| The Cortex-M cores used in microcontrollers have a much
| slower evolution, but the Cortex-A cores are updated every
| year and the differences between the more recent cores and
| the older cores are very big.
|
| Cortex-A78, like in MediaTek Genio 1200 is the 2021
| Cortex-A core. Cortex-A76, like in RK3588 and Raspberry Pi
| 5 is the 2019 Cortex-A core, already 5 years old.
|
| All older Cortex-A cores are hopelessly obsolete.
|
| There still are some borderline acceptable SBCs that use
| Cortex-A73, the 2017 Cortex-A core, i.e. 7 years old.
|
| The NXP and TI products use much weaker Cortex-A cores than
| even that.
|
| The only NXP products with Cortex-A cores that can be
| acceptable for certain purposes are those with Cortex-A55
| cores (2018). These at least support the Armv8.2-A ISA,
| which corrects some important defects in the original
| Armv8-A instruction set.
|
| Nevertheless, the Cortex-A55 cores are very small and slow,
| so using a CPU with them is justified only if that results
| in a much smaller or much cheaper SBC than when using
| Cortex-A7x cores. That means that any acceptable SBC that
| uses Cortex-A55 cores must be small and fanless, e.g. a
| fanless credit-card-sized SBC that must be cheap too, e.g.
| not exceeding $50 unless it contains a lot of memory and
| interfaces that could justify a price slightly higher than
| that.
|
| Many of the solutions using TI or NXP Cortex-A based
| devices fail to satisfy the power consumption, size and
| price values that are expected for such cores (frequently
| due to their use of ancient manufacturing processes, which
| may make a Cortex-A55 consume as much power as a Cortex-A7x
| made with a newer CMOS process).
|
| NXP makes microcontrollers with 1 GHz Cortex-M7 cores,
| which are good enough for many of the applications for
| which Raspberry Pi SBCs have been used. For the remaining
| applications, which need fast interfaces, like for SSDs,
| USB 3 or multiple Ethernet interfaces, it is better to go
| directly to a SBC like Radxa X4, so there are only very few
| applications where a device with obsolete Cortex-A cores
| can be preferred to a either a cheaper microcontroller or a
| faster Intel Atom CPU.
| Havoc wrote:
| Surprised no sata headers.
|
| I'll def wait to see if the fanless heat sinks work out on these
| first
| jsheard wrote:
| SATA is awkward because the drives need a +12V rail, and this
| board probably doesn't have one, so they'd have to cram another
| power supply in along with the SATA controller or leave the
| user to bodge together an external power supply solution. If
| you don't mind doing the latter you could put a SATA controller
| in the M.2 slot:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Support-Interface-Spports-Windo...
| nebalee wrote:
| The board is powered via USB-C PD at 12V, so it might as well
| have a 12V rail.
|
| But with a SATA connector they probably would have to account
| for power hungry devices with spinning disks, which feels a
| bit antithetic to having a power efficient processor.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have a similar board on order, and yes, you need a 12v
| source
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Only 3.5" drives need 12v though.
| scottlamb wrote:
| I think they just had to make some compromises for price and
| form factor. There are a lot of other boards out there based on
| the N100 or its close friends. You might like the ODROID-H4+.
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/
|
| The advantage of the Radxa X4 is that you can buy it instead of
| a Raspberry Pi: similar price, similar form factor, similar
| GPIO options via the on-board RP2040.
| gammacherenkov wrote:
| I would like to add another comment on the matter of idle power
| draw, that is turning out to be somewhat disappointing on the
| platforms of this generation (a).
|
| The TinyMiniMicro PCs from 8/9th-gen Intel are impressive as they
| can get below 3 W at the wall. Gemini Lake (Refresh) thin clients
| can also easily get under 4 W. I wonder whether these
| performances come from optimisations driven by actual market
| requirements (I guess it can make a difference for a company that
| run thousands of those?).
|
| ARM RK3588 platforms are champions in this regard. My Orange Pi 5
| Plus idles at 1.5W (less than a RPi 4, with the same power
| supply). However, they are not viable for people who want to run
| Proxmox.
|
| It seems that almost all N100 platforms idle above 5 W. Also,
| there are not so many passively cooled options from reputable
| manufacturers, while actively cooled boxes are not so silent
| (while TinyMiniMicro PCs are super quiet under most usage
| scenarios).
|
| (a) With EU energy prices, a 5 W difference translates to 20-35
| EUR per year on the electricity bill.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yeah, all my N-series machines idle at 6-8W with nothing but an
| EMMC/SSD and Ethernet plugged it. Older J-series are about the
| same.
|
| RK3588 boards go substantially lower, and the other RK series
| look to do less.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > (a) With EU energy prices, a 5 W difference translates to
| 20-35 EUR per year on the electricity bill.
|
| 0.45 - 0.80 EUR/kWh is surely on the high-end? In most
| countries it seem to be less than ~0.25 (pr at least 0.3)
|
| https://qery.no/consumer-energy-prices-in-europe/
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 14c here in Spain yeah. Some countries like the Netherlands
| are a lot higher but they painted themselves in a corner with
| gas dependence. At the same time Russian imports became
| politically unviable their own gas fields became untenable
| due to earthquakes. Prices went up to 50-100c per kWh and I
| believe still hover around the 40c level there.
|
| Most of the electricity there isn't generated by gas but they
| also stimulated electric heat pump heating heavily leading to
| a huge pressure on the grid.
|
| But anyway I live in Spain now so I don't care :P
| gammacherenkov wrote:
| You are right, I think I screwed up the estimate. I was
| thinking more 0.30-0.45 EUR / kWh so less than 20 EUR per
| year.
| iAkashPaul wrote:
| Can't wait to get this & have TrueNAS+Jellyfin up & running on
| it, certainly beats having to buy so many addons for the Pi &
| still not have a super reliable build.
| c0g wrote:
| Does anyone have experience of putting a huge GPU on something
| like this and using it for inference? You'd be limited by data
| feeding over the NVME port, but otherwise you won't be
| bottlenecked right? Seems like a light weight and cute way to
| limit non-inference power/weight without having to pay the price
| of a Jetson board.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You just don't have the bandwidth to do that. Even if you use
| the M.2 slot you'll be significantly bottlenecked and would be
| better off using something else - even an AMD iGPU will work
| better (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/04/13/2100)
| c0g wrote:
| What's the bottleneck? Once I've got the model and data onto
| the GPU my only cost is launching CUDA kernels right?
|
| Not sure if that blog post is relevant, but even if it is it
| shows a 3060 gets //way// faster throughout than the igpu it
| is testing. I suppose I can test this myself by plugging my
| 3070 into the NVME on my desktop.
| dvdbloc wrote:
| Does anyone know where to buy one of these? Aliexpress keeps
| saying it is out of stock and has for about a week now.
| GordonS wrote:
| One of these with Emulation Station should make a fantastic retro
| gaming machine! I'm using an Rpi 4 as one at present, but for
| sure it would be better with much more CPU power.
| madduci wrote:
| You should then look definitely for Batocera Linux
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Curious about the max frequencies on the GPIO pins since I
| believe it drives them with an RP2040. Not actually sure how the
| RP2040 interfaces with the Intel chip though.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I presume it would just be attached over USB internally. That
| would make using it with the official SDK and other tooling as
| easy as a Pico attached to any other computer.
| robotnikman wrote:
| >This means that I was able to grab the Windows 11 ISO and
| install it. I was able to go to Debian's homepage, grab the
| latest ISO and just, well, install it?
|
| Still the biggest advantage x86 has over ARM in my opinion. I
| hope one day common ARM processors become as flexible.
|
| Either way its amazing to see x86 processors so cheap, low power,
| and still rather powerful. I hope to see more devices using these
| N100's
| javchz wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I recently got a Raspberry Pi 5 and regret not getting one of
| these N100s instead for a small home server. A lot of the
| killer features of the Pi like using a traditional phone
| charger, being passively cooled, and being "cheap" are no
| longer there if you want a stable system. On the other hand,
| the "low power" from ARM systems, it's not that big of a lip
| compared to a traditional X64 mini-PC CPUs.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yep. I was in the same spot. The N100 is also cheaper if you
| factor in the adapter, case, nvme etc. I had a N100 for 100
| bucks. Much better than a pi for a small home assistant
| server IMO. Raspberries are no longer cheap nor especially
| good value for money.
|
| Things were really different at the time of their
| introduction. There wasn't really anything similar except the
| Marvell based sheevaplug.
|
| The only thing I'd use a pi for now is something that really
| needs GPIO as well as significant processing (eg more than an
| esp32 offers).
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Ampere is the main company with that kind of setup (with full
| EDK II BIOS and UEFI), but they still target server / HEDT, not
| desktop, and certainly not the SBC/hobby space.
|
| I asked Raspberry Pi about the likelihood of seeing UEFI
| support this year and it didn't sound like it was a priority,
| at least not for the Pi 5 generation. Would still love to see
| it, as it would let distro maintainers focus less on a few
| "premiere" Arm boards and be able to just have one distro for
| aarch64.
| irusensei wrote:
| You can use aarch64 ISOs on some ARM64 computers through UEFI,
| RPi3+ included. Need to install firmware though. Similar if you
| use Tow-boot on some Pine64 devices and there is a project for
| recent Rockchip boards.
|
| I have 2 Rockpro64s which I boot and installed the default ISO
| of Fedora Server from an ISO file on USB.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I feel like there's an assault going on regarding the usage of
| the question mark? I see it all over social media?
|
| In actual questions, however, it is dismissed altogether?
|
| Where are we going with this trend.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Does anyone know if the Ethernet controller supports EtherCAT?
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