10 ms·

Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decent

Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool.

ac29 8y ago
Why not just use a Atom-based NUC? At 10W TDP (and mostly at idle for many uses), other power draws become more important anyways. Modern Atom's are surprisingly competent.
- notafraudster 8y ago
  Intel hasn't released an Atom-based NUC in 4.5 years (they do have a few more modern "Celeron" or "Pentium" branded units -- not sure if these are intended to be efficient or just cheap). But yes, of course my original comment wasn't implying there is anything magical about ARM that Intel couldn't do -- just that historically they have really dominated the performance per watt low TDP space and Intel's current "efficient" offerings still have pretty huge power draw.
  - ac29 8y ago
    There are at least 2 recent Atom NUC's. They do use the "Celeron" branding, which is a little confusing because there are both Core-based Celerons and Atom-based Celerons. But these two are Atom: Gemini Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/nuc7cjysal.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits... Apollo Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/nuc6cays.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
  - lhl 8y ago
    I don't track the Intel NUC SKUs super closely, but the industrial/embedded board sector is lousy with tiny low-power x86 chips in USFF/NUC, PicoITX, 3.5" form factors (Aaeon, Axiomtek, Jetway, etc or just browse through linuxgizmos.com or cnx-software.com for a constant stream of releases). On the consumer side there might be less, but the Gigabyte Brix, ECS Liva, and the Zotac mini-PC lines seem to be running strong and have a full line of TDPs - Zotac's latest P-series units look pretty great for their size: https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all
- dgregd 8y ago
  Two weeks ago I bought a small Zotac box with Intel Celeron N3060. The whole system with 4GB RAM and SSD drive consumes 8W. It is good for backups. It runs Ubuntu 18.04 w/o any problems.
nutjob2 8y ago
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/ https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/
- rrix2 8y ago
  OP was looking for an ARM machine, not a five year old intel machine
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  Apple's Mac Mini hasn't been updated since 2014. I suspect the performance / power consumption ratio is even worse on these as a result.
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  Starts at $499 > Maximum continuous power: 85W
  - Joeri 8y ago
    It’s a 28W TDP part, so the same power draw as the nuc but a 4th gen instead of 8th gen cpu.
sorenjan 8y ago
I find it odd that there's so little choice between Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC. With all these high powered mobile phones there should be plenty of chips that would be fast enough. I can buy a phone with CPU, GPU, battery, modem, screen, etc for $100, but there's very little cheap low powered PCs.
- knolan 8y ago
  I’ve stuck Intel Compute Sticks onto a few lab machines with good success. Like NUCs they’re a bit too expensive but they are great for a running a tool off a VESA mounted panel, especially as many of these things need Windows.
- shams93 8y ago
  Yeah the only device that fits that profile is the asus chromebit but it runs chromeos and can't yet run android or linux apps so its a much more limited device than the pi even with double the ram.
- AceJohnny2 8y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you, but I can understand why, based on the market: You can buy a cheap powerful phone because there's a market for it. The margins are in the scale of the consumer market. However, there isn't as much a market for a generic "beige-box" cheap CPU. It's one of the difficult realizations of being a techie: the kind of undifferentiated, cheap, flexible box we want just doesn't carry itself as a product.
- giobox 8y ago
  Have you tried looking much? There's actually a fair bit of choice, and has been for the past few years, with many quad-core ARM based Pi competitors in the sub $100 market these days, all using various mobile phone style CPUs: > https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alternative/ https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte... The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally. > https://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php https://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php
shams93 8y ago
Arm isn't like Intel they don't make their own hardware, they design and license their chip designs. A hardware maker would have to license one of these upcoming future chip designs, build their own chip based on it and then sell that. Which is why it takes the resources of an Apple or an Asus to produce these devices. Just the license from Arm alone is a huge cost up front.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Right, but you can still buy these chips after they have made it through this process. There are many ARM chips with decent performance that you can get as a SOM. Some of them even have decent documentation.
- monocasa 8y ago
  To be fair, ARM does build some of it's own chips, they just don't sell them to end users and they cost a very pretty penny. Their RealView/Integrator/Versatile boards have custom ARM chips.
ofrzeta 8y ago
Helios4 is not exactly a NUC but at least it has native SATA instead of a USB bridge: https://kobol.io/helios4/ https://kobol.io/helios4/
RossBencina 8y ago
I'm not sure what qualifies as a NUC, but there are a few "high-end" ARM SoC boards with PCIe now. Here are a few in the $100-$300 price range: Rockchip RK3399 boards: NanoPC-T4, $109 2x A72@2GHz, 4xA53@1.5Ghz 4GB LPDDR3-1866 RAM, 4 lane PCIe M.2 80mm https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=225 https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&... http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4 http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4 RockPro64, $80 2x A72@1.8GHz, 4xA53@1.4Ghz 4GB RAM, 4 lane PCIe full-size slot http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-computer https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c... Rock960, ~$99 https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/ https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/ HiSilicon Kirin boards: HiKey960, $239 Kirin 960, 4x A73@2.4GHz 4x A53@1.8GHz, 3GB LPDDR4, TSMC 16nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey960/hardware-docs/hardware-user-manual.md.html https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey9... HiKey970, $299 Kirin 970, 4x A73@2.36GHz, 4x A53@1.8GHz, 6GB LPDDR4X-1866, PCIe M.2 2260?, TSMC 10nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM There's also the Socinext 24-core developer box. It's $1200 for a complete system: https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/ https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/
- loser777 8y ago
  Having dabbled with a few of these boards (RK3399, Hikey960), I can say that the user experience is still quite far off from what you would expect on an x86 NUC running a GNU/Linux distro. Even finding usable images to flash was tough on the RK3399 and near-impossible on the HiKey960. Even then, the HiKey960 image I found was pretty unstable (randomly killed processes due to a mysterious OOM) and was contributed by a _forum user_, not the official vendor (they seem to mainly support Android). What should be kept in mind is that these are essentially phones-on-a-board that may or may not have been shoehorned properly to run a desktop Linux. That comes with all of the relevant baggage. For example, the HiKey960 board will aggressively thermal throttle given that all that comes with the board is a piddly copper "heatsink" that you _glue_ on the SoC. Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi is the only board that I've come across that offers a sane GNU/Linux experience in terms of software support. The performance is acceptable if you consider that even these 4xA73 boards would still get smoked by a reasonable desktop CPU.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Just underclock and undervolt them.
carlosedp 8y ago
Here is a simple benchmark comparing a Linux VM in my laptop with 2 cores, 4 cores and the RockPro64 board. On the SBC section I've put the power consumption during my tests: https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bfd964a8 https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bf... Fantastic for a $80 board that consumes less than 10W.
- notafraudster 8y ago
  Just replying to say thanks for the useful info! :D
cmurf 8y ago
I think this is 5th generation (?) and it's 6W TDP. I've had one since Dec 2015 running Fedora Server and it's been rock solid. I've even installed Windows 10 in a libvirt/qemu/kvm VM (testing not production), but it's great for running docker containers. Bit slow for compiling things, but nice to offload that work onto the NUC, walk away and do something else and not have to worry about interrupting it if I need to reboot or sleep the laptop going to lunch. https://ark.intel.com/products/87740/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC5PPYH https://ark.intel.com/products/87740/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC5PPYH

ac29 8y ago

Why not just use a Atom-based NUC? At 10W TDP (and mostly at idle for many uses), other power draws become more important anyways. Modern Atom's are surprisingly competent.

notafraudster 8y ago
Intel hasn't released an Atom-based NUC in 4.5 years (they do have a few more modern "Celeron" or "Pentium" branded units -- not sure if these are intended to be efficient or just cheap). But yes, of course my original comment wasn't implying there is anything magical about ARM that Intel couldn't do -- just that historically they have really dominated the performance per watt low TDP space and Intel's current "efficient" offerings still have pretty huge power draw.
- ac29 8y ago
  There are at least 2 recent Atom NUC's. They do use the "Celeron" branding, which is a little confusing because there are both Core-based Celerons and Atom-based Celerons. But these two are Atom: Gemini Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/nuc7cjysal.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits... Apollo Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/nuc6cays.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
- lhl 8y ago
  I don't track the Intel NUC SKUs super closely, but the industrial/embedded board sector is lousy with tiny low-power x86 chips in USFF/NUC, PicoITX, 3.5" form factors (Aaeon, Axiomtek, Jetway, etc or just browse through linuxgizmos.com or cnx-software.com for a constant stream of releases). On the consumer side there might be less, but the Gigabyte Brix, ECS Liva, and the Zotac mini-PC lines seem to be running strong and have a full line of TDPs - Zotac's latest P-series units look pretty great for their size: https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all
dgregd 8y ago
Two weeks ago I bought a small Zotac box with Intel Celeron N3060. The whole system with 4GB RAM and SSD drive consumes 8W. It is good for backups. It runs Ubuntu 18.04 w/o any problems.

nutjob2 8y ago

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/ https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/

rrix2 8y ago
OP was looking for an ARM machine, not a five year old intel machine
oarsinsync 8y ago
Apple's Mac Mini hasn't been updated since 2014. I suspect the performance / power consumption ratio is even worse on these as a result.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
Starts at $499 > Maximum continuous power: 85W
- Joeri 8y ago
  It’s a 28W TDP part, so the same power draw as the nuc but a 4th gen instead of 8th gen cpu.

sorenjan 8y ago

I find it odd that there's so little choice between Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC. With all these high powered mobile phones there should be plenty of chips that would be fast enough. I can buy a phone with CPU, GPU, battery, modem, screen, etc for $100, but there's very little cheap low powered PCs.

knolan 8y ago
I’ve stuck Intel Compute Sticks onto a few lab machines with good success. Like NUCs they’re a bit too expensive but they are great for a running a tool off a VESA mounted panel, especially as many of these things need Windows.
shams93 8y ago
Yeah the only device that fits that profile is the asus chromebit but it runs chromeos and can't yet run android or linux apps so its a much more limited device than the pi even with double the ram.
AceJohnny2 8y ago
I'm in the same boat as you, but I can understand why, based on the market: You can buy a cheap powerful phone because there's a market for it. The margins are in the scale of the consumer market. However, there isn't as much a market for a generic "beige-box" cheap CPU. It's one of the difficult realizations of being a techie: the kind of undifferentiated, cheap, flexible box we want just doesn't carry itself as a product.
giobox 8y ago
Have you tried looking much? There's actually a fair bit of choice, and has been for the past few years, with many quad-core ARM based Pi competitors in the sub $100 market these days, all using various mobile phone style CPUs: > https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alternative/ https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte... The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally. > https://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php https://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php

shams93 8y ago

Arm isn't like Intel they don't make their own hardware, they design and license their chip designs. A hardware maker would have to license one of these upcoming future chip designs, build their own chip based on it and then sell that. Which is why it takes the resources of an Apple or an Asus to produce these devices. Just the license from Arm alone is a huge cost up front.

Skunkleton 8y ago
Right, but you can still buy these chips after they have made it through this process. There are many ARM chips with decent performance that you can get as a SOM. Some of them even have decent documentation.
monocasa 8y ago
To be fair, ARM does build some of it's own chips, they just don't sell them to end users and they cost a very pretty penny. Their RealView/Integrator/Versatile boards have custom ARM chips.

ofrzeta 8y ago

Helios4 is not exactly a NUC but at least it has native SATA instead of a USB bridge: https://kobol.io/helios4/ https://kobol.io/helios4/

RossBencina 8y ago

I'm not sure what qualifies as a NUC, but there are a few "high-end" ARM SoC boards with PCIe now. Here are a few in the $100-$300 price range: Rockchip RK3399 boards: NanoPC-T4, $109 2x A72@2GHz, 4xA53@1.5Ghz 4GB LPDDR3-1866 RAM, 4 lane PCIe M.2 80mm https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=225 https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&... http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4 http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4 RockPro64, $80 2x A72@1.8GHz, 4xA53@1.4Ghz 4GB RAM, 4 lane PCIe full-size slot http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-computer https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c... Rock960, ~$99 https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/ https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/ HiSilicon Kirin boards: HiKey960, $239 Kirin 960, 4x A73@2.4GHz 4x A53@1.8GHz, 3GB LPDDR4, TSMC 16nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey960/hardware-docs/hardware-user-manual.md.html https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey9... HiKey970, $299 Kirin 970, 4x A73@2.36GHz, 4x A53@1.8GHz, 6GB LPDDR4X-1866, PCIe M.2 2260?, TSMC 10nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM There's also the Socinext 24-core developer box. It's $1200 for a complete system: https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/ https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/

loser777 8y ago
Having dabbled with a few of these boards (RK3399, Hikey960), I can say that the user experience is still quite far off from what you would expect on an x86 NUC running a GNU/Linux distro. Even finding usable images to flash was tough on the RK3399 and near-impossible on the HiKey960. Even then, the HiKey960 image I found was pretty unstable (randomly killed processes due to a mysterious OOM) and was contributed by a _forum user_, not the official vendor (they seem to mainly support Android). What should be kept in mind is that these are essentially phones-on-a-board that may or may not have been shoehorned properly to run a desktop Linux. That comes with all of the relevant baggage. For example, the HiKey960 board will aggressively thermal throttle given that all that comes with the board is a piddly copper "heatsink" that you _glue_ on the SoC. Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi is the only board that I've come across that offers a sane GNU/Linux experience in terms of software support. The performance is acceptable if you consider that even these 4xA73 boards would still get smoked by a reasonable desktop CPU.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

Just underclock and undervolt them.

carlosedp 8y ago

Here is a simple benchmark comparing a Linux VM in my laptop with 2 cores, 4 cores and the RockPro64 board. On the SBC section I've put the power consumption during my tests: https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bfd964a8 https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bf... Fantastic for a $80 board that consumes less than 10W.

notafraudster 8y ago
Just replying to say thanks for the useful info! :D

cmurf 8y ago

I think this is 5th generation (?) and it's 6W TDP. I've had one since Dec 2015 running Fedora Server and it's been rock solid. I've even installed Windows 10 in a libvirt/qemu/kvm VM (testing not production), but it's great for running docker containers. Bit slow for compiling things, but nice to offload that work onto the NUC, walk away and do something else and not have to worry about interrupting it if I need to reboot or sleep the laptop going to lunch. https://ark.intel.com/products/87740/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC5PPYH https://ark.intel.com/products/87740/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC5PPYH