7 ms·

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

by 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

dcbadacd 8y ago
> The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the usability of the Pi I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.
- giobox 8y ago
  > I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional) There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching. I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    > but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.
  - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
    Mainline drivers or bust. Today we no longer absolutely need to make compromises and rely on corporate support for out of tree kernelsm
  - imtringued 8y ago
    I don't think so. I feel like the Pi is dragging down the rest of the industry by using broadcom chips based on a GPU that has been obsolete for a long time.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      How can the Pi be dragging down the industry that it created and is still dominating by a hefty margin? People already have plenty of alternatives but somehow their price/performance ratio renders them to obscurity. Perhaps that must mean something.
      - oarsinsync 8y ago
        A small player in an industry doesn't have the volume to drag down the industry, only the dominant player does. The dominant player in this instance is insisting on using chipsets that are effectively obsolete when compared to the competition. As a result, the community that they command continues to work on supporting this obsolete hardware, rather than newer hardware. Network effects exist here just like in many other industries.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Exactly this. ARM is not a platform. It's some SoC where each manufacture solders some random pins to random chips. Few manufactures publish device tress and only the dead Windows phones have UEFI+ARM (with their locked bootloaders. Fuck you MS). If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    > Fuck you MS To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".
    - floatboth 8y ago
      Rockchip, Marvell, AMD (barely an ARM manufacturer, but SoftIron sells them), Cavium (mostly on super-expensive servers though)
      - dcbadacd 8y ago
        Pretty sure Rockchip has violated Linux's GPL. Rest of who you listed I've never seen/used in real life.
        floatboth 8y ago
        Maybe a very long time ago. Or you're confusing them with Allwinner. Rockchip has the source of all the things on their GitHub, and a ton of commits in mainline Linux.
        fake-name 8y ago
        You've never heard of amd?
        userbinator 8y ago
        I think they did, but I'll take GPL violations and (possibly leaked?) publicly available documentation over GPL-compliant source code dumps (which are next-to-useless for actually understanding the hardware anyway.)
- lhl 8y ago
  To be fair, the OP wanted a <28W TDP NUC, and honestly, I'm also a bit mystified by the question as the market is lousy with them. If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less). Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).
darpa_escapee 8y ago
Odroid boards are pretty great, they took end-user needs seriously when designing the their later products. At the time, they sold one of the only consumer ARM boards that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers[1]. Hardkernel has also been patching new kernels for their boards, which is a breath of fresh air. Usually, consumer ARM boards, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation's offerings, are tied to single kernel release and, unless you wanted to commit a lot of time to building your own patchsets, they'd never see a kernel update. [1] http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/201506191222574523.png http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/20150...
- floatboth 8y ago
  Rockchip has quite a lot of mainline Linux support http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix#Mainline_Kernel_Status_Matrix http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix#Mainline... and good documentation.
- rogerbinns 8y ago
  > that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers Are you sure? As far as I could tell, they had a single USB 3 controller that had a 2 port hub. One port was connected to gigabit ethernet, while the other was connected to another two port hub which is the two ports on the device. ie all devices connected to USB 3 and the gigabit are sharing the controller and bandwidth. The background is the Exynos chip used was intended for the cell phone market, where there is no need for multiple USB 3 controllers, in addition the existing USB 2 controllers.
rogerbinns 8y ago
There are also Intel based boards. Apologies for sounding like an ad. I am a big fan of the upboard which starts at $90 and goes up if you add more RAM and storage. They also have a 40 pin connector that is the same as the raspberry pi. It uses a 64 bit Atom chip, and performs surprisingly well. (There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works. BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi. Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.
- giobox 8y ago
  I actually have one of these "Up!" boards as well, it is pretty awesome to get decentish x86 performance in an identical form factor to the Pi, along with built in storage, 4GB of RAM and 'real' gigabit networking. It cost at the time approximately the same as 4x Pi 3s, but was well worth it for the massive increase in performance. They deserve to be far more popular than they are. > http://www.up-board.org/ http://www.up-board.org/
- userbinator 8y ago
  and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. That's what x86 was always winning at. Power consumption is higher, however.
  - rogerbinns 8y ago
sorenjan 8y ago
I know there are plenty of different boards out there, like BananaPi, Odroid, etc, but a lot of them have questionable driver support and are still bare PCBs. The ODROID-HC1 does look interesting though. I guess what I'd really want is a x86 device to get a more PC like experience. I can buy a tablet with battery, touch screen, and Intel Atom X5-Z8300 CPU for less than $90 [0], but there aren't any good cheap x86 alternatives for simple home servers. [0] https://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_298397.html https://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_298397.html
- slezyr 8y ago
  Trust me, driver support is just as bad as with ARMs on those Z8300 devices.
imtringued 8y ago
I don't get it. Your list doesn't even include the RK3399 which is the fastest SoC you can nowadays get on an SBC for $100 and even that only has a geekbench score between 3k to 4k (RPi 3 is 1.2k and my 5 year old i5 has 10k). You'd expect to get at least a 5k score from an SBC for it to be viable. Also this whole announcement is really petty... Qualcomm and Apple already have SoCs with scores higher than 9k on geekbench so why does ARM have so much trouble making good cpu cores? They are comparing existing 14nm CPUs with theoretical 7nm CPUs that they haven't even released yet. Of course it's going to perform better. It would be embarrassing if it didn't...
- ferongr 8y ago
  Geekbench is a bit of a bogus benchmark. I really doubt that the Rockchip board would have even quarter the actual performance on "real" programs (e.g. x264, imagemagick, povray etc.)
  - derefr 8y ago
    > "real" programs (e.g. x264, imagemagick, povray etc.) ...none of which are CPU-bound, instead relying on either hardware accelerators or the presence of specific SIMD instructions. Geekbench is pretty good at measuring how well a chip would perform / scale as a web-app server. (Ignoring IO bandwidth, that is. A benchmark that incorporated both would be brilliant.)
    - ferongr 8y ago
      x264 is an h264/AVC encoder that uses the CPU to extract maximum quality for a given bitrate. It does not support any fixed-function hardware on GPUs and the like since that goes contrary to its goals (gpu-accelerated encodes tend to have worse quality for a given bitrate and the fixed-function hardware doesn't support profiles like Hi10p that can improve quality). Pov-ray is a raytracer. It only runs know he CPU (it has no codepaths to use the GPU). imagemagick is an command line image manipulation suite that by default uses the CPU to perform operations in images. There is opencl support but it requires either a build option or configuration option for it to be enabled. My own experience, comparing LAME and flac encoder speeds on an Android device (binaries invoked via a terminal emulator) to a desktop CPU and comparing the actual performance to the geekbench 4 scores showed that gb overrated the Android device by almost 125%.
mojo982 8y ago
My issue with these is they still use MicroSD cards. I basically want a Raspberry Pi with a SATA connector so I can use an actual hard drive or SSD.
- giobox 8y ago
  You've been able to boot a Pi from USB for quite some time now, avoiding the issues with using a MicroSD card. While it isn't SATA, booting from USB still allows use of an external drive.

by giobox 8y ago

dcbadacd 8y ago

> The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the usability of the Pi I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.

giobox 8y ago
> I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional) There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching. I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  > but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
  Mainline drivers or bust. Today we no longer absolutely need to make compromises and rely on corporate support for out of tree kernelsm
- imtringued 8y ago
  I don't think so. I feel like the Pi is dragging down the rest of the industry by using broadcom chips based on a GPU that has been obsolete for a long time.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    How can the Pi be dragging down the industry that it created and is still dominating by a hefty margin? People already have plenty of alternatives but somehow their price/performance ratio renders them to obscurity. Perhaps that must mean something.
    - oarsinsync 8y ago
      A small player in an industry doesn't have the volume to drag down the industry, only the dominant player does. The dominant player in this instance is insisting on using chipsets that are effectively obsolete when compared to the competition. As a result, the community that they command continues to work on supporting this obsolete hardware, rather than newer hardware. Network effects exist here just like in many other industries.
djsumdog 8y ago
Exactly this. ARM is not a platform. It's some SoC where each manufacture solders some random pins to random chips. Few manufactures publish device tress and only the dead Windows phones have UEFI+ARM (with their locked bootloaders. Fuck you MS). If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  > Fuck you MS To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".
  - floatboth 8y ago
    Rockchip, Marvell, AMD (barely an ARM manufacturer, but SoftIron sells them), Cavium (mostly on super-expensive servers though)
    - dcbadacd 8y ago
      Pretty sure Rockchip has violated Linux's GPL. Rest of who you listed I've never seen/used in real life.
      - floatboth 8y ago
        Maybe a very long time ago. Or you're confusing them with Allwinner. Rockchip has the source of all the things on their GitHub, and a ton of commits in mainline Linux.
      - fake-name 8y ago
        You've never heard of amd?
      - userbinator 8y ago
        I think they did, but I'll take GPL violations and (possibly leaked?) publicly available documentation over GPL-compliant source code dumps (which are next-to-useless for actually understanding the hardware anyway.)
lhl 8y ago
To be fair, the OP wanted a <28W TDP NUC, and honestly, I'm also a bit mystified by the question as the market is lousy with them. If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less). Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).

darpa_escapee 8y ago

Odroid boards are pretty great, they took end-user needs seriously when designing the their later products. At the time, they sold one of the only consumer ARM boards that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers[1]. Hardkernel has also been patching new kernels for their boards, which is a breath of fresh air. Usually, consumer ARM boards, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation's offerings, are tied to single kernel release and, unless you wanted to commit a lot of time to building your own patchsets, they'd never see a kernel update. [1] http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/201506191222574523.png http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/20150...

floatboth 8y ago
Rockchip has quite a lot of mainline Linux support http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix#Mainline_Kernel_Status_Matrix http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix#Mainline... and good documentation.
rogerbinns 8y ago
> that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers Are you sure? As far as I could tell, they had a single USB 3 controller that had a 2 port hub. One port was connected to gigabit ethernet, while the other was connected to another two port hub which is the two ports on the device. ie all devices connected to USB 3 and the gigabit are sharing the controller and bandwidth. The background is the Exynos chip used was intended for the cell phone market, where there is no need for multiple USB 3 controllers, in addition the existing USB 2 controllers.

rogerbinns 8y ago

There are also Intel based boards. Apologies for sounding like an ad. I am a big fan of the upboard which starts at $90 and goes up if you add more RAM and storage. They also have a 40 pin connector that is the same as the raspberry pi. It uses a 64 bit Atom chip, and performs surprisingly well. (There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works. BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi. Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.

giobox 8y ago
I actually have one of these "Up!" boards as well, it is pretty awesome to get decentish x86 performance in an identical form factor to the Pi, along with built in storage, 4GB of RAM and 'real' gigabit networking. It cost at the time approximately the same as 4x Pi 3s, but was well worth it for the massive increase in performance. They deserve to be far more popular than they are. > http://www.up-board.org/ http://www.up-board.org/
userbinator 8y ago
and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. That's what x86 was always winning at. Power consumption is higher, however.
- rogerbinns 8y ago

sorenjan 8y ago

I know there are plenty of different boards out there, like BananaPi, Odroid, etc, but a lot of them have questionable driver support and are still bare PCBs. The ODROID-HC1 does look interesting though. I guess what I'd really want is a x86 device to get a more PC like experience. I can buy a tablet with battery, touch screen, and Intel Atom X5-Z8300 CPU for less than $90 [0], but there aren't any good cheap x86 alternatives for simple home servers. [0] https://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_298397.html https://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_298397.html

slezyr 8y ago
Trust me, driver support is just as bad as with ARMs on those Z8300 devices.

imtringued 8y ago

I don't get it. Your list doesn't even include the RK3399 which is the fastest SoC you can nowadays get on an SBC for $100 and even that only has a geekbench score between 3k to 4k (RPi 3 is 1.2k and my 5 year old i5 has 10k). You'd expect to get at least a 5k score from an SBC for it to be viable. Also this whole announcement is really petty... Qualcomm and Apple already have SoCs with scores higher than 9k on geekbench so why does ARM have so much trouble making good cpu cores? They are comparing existing 14nm CPUs with theoretical 7nm CPUs that they haven't even released yet. Of course it's going to perform better. It would be embarrassing if it didn't...

ferongr 8y ago
Geekbench is a bit of a bogus benchmark. I really doubt that the Rockchip board would have even quarter the actual performance on "real" programs (e.g. x264, imagemagick, povray etc.)
- derefr 8y ago
  > "real" programs (e.g. x264, imagemagick, povray etc.) ...none of which are CPU-bound, instead relying on either hardware accelerators or the presence of specific SIMD instructions. Geekbench is pretty good at measuring how well a chip would perform / scale as a web-app server. (Ignoring IO bandwidth, that is. A benchmark that incorporated both would be brilliant.)
  - ferongr 8y ago
    x264 is an h264/AVC encoder that uses the CPU to extract maximum quality for a given bitrate. It does not support any fixed-function hardware on GPUs and the like since that goes contrary to its goals (gpu-accelerated encodes tend to have worse quality for a given bitrate and the fixed-function hardware doesn't support profiles like Hi10p that can improve quality). Pov-ray is a raytracer. It only runs know he CPU (it has no codepaths to use the GPU). imagemagick is an command line image manipulation suite that by default uses the CPU to perform operations in images. There is opencl support but it requires either a build option or configuration option for it to be enabled. My own experience, comparing LAME and flac encoder speeds on an Android device (binaries invoked via a terminal emulator) to a desktop CPU and comparing the actual performance to the geekbench 4 scores showed that gb overrated the Android device by almost 125%.

mojo982 8y ago

My issue with these is they still use MicroSD cards. I basically want a Raspberry Pi with a SATA connector so I can use an actual hard drive or SSD.

giobox 8y ago
You've been able to boot a Pi from USB for quite some time now, avoiding the issues with using a MicroSD card. While it isn't SATA, booting from USB still allows use of an external drive.