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Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board
- baybal2 7y agoA little tidbit, Intel still manages to sell 5(!) generations old CPUs in China, and those are not old stock. The industry been screaming murder for the last year because Intel stopped selling low and mid-tier chips as such in China aside from "new old stock" The new 10nm Atom line refresh has been delayed 4 times already, and will very likely be delayed for the 5th time. AMD however does not seem too much interested in China's domestic industry at all. AMD's China reseller is a company in a tiny dusty office in Shanghai.
- justinjlynn 7y agoSounds like a good opportunity for a local startup to take some market share.
- bwip 7y agoRockchip and Allwinner seem to be doing well
- baybal2 7y agoThere were times during the netbook boom when ARM notebooks were a thing. And they kept being a thing for at least next 5 years, but they saw near no exposure in the West, mostly going to places like South Asia and Africa
- cpach 7y agoI guess those machines ran Linux then? Since IIRC Windows XP/7 didn’t run on ARM.
- monocasa 7y agoDo you know how well the Dhyana or Zhaoxin processors are doing?
- baybal2 7y agoNobody saw them under the sun, maybe aside from people signing up the research grants
- generatorguy 7y agoWhy is AMD not interested in selling chips in China? Seems crazy to ignore that market unless the price for access is too high.
- mike_d 7y agoAMD was very interested in selling in to China. They did a deal with the Chinese government that was a little too friendly, and the US government effectively shut the operation down by listing the joint-venture as an export regulated entity. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-joint-venture-partner-banned-us-trade-war,39703.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-joint-venture-partner-...
- generatorguy 7y agoAh yes a technology transfer joint venture
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- williadc 7y agoThe processor in these board is about to celebrate its 4th anniversary, and its performance wasn't world-beating at the time of its release. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/93361/intel-atom-x5-z8350-processor-2m-cache-up-to-1-92-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/93361/i...
- baybal2 7y agoWhat about new notebooks on 5700? Yes, 5700 is still sold new to Chinese resellers
- Dylan16807 7y agoA 5700HQ is perfectly fine. That's a 14nm non-Atom part. Compared to a bleeding edge 9980HK, each core is only 25% slower. And you don't need more than four cores here. More relevantly, a 5700HQ is five to six times as fast as this Atom.
- filleduchaos 7y agoPeople aren't exactly buying these boards (and boards like it, such as the Raspberry Pi) to fold proteins or something.
- Dylan16807 7y agoOh, sure. My point's just that a 3-4 year old design isn't a big deal, and if you're concerned about performance it's absolutely not the age to worry about.
- rbanffy 7y agoYou'd want to do that on a GPU anyway.
- frankharv 7y agoWell at least it is shipping with 64bit UEFI. Lots of these cheap Intel chips like Z3740 found in many Wintel tablets only shipped with 32bit UEFI making them un-usable on FreeBSD.
- aliljet 7y agoI wonder if these boards could be used for a DIY 802.11s mesh implementation? Maybe the hobby alternative to an eero/Google/plume/amplify setup...
- Zenst 7y agohttps://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s would be viable.
- aliljet 7y agoThis might just be more dependent on the chipset these boards are coming with, but I'm admittedly just guessing.
- Zenst 7y agoSeen many OpenWRT installs running upon Intel Cherry Trail, not this particular board (yet), but certainly one of the more easier chipsets to get working over some random ARM SOC for sure.
- wilhil 7y agoI don't know why this has taken so long... About 5 years ago, I was involved in a project where we purchased Intel based tablets based off a standard reference design in bulk for about $80 a piece - that included battery, cameras, screen, casing and more. The cost of the board only was about ~$30 or so. I really wondered why no one was selling these to compete against the Pi in the heyday. The only problem we had and why we didn't sell to makers was because we didn't control the design and we had enormous technical problems with EFI/Bios 64 bit booting only and a headache like crazy trying to reinstall Linux which just randomly broke all the time. Truth be told, I wish I pushed through with it.
- RachelF 7y agoWe had similar ideas, but the bootloaders were always problematic. These Atom chips are still probably limited to 32bit boot loaders.
- geokon 7y agoThis is discussed in the comment section. It shouldn't be a problem any longer. Tom Cubie is from Radxa
- DCKing 7y agoIIRC this was a major problem with the Bay Trail generation (32 bit EFI, 64 bit CPU). These are Cherry Trail generation chips (one generation newer) which did get 64 bit EFIs. That's not to say this board has a 64 bit EFI, but the vendor could avoid problems if they're smart.
- notyourday 7y agoI have 4 different BayTrails (manufacturers/etc) running in my apartment. There is zero issue with them in Linux but they have a funky requirement: - they must be booted into legacy i.e. on EFI mode. EFI mode boot does not work reliably. - the boot disk must have MBR and not GPT disk label.
- 7y ago
- partialrecall 7y agoWithout PCIe it's not clear to me what advantages x86 offers in this form factor. I guess an Intel GPU is a plus.
- RachelF 7y agoThe Atom CPU should be faster than an Arm.
- deelowe 7y agoWe sure about that? If we take a common use-case, emulators are very well optimized on ARM these days (more so than PC in some situations).
- pizza234 7y agoIt depends if one talks about Atoms in general or specific models. The Celeron J4105 (which powers the ODROID H2), is technically an Atom, and it's massively faster than an RPi 4 (2-5x), but I don't know about the Z8300. Based on Passmark (which is an arbitrary choice), Rock Pi X and RPi 4 may have comparable performance; if that was established, and I wanted a cheap SBC, I'd definitely go with the former.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pizza234 7y agoCorrection: as pointed out, the J4105 does not belong to the Atom, but the Celeron family (although the architecture, Goldmont Plus, may be used in the future for Atom), so the comparison is not correct.
- akmittal 7y agoRaspberry pi 4 should be as fast as Atom x5-Z8300
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoIntel Edison was an interesting product at the time -- but they cancelled it before much community could develop around it. I wish Intel could "stay the course" a little more.
- avian 7y agoEdison was pretty annoying to work with in my experience. To use the Edison CPU (without their Arduino-like breakout board) on your own hardware you needed a fine-pitch connector that was more or less impossible to solder in a typical home workshop. The Yocto Linux was annoying from a tinker's perspective because it was focused around building static firmware images and not like Raspberry Pi where you ssh in and apt-get away. This all didn't make much sense for a product marketed to makers/hobbyists. More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86. You could compile a static binary on your laptop, scp it over and it would just work without messing with cross-compilation etc. But that really wasn't worth all the other annoyances IMHO.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoAll great points, but I really wish they just listened to their users instead of shelving hobbyist embedded for a few years.
- userbinator 7y agoMore or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86. ...and Intel missed the point that x86 without the rest of the PC isn't that great. I suspect if the Edison was actually PC-compatible (to the point of e.g. being able to boot DOS and older Windows and run their applications) it would've had far more popularity (retro-gaming, etc.) than yet-another-maker-toy.
- rbanffy 7y agoBut then it'd need to bring in a DOS compatible RTC, a CGA/MDA/EGA/VGA output, audio out (PC speaker or Sound Blaster?), joystick port, serial port (or PS/2 emulation from the USB bus). Should the SD card pretend to be an IDE hard disk?
- mey 7y agoBeen keeping my eye out for something like this. I have wanted to build a cheap bare metal k8s cluster for my homelab. While ARM is nice, most containers are targeted at x86.
- heyoni 7y agoIs there ever a time when a container can’t be rebuilt for arm? Seriously asking
- viraptor 7y agoRebuilt - sure, most of the time. But unless you want to spend lots of time rebuilding containers, you may want Intel instead. If you have a "real" machine with ARM available you can build larger software quickly, but if you don't, building something on rpi can take tens of minutes easily.
- rmoriz 7y agoYou can crosscompile images for ARM on x86 using qemu, even docker hub inofficially supports it.
- milofeynman 7y agoThis was my exact thinking. I wanted a pi cluster but didn't want to deal with arm. Exciting...
- rbanffy 7y agoYou can also get a bunch of thin clients on eBay and use those. The AMD APU based ones even have GPUs you can play with.
- larrywright 7y agoDo you have a model number or something that I can use to search for?
- teekert 7y agoEvery time I press "More Options" for the cookies and choose not to accept it just re-presents the screen...
- LeonM 7y agoI tried to dismiss the cookie wall and that completely breaks the page as well. I can't scroll down.
- dxxvi 7y agoI think it should take a nvme card (because of its small size) for storage.
- neilv 7y agoThis trademark is confusing, with Rockchip and Raspberry Pi already involved in the little SoC board space.
- drudru11 7y agoWhat I would like to know is how the GPU compares to a n RPi4 or the latest RPi3. I wish there was a comparison of that. Regardless, I will probly still buy one of these Rock Pi's anyways :-)