3 ms·

This! times 100. It seems common that these ARM boards vendors are like "here is your pcie slot" and then fail to provide all the basic peripherals onboard that

This! times 100. It seems common that these ARM boards vendors are like "here is your pcie slot" and then fail to provide all the basic peripherals onboard that make mITX work on x86. Or for that matter just provide a couple slots on a mATX board. AKA, if the board is missing something fundamental (like graphics, sata, or even USB!) then the board is useless for a lot of cases which require both the missing bits + some other PCIe board. Its the same thing with soldered on RAM, 4G should be enough for everyone! Its quite silly in many regards too, since adding a few $$ to the BOM for a graphics chip/usb/networking/whatever to bring it up to feature parity with $120 boards from asus/etc never seems to cross their minds.

Klinky 6y ago
I would suggest you go make your own board then. Adding DIMM slots is not trivial, and then you have to worry about compatibility with third-party RAM. There is something to be said about a wholly-integrated solution. It's more manageable from the manufacturer's point of view. Flexibility adds complexity and uncontrollable variables, which is not what you want in a product priced at the low end. It's not always the BOM that costs you, instead it's the additional testing, validation & support.
- StillBored 6y ago
  Flexibility gives you a broader market. Its fine if your building 1 product, but if you want to sell into a market with users that have a dozen different requirements and insufficient volume to justify custom configurations your in trouble. OTOH if you can cover a few hundred different use cases with a single design without a lot of additional complexity then your better off. There isn't any way, that every chip+motherboard+ram combination possible on the x86 market is tested. What you test for is compliance to the spec, and a few really common cases to sanity check everything. Then the OEM/final integrator is on the hook for validating/supporting a design. And it works the majority of the time you can buy RAM, or pcie cards, or whatever and plug them in. That is the point of standards. Plus, on the bleeding edge the standards almost always have fallback modes which are considered easier to get right (lower clocks, well understood previous generation, whatever). So when something isn't fully conformant it still works, just at a degraded speed. The problem is most of the arm vendors can't built compliant parts to save their lives. From nonstandard usb, pci, ram and networking gear. It only tends to work because they hack it together in that one configuration that happens to work because its got a couple capacitors sprinked on the board, or a software quirk that bypasses the broken functionality. Just look at all the stuff wrong with the rpi.
  - Klinky 6y ago
    SBCs already are extremely flexible for their market segment. Their market segment just happens to NOT be "developer workstations". The developer workstation market is heavily dominated by x86 because the ecosystem and performance per $ offered by AMD/Intel/nVidia is due to trillions of dollars in development costs over the past decades. ARM is not directly compatible with that ecosystem, so has to re-invent a lot of wheels, and the capital is not there to go head-to-head in commodity PC market when you have a compatibility disadvantage, and your high-end performance is not comparable. Adding an actual system OEM/integrator means another person needs convincing there is a market and adds additional markup. The struggle to put together functional boards is just indicative of the complexity of the problem. Even some x86 boards are garbage.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Except that "Developer workstation" is really "generic product that conforms to multiple targets". Drop a quad port NIC into one of them and you have a router, put a RAID controller in and you have a NAS. Attach a high speed A/D and you have an industrial controller, etc. None of those options really work for the majority of the arm SBC market which are repurposed phone SOCs. Yes, they are flexible as long as a large part of the target is touchscreen + wifi and attaching a USB SDR. Or they get misused as massively overspeced micro controllers that happen to need a network connection (aka IoT). So its really that latter case where they are successful because they are "generic" microcontrollers. Many of the uses cases would be far better/cheaper handled with a cortex-M and a custom board. But using a $35 rpi to read a GPIO and send a packet is the "generic" solution for someone not willing to spend $500k on a custom design to create 1k devices at $2 each.
      - Klinky 6y ago
        I added more color in my comment, but who wants to take on the supportability of your desire for third-party quad-port NIC or RAID controller? Even the DIY enthusiast PC market is a small % of the revenue made by the PC/Server market as a whole. It's already niche, and making a niche of a niche, sounds like a great way to pigeon-hole yourself into unprofitability. Too expensive for microcontroller/kiosk, not enough volume due to those unwilling to take on the compatibility concerns around ARM. The microcontroller and kiosk markets are actually relatively large, and a good niche to be in. Adding the complexity needed to make a full-blown x86 competitor is extremely risky. There are integrators out there using ARM in networking and NAS gear, but they are building the board to their spec, validating it against a small sampling of add-in hardware, screwing the box shut with a "warranty void" sticker on it, and charging a healthy markup for the service.

Klinky 6y ago

I would suggest you go make your own board then. Adding DIMM slots is not trivial, and then you have to worry about compatibility with third-party RAM. There is something to be said about a wholly-integrated solution. It's more manageable from the manufacturer's point of view. Flexibility adds complexity and uncontrollable variables, which is not what you want in a product priced at the low end. It's not always the BOM that costs you, instead it's the additional testing, validation & support.

StillBored 6y ago
Flexibility gives you a broader market. Its fine if your building 1 product, but if you want to sell into a market with users that have a dozen different requirements and insufficient volume to justify custom configurations your in trouble. OTOH if you can cover a few hundred different use cases with a single design without a lot of additional complexity then your better off. There isn't any way, that every chip+motherboard+ram combination possible on the x86 market is tested. What you test for is compliance to the spec, and a few really common cases to sanity check everything. Then the OEM/final integrator is on the hook for validating/supporting a design. And it works the majority of the time you can buy RAM, or pcie cards, or whatever and plug them in. That is the point of standards. Plus, on the bleeding edge the standards almost always have fallback modes which are considered easier to get right (lower clocks, well understood previous generation, whatever). So when something isn't fully conformant it still works, just at a degraded speed. The problem is most of the arm vendors can't built compliant parts to save their lives. From nonstandard usb, pci, ram and networking gear. It only tends to work because they hack it together in that one configuration that happens to work because its got a couple capacitors sprinked on the board, or a software quirk that bypasses the broken functionality. Just look at all the stuff wrong with the rpi.
- Klinky 6y ago
  SBCs already are extremely flexible for their market segment. Their market segment just happens to NOT be "developer workstations". The developer workstation market is heavily dominated by x86 because the ecosystem and performance per $ offered by AMD/Intel/nVidia is due to trillions of dollars in development costs over the past decades. ARM is not directly compatible with that ecosystem, so has to re-invent a lot of wheels, and the capital is not there to go head-to-head in commodity PC market when you have a compatibility disadvantage, and your high-end performance is not comparable. Adding an actual system OEM/integrator means another person needs convincing there is a market and adds additional markup. The struggle to put together functional boards is just indicative of the complexity of the problem. Even some x86 boards are garbage.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Except that "Developer workstation" is really "generic product that conforms to multiple targets". Drop a quad port NIC into one of them and you have a router, put a RAID controller in and you have a NAS. Attach a high speed A/D and you have an industrial controller, etc. None of those options really work for the majority of the arm SBC market which are repurposed phone SOCs. Yes, they are flexible as long as a large part of the target is touchscreen + wifi and attaching a USB SDR. Or they get misused as massively overspeced micro controllers that happen to need a network connection (aka IoT). So its really that latter case where they are successful because they are "generic" microcontrollers. Many of the uses cases would be far better/cheaper handled with a cortex-M and a custom board. But using a $35 rpi to read a GPIO and send a packet is the "generic" solution for someone not willing to spend $500k on a custom design to create 1k devices at $2 each.
    - Klinky 6y ago
      I added more color in my comment, but who wants to take on the supportability of your desire for third-party quad-port NIC or RAID controller? Even the DIY enthusiast PC market is a small % of the revenue made by the PC/Server market as a whole. It's already niche, and making a niche of a niche, sounds like a great way to pigeon-hole yourself into unprofitability. Too expensive for microcontroller/kiosk, not enough volume due to those unwilling to take on the compatibility concerns around ARM. The microcontroller and kiosk markets are actually relatively large, and a good niche to be in. Adding the complexity needed to make a full-blown x86 competitor is extremely risky. There are integrators out there using ARM in networking and NAS gear, but they are building the board to their spec, validating it against a small sampling of add-in hardware, screwing the box shut with a "warranty void" sticker on it, and charging a healthy markup for the service.