4 ms·

I wonder what PC Engines will do to replace AMD's Jaguar APU/SoC. All of AMD's new SoCs seem to be too hot for passive cooling, at least without huge fins. I c

by wahern 6y ago

I wonder what PC Engines will do to replace AMD's Jaguar APU/SoC. All of AMD's new SoCs seem to be too hot for passive cooling, at least without huge fins. I can't find the link, but there were recent discussions (by Red Hat? GCC? clang?) about changing the default minimum supported ISA. There were several proposals, IIRC, with Jaguar right in the middle of the proffered choices, and possibly the best choice for now. But I imagine if that discussion were to happen 2 or 3 years down the road, even Jaguar might not make the cut. At the low end of TDP, Intel still reigns supreme. But their Atom lineup makes far too many compromises, excluding various ISA extensions to price differentiate. And Soekris got burned with their net6501 and defective Atom chips, so I imagine Intel isn't that great a partner for small companies. (I doubt AMD is, either, given the firmware pain people have, but at least their products work.)

undersuit 6y ago
They'll use the R1102G which has the same power envelope as the T40E released 8 years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_accelerated_processing_units#R1000-Family:_%22Banded_Kestrel%22_(2019,_SoC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_accelerated_proces...
- wahern 6y ago
  Ah, released February 2020. I missed that. Cool. The last word on the matter from PC Engines was here, http://www.pcengines.info/forums/?page=post&id=7D919FB8-C4BB-4C33-B47B-F8F53E01600D&fid=DF5ACB70-99C4-4C61-AFA6-4C0E0DB05B2A&pageindex=3 http://www.pcengines.info/forums/?page=post&id=7D919FB8-C4BB..., where it seemed even 12W might be too much, given the power draw of the other components.
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
  Would they move from four physical cores (GX-412TC) to two and without even hyperthreading (R1102G)? I'm not convinced. I've seen a few thin client manufacturers that moved to Intel Goldmont APUs such as 4c ~10W J4105 (Wyse 5040, Fujitsu s740). Interestingly HP continues to use a custom downclocked Carrizo in their t630 (GX-420GI, 4c, 16W). My guess is PCEngines is gonna wait and see, as the four core jaguar is enough for what they need for now, and they care about the longevity of their product life cycles.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    Two cores that are twice as fast would be preferable to four slower cores. Since PCEngines wouldn't be powering up the GPU side of the chip, they could probably make pretty good use of the new CPU's boost clock capabilities. That plus the microarchitecture advantages of Zen over Jaguar, and the higher DRAM bandwidth should make the two-core Zen parts competitive. But I could also see them waiting for 7nm embedded parts.
greggyb 6y ago
There is a delightful market of very small fanless boxes on AliExpress that typically just throws a 15W laptop CPU into an aluminum case. Turns out if you slap a couple pounds of aluminum onto the CPU, it will stay pretty cool. I have a small box with an i5-5200U (15W part) that includes two NICs. This runs as my router and firewal at home. It sits around 40C. It might throttle if I ran heavy workloads on it, but it's great as a small always-on PC. Here's a search to get you started, and you can refine from there: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20200721073945&SearchText=fanless+mini+computer https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
- fermienrico 6y ago
  I wouldn't delve into AliExpress when there is https://pcengines.ch https://pcengines.ch, all boards made in Taiwan and engineered in Switzerland.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    But they don't seem to offer boards based on AMD's R1606G which is super power-efficient. Nor do they offer dual 10GbE NIC boards. And they don't have good ready-made cases with good cooling. :(
- wahern 6y ago
  That's the competition that ultimately ate Soekris' market--they never could recover after the net6501 debacle, and maybe would have exited regardless. But what Soekris offered and PC Engines still offers is ostensibly greater consistency and reliability, a better firmware story, and a proven commitment to long term availability and support of the platform. PC Engines still sells their ALIX model, and Soekris Europe still has net5501 boards in stock. The ALIX and net5501 are both ~15 years old, I think. A substantial portion, if not most of PC Engines' business, comes from small vendors building custom embedded solutions, such as WiFi base stations. The developer/hobbyist community loves PC Engines because it takes the guesswork out of things. The hardware will always be well supported by FOSS--because of PC Engines' efforts, and because there are plenty of FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, etc developers with a box--and there's solid brand recognition regarding quality. (Also, serial!) The downside is that the specs are antiquated almost from day 1, but for basic chores still adequate.
puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
Recent Atoms (Goldmont) are pretty decent - out of order, x64, three instructions per clock (compared to Jaguar's two), SSE4.2 and seemingly free from the bus degradation flaw. You lose AVX, but get to keep AES-NI and gain accelerated SHA which is nice on a tiny server. I think firmware on the intel's side might be a limitation, as IIRC it now requires UEFI, while PCEngines relies on their legacy coreboot implementation (which is actually open so yay).
phonon 6y ago
AMD sells a 6 W Ryzen part that come with 2 10 GbE ports and a GPU. I believe these are 14 nm parts...likely the 7 nm parts will have 50-100% better perf/W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpower-ryzen-embedded-apus-starting-at-6w https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpo...
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I have searched high and low everywhere on the most popular outlets that I could and I never found one of these with the dual 10GbE NICs. If you go to AMD's website that advertises machines made with these boards, _all_ vendors backtracked on dual 10GbE and reverted to dual 1GbE for reasons that none of them explain. If you can point me at a store that actually sells a mini PC, say based on R1606G, _and_ it having dual 10GbE NICs then I'd be ecstatic. :)
  - wahern 6y ago
    EPYC chips also come with integrated ethernet, but I don't think any vendors make use of that, either, not even the EPYC Embedded (3000-series). My Supermicro M11SDV-8CT-LN4F with an EPYC 3201 has 4x1Gbps Intel ports (+1x1Gbps Realtek for IPMI) even though the chip provides 4x10Gbps ports. I've read the issue is that motherboard designers can't be bothered to redesign around the integrated controller; easier to just continue slapping Intel or Realtek controllers on the board. That seems to be a big hurdle for AMD--they don't have enough volume to motivate much of the industry to make the best of what AMD offers. And when it does happen, there's a much longer lag time.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Pretty good explanation. Thank you. It's a real shame. The R1606G can go at 25-35W and it would practically be the most economic I/O heavy server design in history but as you said, the vendors can't be bothered. :(
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Making use of the NIC/MACs in the CPU would require board makers to buy PHYs, which would be only used by AMD boards, or they could not do that and slap the same PCIe NICs on there as they do on all other boards.

by wahern 6y ago

undersuit 6y ago

They'll use the R1102G which has the same power envelope as the T40E released 8 years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_accelerated_processing_units#R1000-Family:_%22Banded_Kestrel%22_(2019,_SoC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_accelerated_proces...

wahern 6y ago
Ah, released February 2020. I missed that. Cool. The last word on the matter from PC Engines was here, http://www.pcengines.info/forums/?page=post&id=7D919FB8-C4BB-4C33-B47B-F8F53E01600D&fid=DF5ACB70-99C4-4C61-AFA6-4C0E0DB05B2A&pageindex=3 http://www.pcengines.info/forums/?page=post&id=7D919FB8-C4BB..., where it seemed even 12W might be too much, given the power draw of the other components.
puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
Would they move from four physical cores (GX-412TC) to two and without even hyperthreading (R1102G)? I'm not convinced. I've seen a few thin client manufacturers that moved to Intel Goldmont APUs such as 4c ~10W J4105 (Wyse 5040, Fujitsu s740). Interestingly HP continues to use a custom downclocked Carrizo in their t630 (GX-420GI, 4c, 16W). My guess is PCEngines is gonna wait and see, as the four core jaguar is enough for what they need for now, and they care about the longevity of their product life cycles.
- wtallis 6y ago
  Two cores that are twice as fast would be preferable to four slower cores. Since PCEngines wouldn't be powering up the GPU side of the chip, they could probably make pretty good use of the new CPU's boost clock capabilities. That plus the microarchitecture advantages of Zen over Jaguar, and the higher DRAM bandwidth should make the two-core Zen parts competitive. But I could also see them waiting for 7nm embedded parts.

greggyb 6y ago

There is a delightful market of very small fanless boxes on AliExpress that typically just throws a 15W laptop CPU into an aluminum case. Turns out if you slap a couple pounds of aluminum onto the CPU, it will stay pretty cool. I have a small box with an i5-5200U (15W part) that includes two NICs. This runs as my router and firewal at home. It sits around 40C. It might throttle if I ran heavy workloads on it, but it's great as a small always-on PC. Here's a search to get you started, and you can refine from there: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20200721073945&SearchText=fanless+mini+computer https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...

fermienrico 6y ago
I wouldn't delve into AliExpress when there is https://pcengines.ch https://pcengines.ch, all boards made in Taiwan and engineered in Switzerland.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  But they don't seem to offer boards based on AMD's R1606G which is super power-efficient. Nor do they offer dual 10GbE NIC boards. And they don't have good ready-made cases with good cooling. :(
wahern 6y ago
That's the competition that ultimately ate Soekris' market--they never could recover after the net6501 debacle, and maybe would have exited regardless. But what Soekris offered and PC Engines still offers is ostensibly greater consistency and reliability, a better firmware story, and a proven commitment to long term availability and support of the platform. PC Engines still sells their ALIX model, and Soekris Europe still has net5501 boards in stock. The ALIX and net5501 are both ~15 years old, I think. A substantial portion, if not most of PC Engines' business, comes from small vendors building custom embedded solutions, such as WiFi base stations. The developer/hobbyist community loves PC Engines because it takes the guesswork out of things. The hardware will always be well supported by FOSS--because of PC Engines' efforts, and because there are plenty of FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, etc developers with a box--and there's solid brand recognition regarding quality. (Also, serial!) The downside is that the specs are antiquated almost from day 1, but for basic chores still adequate.

puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago

Recent Atoms (Goldmont) are pretty decent - out of order, x64, three instructions per clock (compared to Jaguar's two), SSE4.2 and seemingly free from the bus degradation flaw. You lose AVX, but get to keep AES-NI and gain accelerated SHA which is nice on a tiny server. I think firmware on the intel's side might be a limitation, as IIRC it now requires UEFI, while PCEngines relies on their legacy coreboot implementation (which is actually open so yay).

phonon 6y ago

AMD sells a 6 W Ryzen part that come with 2 10 GbE ports and a GPU. I believe these are 14 nm parts...likely the 7 nm parts will have 50-100% better perf/W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpower-ryzen-embedded-apus-starting-at-6w https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpo...

pdimitar 6y ago
I have searched high and low everywhere on the most popular outlets that I could and I never found one of these with the dual 10GbE NICs. If you go to AMD's website that advertises machines made with these boards, _all_ vendors backtracked on dual 10GbE and reverted to dual 1GbE for reasons that none of them explain. If you can point me at a store that actually sells a mini PC, say based on R1606G, _and_ it having dual 10GbE NICs then I'd be ecstatic. :)
- wahern 6y ago
  EPYC chips also come with integrated ethernet, but I don't think any vendors make use of that, either, not even the EPYC Embedded (3000-series). My Supermicro M11SDV-8CT-LN4F with an EPYC 3201 has 4x1Gbps Intel ports (+1x1Gbps Realtek for IPMI) even though the chip provides 4x10Gbps ports. I've read the issue is that motherboard designers can't be bothered to redesign around the integrated controller; easier to just continue slapping Intel or Realtek controllers on the board. That seems to be a big hurdle for AMD--they don't have enough volume to motivate much of the industry to make the best of what AMD offers. And when it does happen, there's a much longer lag time.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Pretty good explanation. Thank you. It's a real shame. The R1606G can go at 25-35W and it would practically be the most economic I/O heavy server design in history but as you said, the vendors can't be bothered. :(
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Making use of the NIC/MACs in the CPU would require board makers to buy PHYs, which would be only used by AMD boards, or they could not do that and slap the same PCIe NICs on there as they do on all other boards.