8 ms·

It's interesting to see how people have basically reinvented the standard motherboard, as people have been building PCs from in the DIY x86/x86-64 community for

It's interesting to see how people have basically reinvented the standard motherboard, as people have been building PCs from in the DIY x86/x86-64 community for 30 years. We've gone from what a raspberry pi was originally intended to be (a $25-35 computer) to something the same size, complexity and price as a standard Taiwanese mini-itx or micro-atx x86-64 motherboard and lower-end Intel or AMD CPU, with the same complement of I/O. I had the feeling this was inevitable when I saw people putting active DC powered fans on heatsinks on the rpi CPU some years ago. Sort of like how a modern Toyota Corolla has incrementally evolved to be a whole lot fatter, heavier, feature laden and costly than the same model name of car 20 years ago.

geerlingguy 6y ago
The rabbit hole gets deeper still: there are at least three in-progress ITX or ATX motherboard designs based on the Compute Module 4: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm
- walrus01 6y ago
  sure, why not, I guess? At least if people want a really low cost desktop, or something like a computer powering a kiosk, there's a plethora of low cost but functional mini-itx, microatx or atx sized steel cases. If you go to newegg and sort by price, for instance: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true If you look further there's some much smaller slimline desktop mini-itx (170x170mm format) barebones cases that are probably about the same price. vast economies of scale in standardized mounting formats and open standards, like the dimensions/mounting holes for a normal ATX power supply...
- squarefoot 6y ago
  Many of them probably are unaware of these things: https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 (random result sorted for low price, just search for "picopsu") Once paired with a fanless Mini-ITX board they make for a really compact system that can be supplied by a single 12V line.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    That has an appeal, but it lacks the peripherals and support that comes with the raspberry pi. The great things about the pi, if not the greatest, is the sheer amount of documentation for doing all sorts of things. Trying to get access to the i2c on an intel board? yeah its possible, but its not easy.
    - numpad0 6y ago
      It shouldn’t be hard to use a PCIe GPIO card in a PC for bare metal programming or “in conjunction with third party OS such as MS-DOS(R) or Linux(tm)”, factory automation companies might still be doing exactly that. I think why those are not brought up often is cost.
      - mbreese 6y ago
        If you really want to do something like that, you could always connect an Arduino or RPi (or similar) to a PC over serial/USB. Then you could use it as a kinda-gateway device. Taking commands from the primary PC and interfacing with low level peripherals over i2c, etc. But for the cost of this, it would probably make more sense to just wired the gateways up directly to Ethernet to allow one system to control all of the devices... which is how I imagine most factory automation is done. No need to have an extra PC to manage network control when an Arduino can do that by itself. Aside from the hobby aspect, one reason why Arduino and RPi are so popular for these types of projects is that they are effectively cheap enough to devote to an individual project. You’d wouldn’t want to devote an entire PC just to manage a sensor or control a door, or... but an Arduino for $10 or RPi for $30, sure.
    - squarefoot 6y ago
      There are small and cheap adapters to take a serial/USB line and transform it into a i2c one, but the i2c bus on most motherboards is already accessible and documented because it's what operating systems use to read various sensors on the board. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html If the i2c but is used for example to do r/w on gpios, then other products can be used, for example: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/
- warmwaffles 6y ago
  I'm also getting into this as well. Currently working on a PCB schematic for a compute module 4 with a full sized nvme, usb port and ethernet port for clustering.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I see a few appealing reasons to spring for the rpi variants: - Lower power profile - In theory no need for noisy fans - Exploring ARM Personally, I'm excited for a mobo that let me cluster N different CM4s with an array of SSDs. I like the idea of building a little Kubernetes cluster on a Pi array for the fun of it.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  It's fun, but even with SSD is going to be slow. I built that for "fun" (without ssds) and an hour later put it to storage and then setup vmware on a spare PC, because it was so slow.
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
  You can build a fanless x64 PC quite easily: 4-core Intel Silvermont/Goldmont or AMD Ryzen Embedded V and R series can be passively cooled. Many of those ITX boards come with a 19V DC-Jack power-in so you can use a laptop power brick and eliminate the PSU fan as well. Fujitsu used to have some nice designs, I think now it's owned by Kontron. Asrock also has a good selection for more retail-oriented products. Of course you can also passively cool a full-fledged desktop CPU if you want but that's a different category in terms of price and performance so I am not talking about that. As for power, I have Puma-based x64 4-core boards that idle at 5W and consume 12W at full load (measured at the wall). Goldmont should be similarly efficient. RPi4 is about 7W at load I think. Not a huge difference.
  - w0utert 6y ago
    Yeah, you can even go back much further in time if you're not too worried about performance. I've been running a fanless Atom J1900 based mini-PC as a home server for ~8 years nonstop now. It's trivial to build such a system but at least back then the cost was literally 10x to 20x the price of a rPI today. I would guess that even though it's an 8-year old CPU it's probably about 2x as fast as an rPI 4B, and for something that's been chugging along for all this time the cost/depreciation over time vs. a much cheaper rPI isn't really an issue for me.
  - 6y ago
avhception 6y ago
I really think the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop, very much like the IBM PC became the de-facto x86 machine. I really wish the boot procedure and all that wasn't so proprietary. It's unfortunate that the RPi foundation doesn't acknowledge this potential more. It feels like the RPi is stuck in the middle between being a low-cost board for GPIO tinkering and being a low-cost general-purpose computer, being not really that good at either task. Maybe they should create a coreboot-enabled board that is a little more pricey, starting at 60 or 80$ or something, for the "ARM-PC" (the RasPC!) market and separate that from the board for the tinkerers.
- pndy 6y ago
  The 400 model of Pi has a potential to start something comparable to microcomputer boom in the 80s and become first step into ARM desktops (again) I believe and also become the standard for machines used in education - if someone will play this out well. Smartphones and tablets dominate consumer market nowadays for sure but these are largely entertaining devices only not offering much when it comes to education; of course you can install apps but you're still limited by form factor.
- OJFord 6y ago
  Like the '400' model built into a keyboard released fairly recently?
- cigaser 6y ago
  RPi foundation has its goals and it follows them well. I hope they will not get distracted by "ideology".
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  > Really think the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop I'd say it already is yet still isn't particularly useful in this role. As soon as it gets able to run YouTube without visible performance problems and adds some spare PCIe lanes so you won't have to sacrifice USB 3.0.
  - 6y ago
qwertox 6y ago
The IO pins are the big difference. If you wanted to solder/connect some ICs to your PC, you were limited to using the parallel/serial ports. We get a much more direct access to the CPU with these SBCs, which is what makes them so special. It's more like they are a microcontroller on steroids, rather than a stripped down PC.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  Absolutely - but in the context here of low-budget desktops, having GPIO is something relatively few users want? I personally tend to use an RPi Zero W instead of an Arduino/ESP* for little projects because I like having networking, cron, etc.
detaro 6y ago
Not really "reinvented", since everyone knows what a motherboard is. A "normal" motherboard just isn't something you can easily design and make yourself. While the Pi is in many ways not the "best" basis for such projects, its the one that is the most initially accessible, or at least appears to be, compared to other SOMs. Hence you see more small projects based around it.
cookiengineer 6y ago
What I personally don’t understand is why most ARM alternatives (odroid, raspberry, banana pi, beagleboard etc) always think in such small dimensions. I mean, a 128 core ARM with 1TB of RAM would crush any x86_64 alternative easily. ARM has no limits in parallelization, why is there nobody using that advantage?

geerlingguy 6y ago

The rabbit hole gets deeper still: there are at least three in-progress ITX or ATX motherboard designs based on the Compute Module 4: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

walrus01 6y ago
sure, why not, I guess? At least if people want a really low cost desktop, or something like a computer powering a kiosk, there's a plethora of low cost but functional mini-itx, microatx or atx sized steel cases. If you go to newegg and sort by price, for instance: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true If you look further there's some much smaller slimline desktop mini-itx (170x170mm format) barebones cases that are probably about the same price. vast economies of scale in standardized mounting formats and open standards, like the dimensions/mounting holes for a normal ATX power supply...
squarefoot 6y ago
Many of them probably are unaware of these things: https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 (random result sorted for low price, just search for "picopsu") Once paired with a fanless Mini-ITX board they make for a really compact system that can be supplied by a single 12V line.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  That has an appeal, but it lacks the peripherals and support that comes with the raspberry pi. The great things about the pi, if not the greatest, is the sheer amount of documentation for doing all sorts of things. Trying to get access to the i2c on an intel board? yeah its possible, but its not easy.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    It shouldn’t be hard to use a PCIe GPIO card in a PC for bare metal programming or “in conjunction with third party OS such as MS-DOS(R) or Linux(tm)”, factory automation companies might still be doing exactly that. I think why those are not brought up often is cost.
    - mbreese 6y ago
      If you really want to do something like that, you could always connect an Arduino or RPi (or similar) to a PC over serial/USB. Then you could use it as a kinda-gateway device. Taking commands from the primary PC and interfacing with low level peripherals over i2c, etc. But for the cost of this, it would probably make more sense to just wired the gateways up directly to Ethernet to allow one system to control all of the devices... which is how I imagine most factory automation is done. No need to have an extra PC to manage network control when an Arduino can do that by itself. Aside from the hobby aspect, one reason why Arduino and RPi are so popular for these types of projects is that they are effectively cheap enough to devote to an individual project. You’d wouldn’t want to devote an entire PC just to manage a sensor or control a door, or... but an Arduino for $10 or RPi for $30, sure.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    There are small and cheap adapters to take a serial/USB line and transform it into a i2c one, but the i2c bus on most motherboards is already accessible and documented because it's what operating systems use to read various sensors on the board. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html If the i2c but is used for example to do r/w on gpios, then other products can be used, for example: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/
warmwaffles 6y ago
I'm also getting into this as well. Currently working on a PCB schematic for a compute module 4 with a full sized nvme, usb port and ethernet port for clustering.

throwaway894345 6y ago

I see a few appealing reasons to spring for the rpi variants: - Lower power profile - In theory no need for noisy fans - Exploring ARM Personally, I'm excited for a mobo that let me cluster N different CM4s with an array of SSDs. I like the idea of building a little Kubernetes cluster on a Pi array for the fun of it.

intricatedetail 6y ago
It's fun, but even with SSD is going to be slow. I built that for "fun" (without ssds) and an hour later put it to storage and then setup vmware on a spare PC, because it was so slow.
puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
You can build a fanless x64 PC quite easily: 4-core Intel Silvermont/Goldmont or AMD Ryzen Embedded V and R series can be passively cooled. Many of those ITX boards come with a 19V DC-Jack power-in so you can use a laptop power brick and eliminate the PSU fan as well. Fujitsu used to have some nice designs, I think now it's owned by Kontron. Asrock also has a good selection for more retail-oriented products. Of course you can also passively cool a full-fledged desktop CPU if you want but that's a different category in terms of price and performance so I am not talking about that. As for power, I have Puma-based x64 4-core boards that idle at 5W and consume 12W at full load (measured at the wall). Goldmont should be similarly efficient. RPi4 is about 7W at load I think. Not a huge difference.
- w0utert 6y ago
  Yeah, you can even go back much further in time if you're not too worried about performance. I've been running a fanless Atom J1900 based mini-PC as a home server for ~8 years nonstop now. It's trivial to build such a system but at least back then the cost was literally 10x to 20x the price of a rPI today. I would guess that even though it's an 8-year old CPU it's probably about 2x as fast as an rPI 4B, and for something that's been chugging along for all this time the cost/depreciation over time vs. a much cheaper rPI isn't really an issue for me.
- 6y ago

avhception 6y ago

I really think the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop, very much like the IBM PC became the de-facto x86 machine. I really wish the boot procedure and all that wasn't so proprietary. It's unfortunate that the RPi foundation doesn't acknowledge this potential more. It feels like the RPi is stuck in the middle between being a low-cost board for GPIO tinkering and being a low-cost general-purpose computer, being not really that good at either task. Maybe they should create a coreboot-enabled board that is a little more pricey, starting at 60 or 80$ or something, for the "ARM-PC" (the RasPC!) market and separate that from the board for the tinkerers.

pndy 6y ago
The 400 model of Pi has a potential to start something comparable to microcomputer boom in the 80s and become first step into ARM desktops (again) I believe and also become the standard for machines used in education - if someone will play this out well. Smartphones and tablets dominate consumer market nowadays for sure but these are largely entertaining devices only not offering much when it comes to education; of course you can install apps but you're still limited by form factor.
OJFord 6y ago
Like the '400' model built into a keyboard released fairly recently?
cigaser 6y ago
RPi foundation has its goals and it follows them well. I hope they will not get distracted by "ideology".
qwerty456127 6y ago
> Really think the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop I'd say it already is yet still isn't particularly useful in this role. As soon as it gets able to run YouTube without visible performance problems and adds some spare PCIe lanes so you won't have to sacrifice USB 3.0.
- 6y ago

qwertox 6y ago

The IO pins are the big difference. If you wanted to solder/connect some ICs to your PC, you were limited to using the parallel/serial ports. We get a much more direct access to the CPU with these SBCs, which is what makes them so special. It's more like they are a microcontroller on steroids, rather than a stripped down PC.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Absolutely - but in the context here of low-budget desktops, having GPIO is something relatively few users want? I personally tend to use an RPi Zero W instead of an Arduino/ESP* for little projects because I like having networking, cron, etc.

detaro 6y ago

Not really "reinvented", since everyone knows what a motherboard is. A "normal" motherboard just isn't something you can easily design and make yourself. While the Pi is in many ways not the "best" basis for such projects, its the one that is the most initially accessible, or at least appears to be, compared to other SOMs. Hence you see more small projects based around it.

cookiengineer 6y ago

What I personally don’t understand is why most ARM alternatives (odroid, raspberry, banana pi, beagleboard etc) always think in such small dimensions. I mean, a 128 core ARM with 1TB of RAM would crush any x86_64 alternative easily. ARM has no limits in parallelization, why is there nobody using that advantage?