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I love reading about all of these exotic Raspberry Pi projects and people pushing the Raspberry Pi into applications far beyond what you'd expect. But at the s

I love reading about all of these exotic Raspberry Pi projects and people pushing the Raspberry Pi into applications far beyond what you'd expect. But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. The Pi is a lot of fun and the Raspberry Pi foundation has done an excellent job of bringing us powerful ARM processors at low price points, but the gap between Quad Cortex-A72 and even a cheap, low-power x86 board is still massive. But on the other hand if you're doing this for learning and for fun, these things are awesome.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Pragmatic (as usual). ;-) I'm not so sure though that we're not seeing early forays into something that will in fact come down in cost, go up in efficiency.
cpach 5y ago
What are some good x86-64 alternatives to the Raspberry Pi? Asking since I’m quite out-of-date in my hardware knowledge. I guess what I want is low energy consumption, ~8 GB RAM (or more) and enough CPU to run a bunch of Docker containers. And a price tag that’s not higher than the Pi.
- scottlamb 5y ago
  I don't think you're going to find anything as cheap as a single Pi, but you should be able to find something cheaper than the Turing Pi 2 ($200?), 4 of its CM4 adapters ($40 total), and 4 Raspberry Pi CM4s ($140 total): $380ish. One option is to buy a used Intel NUC on eBay. I bought one for $235 (with RAM, SSD, and case) a couple years ago that satisfies all that. I haven't looked into a lot of the other x86-64 SBCs. I really liked the ODROID-H2+ but it's discontinued due to supply chain problems. I'm hoping an ODROID-H3 or something will come out next year.
- worker767424 5y ago
  Some of the modern Atom CPUs might fit the bill.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  I'm told there's an "thin client" class of computers. Ebay may have a few used variants that get close to your target cost, look for the HP t620 / t630 / t640 series for examples but I am also getting hits searching for used enterprise network thin clients, with prices in the ~$45+ range. I'm considering something like this if at some point I decide to upgrade from my RPi 4, which is currently RAM limited. ServeTheHome did a one-liter PC series they called Project Tiny Mini Micro, that features small units that hit everything you ask for except cost (buying used might avert the ~$250-$800 price tags I see)
vineyardmike 5y ago
The first few lines of this article made it clear this was learning oriented and a “challenge” from a friendly competition.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I love the "lets do something just for the sake of it" approach in life. Too often economic thinking restrict from fun creations and discoveries
pdpi 5y ago
I've been meaning to build something like this for a while now, and "performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers." is pretty much my motivation to do it — I want a sufficiently limited setup where I'll hit bottlenecks with relatively small workloads, because the whole point is playing with evading those bottlenecks.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I'm almost wondering if this might be useful for a research lab, to prototype HPC algorithms. Like, I don't really want to run stuff on a big cluster or supercomputer while running my code. And it would be nice to have a tiny little cluster that hits bottlenecks while solving matrices that I can easily run on my desktop.
  - jcrawfordor 5y ago
    The problem here is that the fidelity of a test run on a raspberry pi cluster, as compared to one run on the actual target hardware, is about the same as running the test on a cheaper and easier simulator environment of VMs.
    - accountofme 5y ago
      From what I have heard, Pi's are used by supercomputer clusters to solve the problem of testing code at scale (hundreds of nodes) but not on the expensive hardware.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Probably not a research lab, but maybe an educational lab. Experience problems with multi-node systems and learn to work around them, but expect real application problems to be different.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I totally understand. This is a fun way to do it. A cheaper option would also be to run a lot of virtual machines on a single device and only assign them limited CPU and RAM budgets. You can actually do this all within a single Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with ESXi: https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esxi-on-arm-with-a-raspberry-pi/ https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esx... Not going to lie: I'd still enjoy having one of these Quad-Pi boards to play with, though.
moffkalast 5y ago
The Pi generally has pretty atrocious power management, with linear regulators and no option to sleep or save power in any way aside from turning off stuff like USB controllers. It would probably cost them like $2 in parts to add switch mode power supplies and they'd reduce power consumption by at least half if not more. But no we can't afford a few dollars worth' of parts on an $80 product to improve quality of life significantly lmao. Imagine all the battery powered applications where this would be a night and day difference.
- andai 5y ago
  Does anyone offer a comparable product that does that? Might be worth building one just to scare them into fixing it.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    There are tons of SBCs out there, but none of them scare Raspberry Foundation because none of them have the wide distribution, brand recognition, and large community that goes with it. It's very much a popularity feeds popularity market.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    There's the clusterboard from pine64 which fits up to seven CPU boards: https://pine64.com/product-category/clusterboard/ https://pine64.com/product-category/clusterboard/ You can use two different CPU boards with the clusterboard: - SOPINE A64 compute module with a quad core ARM Cortex A53 and 2 GB RAM - SOEDGE AI NEURAL MODULE with a dual-Core ARM Cortex A35, a NPU IP from Verisilicon Vivante and 2 GB RAM Note that the pinout of the SOPINE/SOEDGE modules is not compatible with the Raspberry Pi 1 and 3 compute modules (DDR3 vs. DDR2 SO-DIMM socket and obviously a different pinout), so you unfortunately can't mix them. Pine64 also recently announced the SOQuartz module with a more powerful SoC (Rockchip RK3566 with four ARM Cortex-A55 cores, a Mali-G52 GPU and a 0.8 TOPS NPU), which uses the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi 4 compute modules. This might be an interesting alternative for future cluster solutions based on the new form factor. https://www.notebookcheck.net/PINE64-SOQuartz-Compute-Module-W-US-34-99-system-on-module-launched-that-can-be-used-as-a-Raspberry-Pi-Compute-Module-4-carrier-board.577956.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/PINE64-SOQuartz-Compute-Module...
formerly_proven 5y ago
Though unfortunately the Mini-ITX space has been left do dangle for a few years now; most of the affordable (<300 money) boards have pretty old CPUs. AMD hasn't had something new in that space for a very long time - E-350/450 based boards were just recently discontinued, and that was a 10 year old part. The only other boards still available seem to be re-spins to sell of 5-6 year old APUs. These were decent in their time, but time has moved on. The E-350/450 were also bundled with crappy southbridges which consumed way more power than the CPU itself - when you see one of these boards, the smaller, fanless heatsink is for the CPU, the big one for the southbridge. VIA has been gone for some time. All the Intel boards are 14nm or 22nm parts, usually from 2014-2017. Newest boards seem to use the J4125 - a Goldmont refresh from 2019. Intel at least offers some newer stuff in the NUC form factor (though at much higher prices as well). NUCs are pretty non-standard form factor though and offer PCIe only through M.2, so for I/O you'll need an awkward M.2-to-PCIe adapter with a cable. AMD really only has that 4700S kit (which uses a PS5 SoC with defective iGPU as I understand it) at around 400 currency. The 4700S seems to have ridiculous idle power draw (~80 W - maybe power management for the GDDR and other parts are disabled together with the iGPU). There are some ARM boards now with PCIe. The RPi CM4 has a PCIe 2.0 x1, which is not a lot but maybe good enough for some use cases. The RockPro64 has an PCIe 1.0 x4 slot; the RockPi4 has an extremely awkwardly positioned M.2 slot (same PCIe 1.0 x4, it's the same SoC as the RockPro64). None of these are great options.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Indeed, the number of acceptable ITX boards is in single digits now for last gen CPUs.
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    >last get CPUs Did you mean "last gen CPUs"? If indeed that was a typo, I think it would be a difficult one to make on a QWERTY keyboard, because the N key isn't very close to the T key. Are you a Dvorak typist, by chance?
    - bobnamob 5y ago
justin66 5y ago
> a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall It seems like it should be this way but when it comes down to cases, for example making a network gateway, a lot of the options that get thrown around are frustratingly costly. As in, a laptop motherboard that does twice what this x86 SBC does would cost half what this does costly. I’d really like to know what x86 SBCs are now considered to be real Raspberry Pi competitors, or even considered to be in the ballpark. When the subject of ARM based RPi competitors comes up, it’s usually a conversation about the level of support those boards offer, and in that regard being x86 based is obviously a total game changer.
- toast0 5y ago
  If this board is $200 and the 4 raspberry pi modules you plug in need an adapter at $10 each and cost between $25 (1g ram, no wireless, no storage) and $70 (8g ram, no wireless, no storage), and we consider Mini-ITX to be tiny (debatable), we've got a budget of $340 to $520 if I can arithmetic. And we need motherboard + cpu + ram. PC parts prices aren't great right now, but a AMD Ryzen 5600G @ $240, an ASRock A520M-ITX/ac @ $105, and a Silicon Gaming 2x 16GB of DDR4-3200 for $90, is $435 [1]; assuming the firmware shipped with the board is new enough for the CPU (i didn't check if you can flash this board without a supported CPU). You can limit the CPU power in firmware settings, and to hold close to the power usage of this cluster board. If you only get 4G ram, you can save some money, but not enough to get under the lowest pi cluster with current pricing. If you need it less expensive, you could maybe get an older AMD processor or look at intel. If you want smaller than itx, it gets hard. Maybe reuse a chromebox or similar, but then you don't have much choice of hardware and connectivity. [1] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yCj2vf https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yCj2vf
- easygenes 5y ago
  In amateur astrophotography there’s a few Raspberry Pi based automation rigs which retail for a few hundred dollars (e.g. ASIAIR). This is a case where cheap x86 SBCs are a much better option because they give you access to the vast suites of Windows based astrophotography software available, lately particularly N.I.N.A. I even just came across a video where someone else came to the same conclusion and went into good depth on it. [1] The MeLe Quieter 2 [2] is a similar form factor to little ARM SBCs, is passively cooled, is a couple hundred dollars, and includes Win10Pro. For that you get a quad core 2Ghz+ 14nm processor, 8GB ram, and 128GB eMMC. 1: https://youtu.be/asSfA6HVHAc 2: https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/06/01/mele-quieter2-review-windows-10-ubuntu-20-04-egpu/
inetknght 5y ago
> Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. I am convinced that Intel does not deliver on that. What tiny x86 board is comparable to the Raspberry Pi? I'm looking for excellent Linux support, with well documented GPIO/ADC/DACs, and as few closed-source hardwares as possible at a similar price point. If I want to talk directly to the ethernet controller (for example) then I should be able to look at the board's documentation without having to sign any NDA.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  So you have found docs for the Broadcom SoCs on the Pi without NDA? That would be newsworthy. The ethernet controller lives in the SoC btw, and talks to a phy. That's another boardcom chip. See if you can find a datasheet for BCM54210. The Pi is not open hardware, even the schematic is a joke. Broadcom is another way to spell "NDA" and "no docs for plebs." I don't know about price but you absolutely can find Mini-ITX (and smaller) Intel based systems that idle at 5-15 watts and perform better than the Pi. At $200 for the cluster board, $40 for the adapters, and ~$50 a pop times 4 for the CM4s, we're talking $400-$500 and that's not far off from the price of some of these low end x86-64 systems that -- yess -- are much faster than the Pi 4.
- bri3d 5y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the Pi isn't open by anyone's definition or any stretch of the imagination. But, it sounds like you want a Pi for the thing it's actually somewhat good at, which is not running Kubernetes on a 4-way cluster board with an ATX power supply. The Pi is nice because it's a bridge between microcontrollers and normal OS-grade computing. You can have a full desktop environment and also have GPIOs and SPI peripherals talking to the outside world. This is pretty cool and is a nice little niche to be in. I don't think anything really beats the Pi here - there are Rockchip and Allwinner based boards that compete, but they're all just different facets of the same gem so to speak. Once you stop using those microcontroller-style functionalities and bridges to the real world and start using the Pi as a cluster server, things don't really make sense anymore to me. I get why people do this for fun (just like back in the day people would set up MPI/Beowulf clusters of whatever cast-off vintage desktops they could find), but for practicality points, there's no good argument for the Pi IMO. Compared to this 4x cluster board, an Intel NUC 11 Tiger Canyon comes in at a similar price point, 3x+ the performance/watt, and at least 5x the performance (for real workloads that touch I/O, probably 10x or more).
bullen 5y ago
I always reply to these comments because well they are simply wrong for regular Raspberry clusters (this one is stupid though, but still fun to watch): 1) The Raspberry Pi 4 is THE cheapest 2Gflops/W computer ever made and probably that will ever be made in the future too! Peak of energy/resources/lithography/architectures and velocity of money against that, will most likely make it so. 2) You can scale the Raspberry cluster as you want it, only power the nodes you need, it's modular, one breaks you still have a few left, same for the SD cards which BTW while being so slow a Raspberry 2 (2W!) can saturate them they are SURPRISINGLY sturdy (my original SanDisc (every other brand has been a complete scam) are on their 7th year of 99.999% uptime, down when my power company cut the electricity for an hour). 3) The Raspberry cluster is smaller, cooler and silent (if passively cooled, it's the most powerful device that can be fully passively cooled at 100% CPU (7W) without becoming too hot to wear early) and wont fail because of failing fans! 4) For battery backup there is nothing better because beyond total of 100W for 24 hours you start to see the limits of what is practical to manage on a individual basis. I post this picture every time: http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png (this is how you cool a Raspberry 2/4 hybrid cluster)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  Expanding on #2, when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws, offloading or running a variety of services/daemons on physically separate machines can also improve security. We all get told to reduce the attack vector and this is one way to do that. The organisational hierarchy best exemplifies this security isolation point for an entity, like businesses, govts, etc etc.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    > when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws Spectre in particular is not a CISC HW flaw. It affects ARM and other RISC architectures as well: https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/speculative-processor-vulnerability/downloads/addressing-spectre-variant-1-in-software https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/specu...
walrus01 5y ago
> But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. I agree with all of this and if you really need to have multiple separate systems (such as to test/develop some clustering thing) you can easily turn a 25W-35W max TDP, x86-64 motherboard and cpu combo into a xen or kvm hypervisor, on debian or centos. And put as many VMs as you need on that.
- blibble 5y ago
  kvm works on raspberry pi 4 perfectly well
  - walrus01 5y ago
    and works much better in performance on a system where you can install an affordable NVME PCI-E 3.0 or 4.0 SSD for the hypervisor and guest VMs. With a raspberry pi4 you're limited to unreliable microSD cards or weird hacks like a SATA3 drive connected by USB3.
    - blibble 5y ago
      pi4 has a PCI-e bus and supports nvme
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board Which is a poor solution as a local dev/test platform for apps to be deployed to ARM cloud platforms, which seems to be the selling point of this.
scottlamb 5y ago
It might make more sense with the nVidia Jetson option. [1] The Jetsons are considerably faster than the Pi CM4 at both general computational tasks and GPU-focused ones (like video decoding/encoding and machine learning). I wouldn't be too surprised if four of those outperformed a comparably priced/power-hungry/sized x86-64 machine for the right workload. YMMV. (That goes for any of the three Jetson models they list.) I'm also curious to see what the Turing TCM turns out to be. Though the IO is still limited to the one GbE port + one PCIe 2.0 channel per device for anything you cram in there...and the heterogenous use of the PCIe channel may or may not match what you want... [1] https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-v2-is-here/ https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-v2-is-here/
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
There's a lot of bad things about Intel and x86 that I don't have to worry about with this: - I don't have to worry about Intel ME backdoors. - I don't have to worry about UEFI at all. - I have 4 sets of cores that are physically separated, so I have a real defense against spectre-type vulnerabilities. E.g. public-facing nginx can go on one, backend application server can go on another, and SQL server on a third. - Doesn't look like I really need any fans.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  I would take uefi over the insanity that is the pi boot process, any day. (Agreed on the other points)
_ea1k 5y ago
I'm curious, how big is the CPU gap between 4 of these and a single cheap ATOM Nuc at this point? Or i3? I don't doubt that its significant, but it seems like these are catching up?
jacquesm 5y ago
There are actually some pretty good reasons to do this using a bunch of separate processors: better process isolation than you'll ever get on a VM based solution, far more predictable performance per node, physical redundancy (if one breaks you still have three left), potentially better security because being able to compromise one of these leaves the other three in a position to lock out the compromised node without anything like a VM escape or so to worry about. Having a desktop computer built out of a cluster of small cpus each running a fragment of your workload has disadvantages, for sure, but I can see some advantages as well, besides the fun factor. It could easily be something akin to a hardware assisted version of Qubes OS.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"There are actually some pretty good reasons to do this using a bunch of separate processors: better process isolation than you'll ever get on a VM based solution" Things like that usually run in one's basement running home owner's own processes. Why would I care about my own processes "spying" on each other totally eludes me.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Because just opening a web page these days equals someone else running their code on your computer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26438040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26438040
    - FpUser 5y ago
      TLDR. That thing is a server (at least in my cases). They do not fish out and run code from some web page. They get request, they compute result and send that result back. Enough already of that scaring everyone into the "safe environment and languages"
wanderer_ 5y ago
> idles at 15W Well, not so fast... There is a high-performance SSD in there, and this is without power optimizations (you can go as far as shutting down entire nodes!)
tealpod 5y ago
Its not just for fun, Raspberry Pi is used in many realworld applications. I personally implemented LAB equipment access control system and chemical auditing tracker using many Raspberry Pi for Lurie Nanofabrication Facility https://lnf.umich.edu/ https://lnf.umich.edu/ The failure rate is like 1 in 20 over a period of year (that too in power system), they are very sturdy.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Pragmatic (as usual). ;-) I'm not so sure though that we're not seeing early forays into something that will in fact come down in cost, go up in efficiency.

cpach 5y ago

What are some good x86-64 alternatives to the Raspberry Pi? Asking since I’m quite out-of-date in my hardware knowledge. I guess what I want is low energy consumption, ~8 GB RAM (or more) and enough CPU to run a bunch of Docker containers. And a price tag that’s not higher than the Pi.

scottlamb 5y ago
I don't think you're going to find anything as cheap as a single Pi, but you should be able to find something cheaper than the Turing Pi 2 ($200?), 4 of its CM4 adapters ($40 total), and 4 Raspberry Pi CM4s ($140 total): $380ish. One option is to buy a used Intel NUC on eBay. I bought one for $235 (with RAM, SSD, and case) a couple years ago that satisfies all that. I haven't looked into a lot of the other x86-64 SBCs. I really liked the ODROID-H2+ but it's discontinued due to supply chain problems. I'm hoping an ODROID-H3 or something will come out next year.
worker767424 5y ago
Some of the modern Atom CPUs might fit the bill.
NortySpock 5y ago
I'm told there's an "thin client" class of computers. Ebay may have a few used variants that get close to your target cost, look for the HP t620 / t630 / t640 series for examples but I am also getting hits searching for used enterprise network thin clients, with prices in the ~$45+ range. I'm considering something like this if at some point I decide to upgrade from my RPi 4, which is currently RAM limited. ServeTheHome did a one-liter PC series they called Project Tiny Mini Micro, that features small units that hit everything you ask for except cost (buying used might avert the ~$250-$800 price tags I see)

vineyardmike 5y ago

The first few lines of this article made it clear this was learning oriented and a “challenge” from a friendly competition.

agumonkey 5y ago
I love the "lets do something just for the sake of it" approach in life. Too often economic thinking restrict from fun creations and discoveries

pdpi 5y ago

I've been meaning to build something like this for a while now, and "performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers." is pretty much my motivation to do it — I want a sufficiently limited setup where I'll hit bottlenecks with relatively small workloads, because the whole point is playing with evading those bottlenecks.

bee_rider 5y ago
I'm almost wondering if this might be useful for a research lab, to prototype HPC algorithms. Like, I don't really want to run stuff on a big cluster or supercomputer while running my code. And it would be nice to have a tiny little cluster that hits bottlenecks while solving matrices that I can easily run on my desktop.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  The problem here is that the fidelity of a test run on a raspberry pi cluster, as compared to one run on the actual target hardware, is about the same as running the test on a cheaper and easier simulator environment of VMs.
  - accountofme 5y ago
    From what I have heard, Pi's are used by supercomputer clusters to solve the problem of testing code at scale (hundreds of nodes) but not on the expensive hardware.
- toast0 5y ago
  Probably not a research lab, but maybe an educational lab. Experience problems with multi-node systems and learn to work around them, but expect real application problems to be different.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I totally understand. This is a fun way to do it. A cheaper option would also be to run a lot of virtual machines on a single device and only assign them limited CPU and RAM budgets. You can actually do this all within a single Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with ESXi: https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esxi-on-arm-with-a-raspberry-pi/ https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esx... Not going to lie: I'd still enjoy having one of these Quad-Pi boards to play with, though.

moffkalast 5y ago

The Pi generally has pretty atrocious power management, with linear regulators and no option to sleep or save power in any way aside from turning off stuff like USB controllers. It would probably cost them like $2 in parts to add switch mode power supplies and they'd reduce power consumption by at least half if not more. But no we can't afford a few dollars worth' of parts on an $80 product to improve quality of life significantly lmao. Imagine all the battery powered applications where this would be a night and day difference.

andai 5y ago
Does anyone offer a comparable product that does that? Might be worth building one just to scare them into fixing it.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  There are tons of SBCs out there, but none of them scare Raspberry Foundation because none of them have the wide distribution, brand recognition, and large community that goes with it. It's very much a popularity feeds popularity market.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  There's the clusterboard from pine64 which fits up to seven CPU boards: https://pine64.com/product-category/clusterboard/ https://pine64.com/product-category/clusterboard/ You can use two different CPU boards with the clusterboard: - SOPINE A64 compute module with a quad core ARM Cortex A53 and 2 GB RAM - SOEDGE AI NEURAL MODULE with a dual-Core ARM Cortex A35, a NPU IP from Verisilicon Vivante and 2 GB RAM Note that the pinout of the SOPINE/SOEDGE modules is not compatible with the Raspberry Pi 1 and 3 compute modules (DDR3 vs. DDR2 SO-DIMM socket and obviously a different pinout), so you unfortunately can't mix them. Pine64 also recently announced the SOQuartz module with a more powerful SoC (Rockchip RK3566 with four ARM Cortex-A55 cores, a Mali-G52 GPU and a 0.8 TOPS NPU), which uses the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi 4 compute modules. This might be an interesting alternative for future cluster solutions based on the new form factor. https://www.notebookcheck.net/PINE64-SOQuartz-Compute-Module-W-US-34-99-system-on-module-launched-that-can-be-used-as-a-Raspberry-Pi-Compute-Module-4-carrier-board.577956.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/PINE64-SOQuartz-Compute-Module...

formerly_proven 5y ago

Though unfortunately the Mini-ITX space has been left do dangle for a few years now; most of the affordable (<300 money) boards have pretty old CPUs. AMD hasn't had something new in that space for a very long time - E-350/450 based boards were just recently discontinued, and that was a 10 year old part. The only other boards still available seem to be re-spins to sell of 5-6 year old APUs. These were decent in their time, but time has moved on. The E-350/450 were also bundled with crappy southbridges which consumed way more power than the CPU itself - when you see one of these boards, the smaller, fanless heatsink is for the CPU, the big one for the southbridge. VIA has been gone for some time. All the Intel boards are 14nm or 22nm parts, usually from 2014-2017. Newest boards seem to use the J4125 - a Goldmont refresh from 2019. Intel at least offers some newer stuff in the NUC form factor (though at much higher prices as well). NUCs are pretty non-standard form factor though and offer PCIe only through M.2, so for I/O you'll need an awkward M.2-to-PCIe adapter with a cable. AMD really only has that 4700S kit (which uses a PS5 SoC with defective iGPU as I understand it) at around 400 currency. The 4700S seems to have ridiculous idle power draw (~80 W - maybe power management for the GDDR and other parts are disabled together with the iGPU). There are some ARM boards now with PCIe. The RPi CM4 has a PCIe 2.0 x1, which is not a lot but maybe good enough for some use cases. The RockPro64 has an PCIe 1.0 x4 slot; the RockPi4 has an extremely awkwardly positioned M.2 slot (same PCIe 1.0 x4, it's the same SoC as the RockPro64). None of these are great options.

baybal2 5y ago
Indeed, the number of acceptable ITX boards is in single digits now for last gen CPUs.
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  >last get CPUs Did you mean "last gen CPUs"? If indeed that was a typo, I think it would be a difficult one to make on a QWERTY keyboard, because the N key isn't very close to the T key. Are you a Dvorak typist, by chance?
  - bobnamob 5y ago

justin66 5y ago

> a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall It seems like it should be this way but when it comes down to cases, for example making a network gateway, a lot of the options that get thrown around are frustratingly costly. As in, a laptop motherboard that does twice what this x86 SBC does would cost half what this does costly. I’d really like to know what x86 SBCs are now considered to be real Raspberry Pi competitors, or even considered to be in the ballpark. When the subject of ARM based RPi competitors comes up, it’s usually a conversation about the level of support those boards offer, and in that regard being x86 based is obviously a total game changer.

toast0 5y ago
If this board is $200 and the 4 raspberry pi modules you plug in need an adapter at $10 each and cost between $25 (1g ram, no wireless, no storage) and $70 (8g ram, no wireless, no storage), and we consider Mini-ITX to be tiny (debatable), we've got a budget of $340 to $520 if I can arithmetic. And we need motherboard + cpu + ram. PC parts prices aren't great right now, but a AMD Ryzen 5600G @ $240, an ASRock A520M-ITX/ac @ $105, and a Silicon Gaming 2x 16GB of DDR4-3200 for $90, is $435 [1]; assuming the firmware shipped with the board is new enough for the CPU (i didn't check if you can flash this board without a supported CPU). You can limit the CPU power in firmware settings, and to hold close to the power usage of this cluster board. If you only get 4G ram, you can save some money, but not enough to get under the lowest pi cluster with current pricing. If you need it less expensive, you could maybe get an older AMD processor or look at intel. If you want smaller than itx, it gets hard. Maybe reuse a chromebox or similar, but then you don't have much choice of hardware and connectivity. [1] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yCj2vf https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yCj2vf
easygenes 5y ago
In amateur astrophotography there’s a few Raspberry Pi based automation rigs which retail for a few hundred dollars (e.g. ASIAIR). This is a case where cheap x86 SBCs are a much better option because they give you access to the vast suites of Windows based astrophotography software available, lately particularly N.I.N.A. I even just came across a video where someone else came to the same conclusion and went into good depth on it. [1] The MeLe Quieter 2 [2] is a similar form factor to little ARM SBCs, is passively cooled, is a couple hundred dollars, and includes Win10Pro. For that you get a quad core 2Ghz+ 14nm processor, 8GB ram, and 128GB eMMC. 1: https://youtu.be/asSfA6HVHAc 2: https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/06/01/mele-quieter2-review-windows-10-ubuntu-20-04-egpu/

inetknght 5y ago

> Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. I am convinced that Intel does not deliver on that. What tiny x86 board is comparable to the Raspberry Pi? I'm looking for excellent Linux support, with well documented GPIO/ADC/DACs, and as few closed-source hardwares as possible at a similar price point. If I want to talk directly to the ethernet controller (for example) then I should be able to look at the board's documentation without having to sign any NDA.

foxfluff 5y ago
So you have found docs for the Broadcom SoCs on the Pi without NDA? That would be newsworthy. The ethernet controller lives in the SoC btw, and talks to a phy. That's another boardcom chip. See if you can find a datasheet for BCM54210. The Pi is not open hardware, even the schematic is a joke. Broadcom is another way to spell "NDA" and "no docs for plebs." I don't know about price but you absolutely can find Mini-ITX (and smaller) Intel based systems that idle at 5-15 watts and perform better than the Pi. At $200 for the cluster board, $40 for the adapters, and ~$50 a pop times 4 for the CM4s, we're talking $400-$500 and that's not far off from the price of some of these low end x86-64 systems that -- yess -- are much faster than the Pi 4.
bri3d 5y ago
It's worth pointing out that the Pi isn't open by anyone's definition or any stretch of the imagination. But, it sounds like you want a Pi for the thing it's actually somewhat good at, which is not running Kubernetes on a 4-way cluster board with an ATX power supply. The Pi is nice because it's a bridge between microcontrollers and normal OS-grade computing. You can have a full desktop environment and also have GPIOs and SPI peripherals talking to the outside world. This is pretty cool and is a nice little niche to be in. I don't think anything really beats the Pi here - there are Rockchip and Allwinner based boards that compete, but they're all just different facets of the same gem so to speak. Once you stop using those microcontroller-style functionalities and bridges to the real world and start using the Pi as a cluster server, things don't really make sense anymore to me. I get why people do this for fun (just like back in the day people would set up MPI/Beowulf clusters of whatever cast-off vintage desktops they could find), but for practicality points, there's no good argument for the Pi IMO. Compared to this 4x cluster board, an Intel NUC 11 Tiger Canyon comes in at a similar price point, 3x+ the performance/watt, and at least 5x the performance (for real workloads that touch I/O, probably 10x or more).

bullen 5y ago

I always reply to these comments because well they are simply wrong for regular Raspberry clusters (this one is stupid though, but still fun to watch): 1) The Raspberry Pi 4 is THE cheapest 2Gflops/W computer ever made and probably that will ever be made in the future too! Peak of energy/resources/lithography/architectures and velocity of money against that, will most likely make it so. 2) You can scale the Raspberry cluster as you want it, only power the nodes you need, it's modular, one breaks you still have a few left, same for the SD cards which BTW while being so slow a Raspberry 2 (2W!) can saturate them they are SURPRISINGLY sturdy (my original SanDisc (every other brand has been a complete scam) are on their 7th year of 99.999% uptime, down when my power company cut the electricity for an hour). 3) The Raspberry cluster is smaller, cooler and silent (if passively cooled, it's the most powerful device that can be fully passively cooled at 100% CPU (7W) without becoming too hot to wear early) and wont fail because of failing fans! 4) For battery backup there is nothing better because beyond total of 100W for 24 hours you start to see the limits of what is practical to manage on a individual basis. I post this picture every time: http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png (this is how you cool a Raspberry 2/4 hybrid cluster)

deleted 5y ago
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Terry_Roll 5y ago
Expanding on #2, when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws, offloading or running a variety of services/daemons on physically separate machines can also improve security. We all get told to reduce the attack vector and this is one way to do that. The organisational hierarchy best exemplifies this security isolation point for an entity, like businesses, govts, etc etc.
- qayxc 5y ago
  > when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws Spectre in particular is not a CISC HW flaw. It affects ARM and other RISC architectures as well: https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/speculative-processor-vulnerability/downloads/addressing-spectre-variant-1-in-software https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/specu...

walrus01 5y ago

> But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. I agree with all of this and if you really need to have multiple separate systems (such as to test/develop some clustering thing) you can easily turn a 25W-35W max TDP, x86-64 motherboard and cpu combo into a xen or kvm hypervisor, on debian or centos. And put as many VMs as you need on that.

blibble 5y ago
kvm works on raspberry pi 4 perfectly well
- walrus01 5y ago
  and works much better in performance on a system where you can install an affordable NVME PCI-E 3.0 or 4.0 SSD for the hypervisor and guest VMs. With a raspberry pi4 you're limited to unreliable microSD cards or weird hacks like a SATA3 drive connected by USB3.
  - blibble 5y ago
    pi4 has a PCI-e bus and supports nvme

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board Which is a poor solution as a local dev/test platform for apps to be deployed to ARM cloud platforms, which seems to be the selling point of this.

scottlamb 5y ago

It might make more sense with the nVidia Jetson option. [1] The Jetsons are considerably faster than the Pi CM4 at both general computational tasks and GPU-focused ones (like video decoding/encoding and machine learning). I wouldn't be too surprised if four of those outperformed a comparably priced/power-hungry/sized x86-64 machine for the right workload. YMMV. (That goes for any of the three Jetson models they list.) I'm also curious to see what the Turing TCM turns out to be. Though the IO is still limited to the one GbE port + one PCIe 2.0 channel per device for anything you cram in there...and the heterogenous use of the PCIe channel may or may not match what you want... [1] https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-v2-is-here/ https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-v2-is-here/

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

There's a lot of bad things about Intel and x86 that I don't have to worry about with this: - I don't have to worry about Intel ME backdoors. - I don't have to worry about UEFI at all. - I have 4 sets of cores that are physically separated, so I have a real defense against spectre-type vulnerabilities. E.g. public-facing nginx can go on one, backend application server can go on another, and SQL server on a third. - Doesn't look like I really need any fans.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I would take uefi over the insanity that is the pi boot process, any day. (Agreed on the other points)

_ea1k 5y ago

I'm curious, how big is the CPU gap between 4 of these and a single cheap ATOM Nuc at this point? Or i3? I don't doubt that its significant, but it seems like these are catching up?

jacquesm 5y ago

There are actually some pretty good reasons to do this using a bunch of separate processors: better process isolation than you'll ever get on a VM based solution, far more predictable performance per node, physical redundancy (if one breaks you still have three left), potentially better security because being able to compromise one of these leaves the other three in a position to lock out the compromised node without anything like a VM escape or so to worry about. Having a desktop computer built out of a cluster of small cpus each running a fragment of your workload has disadvantages, for sure, but I can see some advantages as well, besides the fun factor. It could easily be something akin to a hardware assisted version of Qubes OS.

FpUser 5y ago
>"There are actually some pretty good reasons to do this using a bunch of separate processors: better process isolation than you'll ever get on a VM based solution" Things like that usually run in one's basement running home owner's own processes. Why would I care about my own processes "spying" on each other totally eludes me.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Because just opening a web page these days equals someone else running their code on your computer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26438040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26438040
  - FpUser 5y ago
    TLDR. That thing is a server (at least in my cases). They do not fish out and run code from some web page. They get request, they compute result and send that result back. Enough already of that scaring everyone into the "safe environment and languages"

wanderer_ 5y ago

> idles at 15W Well, not so fast... There is a high-performance SSD in there, and this is without power optimizations (you can go as far as shutting down entire nodes!)

tealpod 5y ago

Its not just for fun, Raspberry Pi is used in many realworld applications. I personally implemented LAB equipment access control system and chemical auditing tracker using many Raspberry Pi for Lurie Nanofabrication Facility https://lnf.umich.edu/ https://lnf.umich.edu/ The failure rate is like 1 in 20 over a period of year (that too in power system), they are very sturdy.