19 ms·

PC Engines EOL

257 points by wahern 4y ago

hyperpl 4y ago
My apu2d4 on OpenBSD has been running perfectly for a number of years now. Sad to see this wrapping up but it was certainly a fun experience. I given Pascal a big thanks and wish him all the best!
- sjaak 4y ago
  It will probably run for many more years to come :)
  - transpute 4y ago
    Yes, they rarely appear on eBay. With upstream coreboot support, one could build the firmware.
    - mariuolo 4y ago
      > With upstream coreboot support, one could build the firmware. I remember building it, see https://github.com/pcengines https://github.com/pcengines .
lpcvoid 4y ago
This is a sad day for me, I have been running one of these with OpenWRT for a long time and they are absolutely stellar. I was hoping for a new version at some point, perhaps with some higher clock speeds for higher peak loads, but oh well, it was a good run. Thanks, PCEngines!
robohoe 4y ago
Nooooo....My APU2 has been kicking butt for past 5 years. Previous to that I used their Alix platform with PFSense. Those things are stable as rock. The only issues I ever had was with CF and SD cards. Actual devices are rock solid.
bonetruck 4y ago
Long time user of ALIX and APU boards, and Soekris before them. Very sad to see this news. You will be missed!
phaedrus 4y ago
My introduction to PC Engines was finding a strange embedded PC board in a pile of electronics scrap. (I think it would turn out to be an ALIX board.) Connecting to its serial port brought up a Linux prompt, but I didn't know the password. I popped the compact flash card into a reader; maybe I could see it in the password file in /etc? Hmmm... seems to be encrypted. Well I have write access too; can I just... make the password empty? I was fairly new to Linux at this time, so the fact that that worked was a huge boost to my confidence. I played around with putting different minimal Linux distros on it, and just generally having fun fooling around with a tiny x86 SBC. When I needed a new router for my home network, there was no question but that I was going to get one of these (though I got the newer APU2 board of course). I can't believe PC Engines is shutting down! End of an era.
zoobab 4y ago
I broke my Alix 1C trying to install Coreboot on there: http://www.zoobab.com/alix-1c http://www.zoobab.com/alix-1c I went once in Zurich and knocked at the door of PC Engines to buy a Wistron wifi card (it was cheaper then shipping it to Belgium), it was one guy in a house with plenty of hardware. Memories!
- soder2 4y ago
  No surprise the official website has no info about the company (e.g. who is the CEO of this company by the way? A name at least...?). Of course there is no info, as I suspected its a single person doing everything. One man show. Some factual mistakes I have read in this lengthy thread (not going to individually jump to each post to reply there): APU2-3-4-5-6 all models running literally the same ~10 year old obsolete prehistoric SoC / CPU. And to be precise, its clock speed is just 1.0Ghz! Not 1.4Ghz! It makes a huge difference in this case, ~40%. The 1.4Ghz is a boost clock speed, and its only possible for a single (1!) core, and only while the other 3 cores are literally idle. The 1.2Ghz boost is an interim clock speed though. Quite unrealistic sustained workload, right? So if you want to calculate performance based on clockspeed and IPC, you'd need to assume the 1.0Ghz, and not the 1.4. By the way, this CPU boost feature was broken since inception, until 2019, so literally only 1.0Ghz was possible even for single core workloads until that time. Have to mention it was a PITA for the firmware developer subcontractor (a word about this as well below) to make it work with lot of sweat and blood and tears. Thanks to AMD being a jerk, and not providing any support document for these folks. (People assume its only Intel who the dick company is. But I can assure everyone, AMD is the same arrogant profit-oriented a..hole company, as Intel. No difference! Just because Zen is successful in the past t-6 yrs, AMD is still a difficult company to deal with, if you are an embedded system integrator partner of theirs. End of rant.) - ECC: thats another misleading feature: its mentioned (very only in the schematics PDF, nowhere else you will find this technical info clearly written in the APU2 models page: only the 4GB RAM model has ECC. The 2GB models DO NOT HAVE ECC! As a proof, you can see it for a fraction of second when the BIOS boots, and you see the RAM information. If you bought a 2GB board, believing you'll also have ECC, you are screwed! Intel 210 vs 211 NIC: because the quad-core CPU in this prehistoric SoC is so low powered, it DOES MATTER that the i210 supports 4TX&RX queue, but the i211 only supports 2! So if your workload is heavy packet processing, the i210 is a must! As the i211 wont be able to distribute packets evenly among all the 4 cores, only between 2, so performance will suffer. Bonus little known fact: PPPoE protocol does not support the RSS (Receive Side Scaling) protocol, because PPPoE is NOT based on IP. So all your PPPoE traffic will hammer CPU0, and that core only. Performance will suffer. Nowhere near close to gigabit routing under such conditions buddy! Just you wont read this caveat anywhere, thanks "sponspored" reviewers, hiding this painful fact! The internet is full of people complaining about their gigabit speed not achieved, and it always turns out a PPPoE-type of subscription is in service. Firmware: because pcengines is a 1manshow company, he (she?) outsourced writing the BIOS for APU to a polish company called 3mdeb. When you buy an APU, you rely on a 3rd party company to provide coreboot BIOS support. As if you bought a motherboard from Asus or Gigabyte, but the UEFI comes from an "unknown" company. When they bankcrupt, and you go to Asus/Gigabyte, they will tell you: sorry, but the bios is not provided by us for your motherboard, go complain to that company who (was) responsible for it! Sounds strange, right? So in short, there is no such thing as a default non-coreboot BIOS in the APU product. This became an issue, when people wanted to see improvements on the BIOS, and the PCENGINES github issue tracker was full of open items. And the 1manshow pcengines company replied that its 3mdeb who writes the bios, pcengines doesnt deal with such topics. Contractually the customer bought a product, that is branded as PCENGINES, not a oroduct that has the 3mdeb logo on it, I hope you see my point. But anyway, this was sort of ok until very recently. In Aug 2022, the continuous flow of coreboot releases for APU stoppes suddenly. Feeling the coming bankruptcy of pcengines, 3mdeb backtracked from the relationship this February (the CEO of 3mdeb confirmed this on various forums). So everyone who is following the story knew, that pcengines APU is officially dead by now. Last point: it is very disappointing, that this product will be gone. While it had its limitations and weaknesses, it was a so-so performant and reliable x86 router solution. As many pointed out, full-x86-64 compatibilits, noFAN, ECC, multi-NIC support was the pros. Cannot understand why on earth there are no other zen1-2-3based embedded routers in the 10Watt-range, that consumers could buy, without paying the artificial "embedded-so-it-will-cost-100%-more" TAX? Also I have to question PCENGINES 1manshow person as well: built a product 6 years ago (if I am not mistaken, APU2 has been released in 2016-17?), the EOL of the SoC was known on the 1st day. But did not prepare another alternative, based the whole company on literally only 1 product (apu2-3-4-5-6 are all based on the same SoC, so technically they are still 1 product, even if there are differences in the # of NICs, and the SIM slots). So when the known EOL time comes, hasnt prepared for a new product? Yes I know, AMD to blame. But seriously, throwing away this whole market segment?
bityard 4y ago
We hear all the time about promising kickstarters that fail and everyone just nods their heads in agreement that "shipping hardware is hard". And surely it is. But yet, here was one guy shipping thousands of custom-designed modern-ish computers to hobbyists and businesses around the world at a very fair price for multiple decades. I have had an APU2C4 acting as my firewall (running OpnSense) at home for the past few years. It's been pretty a pretty good little box. My singular complaint is that the CPU has always been much slower than I'd like. Standard firewall functionality works fine, but doing any admin stuff involving package management takes ages, even with an SSD. I'm not sure what I will replace it with when the time comes. Despite talk of alternatives in these comments, there is nothing on the market that checks all of the same boxes that the APU2 does: 1) AMD64 2) fanless 3) low power 4) multiple interfaces 5) under $200.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Why AMD64? Isn’t this like the classic use case for a RaspPi?
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    While a Raspberry Pi is much more powerful than your basic router, these kinds of routers are those with genuinely extra features that will strain out a RasPi (for example, multi-gigabit routing, advanced traffic shaping, and in GP's case packet-based firewall with a possibility of deep packet inspection). Until we have decent emebedded ARM-based computers, it is still likely that there would be a reliance on x86 computers simply because they exist.
  - bityard 4y ago
    A valid question. The best answer is flexibility. On AMD64, I am guaranteed to be able to run pretty much any OS I want if my needs should change. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, weird Linux distros, whatever. Comparable ARM boards, however, tend to only work with Linux and have highly variable levels of support at that. Support can wane depending on interest and level of involvement of the community. A Raspberry Pi would be an excellent choice if they ever offered one with multiple gigabit interfaces. But it's the only ARM board I would currently consider for the role.
moneytoo 4y ago
I had mine APU2C4 for over 6 years, used as an all in one router, WiFi AP, NAS. Replaced it few weeks ago with Odroid H3+. Now I can have way more storage, 64 GB instead of 4 GB and performance while idling at same or lower power (3.5 Wh). APU2 (like the case) did indeed felt a bit more industrial grade though.
- pietrushnic 4y ago
  There is no storage limitation on PC Engines, you can get 1TB mSata and put inside and it should work without problems. Also apu2 and other have SATA port inside [1], there is also SD card slot as well as USB. [1]: https://voidst.one/posts/comprehensive-guide-to-pc-engines-apu-2-part-1-hardware/ https://voidst.one/posts/comprehensive-guide-to-pc-engines-a...
pipes 4y ago
I saw this and thought it was about the pc engine games console. I believe it's called the turbo graphics in the states.
- esnowrackley 4y ago
  Same here! But that hit its EOL a little while ago...
dale_glass 4y ago
Unfortunate, but at this point I'm starting to give up for doing routing/firewalling on low power consumer hardware anyway. At 10G and above, it's just very hard for such CPUs to keep up, and reasonable power usage seems to require hardware acceleration. I think part of the issue is the tiny ethernet frame size. Dealing with millions of packets per second is just hard on a low power CPU. And unfortunately due to the internet, jumbo frames are only a viable thing on the inside. So now the equation swings towards purpose-built devices that can actually accelerate routing, bridging and firewalling in hardware.
- pietrushnic 4y ago
  Most ARM cases would mean a tremendous amount invested in reverse engineering of binary blobs required to configure network and crypto-accelerators. Also, in most cases, it means no support *BSD like OPNsense and pfSense. That leads to fully proprietary designs, lack of transparency, and limited trustworthiness. What we were able to realize over the years of writing firmware and researching new solutions for network appliance vendors is that support for accelerators is considered a premium feature and typically is available only behind paywall corporate unobtanium. Consider very respected silicon vendors, such as Marvell [1] or NXP [2]. If you have in mind hardware (no matter if x86, Arm, RISC-V, or POWER) that would be able to mark all checkboxes that PC Engines score [3] with 10G performance, then it would be exciting competition otherwise, we are very far from community expectations, where most BSD users with open-source firmware based hardware choose PC Engines or Protectli [4]. [1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg53306.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg53306.html [2]: https://www.nxp.com/support/support/nxp-engineering-services/vortiqa-application-solutions-kits/layerscape-1043a-processor-broadband-home-router-application-solutions-kit:QORIQ-LS1043A-BHR-ASK?tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab https://www.nxp.com/support/support/nxp-engineering-services... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636960 [4]: https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=computers&f=node_coreboot&v=1&p1 https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=computers&f=node_coreboot&v=...
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Did I just get a message from ChatGPT? Because this comment doesn't quite make sense. I said nothing about ARM, and those links don't lead to quite where I'd expect.
ptman 4y ago
Turris Omnia Enterprise https://old.reddit.com/r/Turris/comments/11ns0ho/new_turris_models_on_15th_and_16th_of_march/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Turris/comments/11ns0ho/new_turris_...
elevation 4y ago
For some use cases FitPC[0] could be an alternative. [0]: https://fitpc.com/ https://fitpc.com/
rozal 4y ago
Read this as: PC Engines LOL
thayne 4y ago
What are some alternatives?
- 70rd 4y ago
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64 https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64 Those boxes are at higher price point, but far exceed the apu lineup in features/compute.
  - transpute 4y ago
    All firmware component source code (e.g., ARM Trusted Firmware and U-Boot) Do you know if they allow customization of the Trusted Firmware, e.g. with owner-signed TrustZone? The most recent project update was July 2021? https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64/updates https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64/upda... https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/article-youtube-suggestion-traverse-ten64.38236/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/article-yo... > [Ten64] platform (Layerscape) is somewhat interesting but sadly has been so slow to appear in reasonable products that it has been surpassed by basic Celeron-based systems ... seems to me that the Layerscape platform will go the same route as the Marvell (Armada 385 I think) ones did; one or two revisions and then radio silence where only highly integrated partners still keep using it ... it's not powerful enough as a CPU, and the hardware acceleration suffers from the same problems that basic Broadcom SoCs and higher-end ASIC-accelerators do: they get outdated and useless rather quickly
    - mcbridematt 4y ago
      Hi, I'm the person behind the Ten64. Ten64's have been shipping for a while now, though you are best to ask in our support forum: https://forum.traverse.com.au/ https://forum.traverse.com.au/ . We haven't posted much on Crowd Supply as it's a very manual process to get stuff up on there. I'm not too familiar with TrustZone, but I'm not aware of any limitations in the secure world. I haven't tried OP-TEE or any similar secure world firmware' simply as no one has asked for it. You can see all our firmware components here: https://gitlab.com/traversetech/ls1088firmware https://gitlab.com/traversetech/ls1088firmware
outsomnia 4y ago
I used these for home router + wifi until last week... they were pretty good, low power and low heat / fanless, relatively normal x86 with a BIOS tailored for embedded. I can see they're a bit niche both themselves, and using a niche cpu for the vendor and arm64 wants to eat their lunch. But it was good while it lasted. I coincidentally replaced mine just before this with 2.5G arm64 based board, also fanless.
- smw 4y ago
  Could you possibly provide a link? Thanks!
wiml 4y ago
This is bittersweet, I've used pcengines boards for a lot of things over the years. Question to HN: What hardware are you using today for things you would have used an APU for a decade ago?
- msh 4y ago
  A m1 mac mini for home server replaced the apu for me.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    Is Asahi at a state where you can ditch MacOS for this?
    - msh 4y ago
      No, unfortunatly. I run my linux stuff in docker containers.
_0xdd 4y ago
Sad day. I picked up an ALIX board quite a number of years ago and it served as my first introduction to using OpenBSD for routing. I've been using the APU2 line since then, and I absolutely love the devices. Really great low-cost hardware that, for my purposes, has been rock solid for years.
transpute 4y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614613 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35619349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35619349
rektide 4y ago
PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. There are a variety of new Ryzen embedded cores which have really great capabilities that could fit this model. We're just not in the same world where AMD is going to sit down & lead you through design, like a much much smaller world was. And board design is harder, faster systems. It's just harder to make boards. What really sucks is that this frell over a huge market segment. Industrial embedded stuff is all crazy expensive. New embedded systems are often $700 plus. I'm also curious to know what availability on embedded parts is. I get the impression old parts aren't necessarily easy to get, much less get with reasonable discount prices. The low-end R1505G from 2019 was $80 when announced, & my vague impression is this is still about as low as one's gonna go for getting a embedded Ryzen chip. The GX-412 chips from 2014 were probably half the price. It's so awful that the gap between rpi & x86 grows. Sure there are excellent second hand markets, but the x86 market running upmarket is a terrible general situation. Decent embedded chips should be a very cost effective available baseline, should make lots of affordable baseline low frills systems available.
- transpute 4y ago
  > PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. PC Engines designed one of the best-regarded boards of the last decade. It's unlikely that they needed babysitting by AMD. What they sought from AMD was a low-power embedded SoC without a GPU, in ~price and perf/watt of sub-10W TDP SoC used in the fanless APU2. An SoC with different TDP and price tier would have meant no upgrade path for APU2 customers, and market development for new customers. Ryzen Embedded V2000 (2020) customers included casinos. All models included iGPU, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-embedded-socs-with-up-to-eight-7nm-cores-and-radeon-graphics https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-e... Ryzen Embedded V3000 (2022) finally dropped the iGPU, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launched-with-zen-3-and-ddr5/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launch... While we're having a moment of silence for PC Engines, they deserve credit for small biz survival through 2020-2022, with supply chain disruptions and grey markets for Intel NICs and other components. Now AMD is ending sales of embedded GX-412TC, with 6 month backlog and >30% drop in laptop sales. Why can't AMD extend sales of this old SoC until they have a replacement Ryzen Embedded V3000 SKU with comparable power profile? GX-412 is an older node. Customers want to buy it. AMD has struggled to get adoption and design wins for Ryzen Embedded. Why abandon existing embedded customers?
tiew9Vii 4y ago
This is sad. I built a home OpenBSD router several years ago using the APU2. I haven't touched it/loggied in for several years although I keep meaning to so i can update the OS. It's been sat ticking along nicely doing DNS, DNS filtering, cross subnet routing, wireguard for remote hiccup free. I'm not sure there's any equivalent now?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperpl 4y ago
  I'm guessing protectli might be a contender here. I think they're able to router gigabit as well. I think there are some similar variants that can be had from Aliexpress but I certainly wouldn't be running those as my router.
- transpute 4y ago
  $200 ODROID dual NIC H3/H3+ Intel Jasper Lake, https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 $400 HP T740 Ryzen Embedded thin client from eBay, add Intel PCIe quad port NIC, https://www.neelc.org/posts/hp-t740-freebsd/ https://www.neelc.org/posts/hp-t740-freebsd/ $800 OPNsense Ryzen Embedded 10GbE router, https://wiki.junicast.de/en/junicast/review/opnsense_dec740 https://wiki.junicast.de/en/junicast/review/opnsense_dec740
  - imiric 4y ago
    Those Deciso routers look amazing <3 Thanks for linking!
  - tambre 4y ago
    Only the OPNsense seems to support ECC memory. The Intel boards would be so amazing if not for their artifical segmentation.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I have a Xeon D1521 board that I use which does support ECC. It was under $500 when I bought it, but can't find it now. Supermicro does make a mITX board around it with 2x10GbE for $800. Asrock (which made the board I have) sells a uATX one in mid $500 range (I think I spent $499 on mine[1]). 1: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=D1521D4I#Specifications https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=D...
rpcope1 4y ago
Wow this really sucks. I've got a bunch of these...I don't think I've ever seen anything as flexible, capable and stable at this price point ever. It really sucks that AMD is really dropping the ball here.
doctorfennel 4y ago
[dead]
1letterunixname 4y ago
Neat history but not all that efficient in terms of heat, instructions per cycle, or money. While RPi prices are still stupid, there's a variety of low-spec IoT ESP32, STM32, and pocketbeagle. Bananapis are far more capable than RPis for about +50% $. If you have more money, embedded Ryzen and EPYC such as used by Deciso OPNsense boxes (FreeBSD-based). https://shop.opnsense.com/dec800-series-opnsense-desktop-security-appliance/ https://shop.opnsense.com/dec800-series-opnsense-desktop-sec... https://premioinc.com/pages/amd-ryzen-embedded-single-board-computers-sbc https://premioinc.com/pages/amd-ryzen-embedded-single-board-...
- transpute 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    [flagged]
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  None of those cover the same properties, though. PC Engines did reasonably cheap full computers (embedded, or at least headless, but GBs of RAM), x86 (so you didn't need some special hacked up OS image just for your exact board), and coreboot (high quality open source firmware).
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    [flagged]
Helmut10001 4y ago
Oh no, I love my Apu2.D4 OPNsense router! Such a versatile, robust and low-tdp platform. What are alternatives? I use a protectli [1] at my second place, but it is more expensive and feels a little bit too bulky, compared to the APU. I also have an Odroid Cloudshell 2 with XU4 as a NAS [2], but the platform is not as widely supported, e.g. without coreboot support (I still love the Odroid). The Raspberry Pi Zero WH is difficult to get these days (and not powerful enough), and I find the Raspberry lineup a little bit too fragile to hardware issues, from my experiences. My APU with open coreboot firmware worked 7 years without a single issue. What I would wish for would be a low-cost embedded solution (< $400) with support for ECC memory. [1]: https://protectli.com/ [2]: https://www.hardkernel.com/
- INTPenis 4y ago
  I moved from my APU2 router to a HUNSN Intel Celeron router, still fanless, 2.5Gb in 4 ports, still can run opnsense, tho I run OpenBSD on it. So I'm happy with it.
  - leetnewb 4y ago
    I think I picked up a similar one - haven't put it into operation yet, but seems to stay cool enough in testing.
- transpute 4y ago
  PC Engines APU2 offered unmatched flexibility in the sub-$200 x86 segment: low-power, fanless open-source coreboot firmware Intel NICs (vs Realtek) open schematics USB, SD, SATA or mSATA storage ECC RAM GPIO TPM and DRTM 3rd party cases for rack/wall mount supported by Linux, Xen, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, pfSense, OPNsense They are taking orders until June 2023, for shipment in ~6 months. Alternatives have different feature subsets, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636898
  - jon-wood 4y ago
    We've been developing an industrial IoT gateway at work on top of the APU2 series, and there really is nothing quite like it. I'd add to that list support for mPCIe LTE modems. My only real complaint with the APU2 was that the story around TPM support isn't great - while they do technically support a TPM, its via an additional board you plug in, and availability is more or less non-existent. Apparently the CPU has a built in TPM but PC Engines were unable to get it working, and AMD weren't engaging with them on resolving that.
das-hinterland 4y ago
First Soekris now PCEngines. Sad that this market is being ceded to untrustworthy shite from Shenzhen.
- vladak 4y ago
  Exactly. Soekris was the first thing that came to my mind after seeing this news, having used various Soekris boxes for home router for many years. Eventually got replaced by Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 (which are now also impossible to get via common sale channels, besides ebay) running OpenBSD.
  - bnabholz 4y ago
    At work we have hundreds of Alix/APUs in the field and they have been great, very low hardware failure rate (occasionally a NIC going bad). We will probably make a final order to carry us through and then it's back to the drawing board. I also have fond memories of my personal Soekris box running m0n0wall in the early 2000s (I think back then pfSense was more bloated/slow on limited hardware). My experience with that setup was definitely what made me consider the PC Engines equipment for work. Similarly I have also switched to Ubiquiti for home use.
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    I have a feeling that the MIPS-based Octeon SOCs are EOL or close to it, and Ubiquiti is allocating everything to the Unifi versions of the same hardware.
anilakar 4y ago
The ALIX/APU platform is sadly the only one on the market that: - has at least three network interfaces - is a relatively straightforward x86 system you can just slap a mainstream Linux distro on - is small enough to be integrated into a custom enclosure - is affordable. It's been a reliable platform with only one broken serial port and one broken ethernet interface in some 500 deployed systems (flash endurance is another story, however).
- fullstop 4y ago
  Check out the Qotom fanless mini-PCs. Mine has 5x network interfaces, and it's a straight forward x86-64 system. I run OpenWrt on mine, but it's just a PC so you can install any mainstream Linux distribution on it. It comes with an enclosure, which might not be what you're looking for. The cost depends on how much memory / storage you need, obviously, but it's not that different from the ALIX/APU once you include things like power supplies, cases, etc.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Other devices can fall in that category, or be very close to that, although being much faster they obviously cost more than the ALIX/APU. See for example https://www.ipu-system.de/ https://www.ipu-system.de/ That said, I have been extremely happy with my old WRAP boards; they worked for years without a hitch with PfSense (now I would use OpnSense), and didn't swap them with newer PcEngines boards just because at that time they were already a tad slow for today's Internet.
- 3np 4y ago
  CWWK Intel N5XXX and N6XXX (resold under other names) on AliExpress ticks all those boxes. ServeTheHome has some video reviews and user forum threads on them. Still holding my breath for a Ryzen-Embedded-based APU successor but that's the closest I'm aware of.
  - eqvinox 4y ago
    > Still holding my breath for a Ryzen-Embedded-based APU successor but that's the closest I'm aware of. Something like this? https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embedded-computers/bedrock-v3000-basic/ https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embed... (can't find prices yet, sadly.) Also some time this year a successor to the (Zen1 and very dated) Epyc 3000 series is supposed to show up. I've been running 2 of those and they were nice back when they were fresh. Much more of a small-server setup though.
ceving 4y ago
So sad. I bought many APUs.
marenkay 4y ago
This is a great loss. APU was my favourite system to bootstrap infrastructure in my home and labs because it was powered by coreboot and runs Linux out of the box, and also is one of the few low powered devices which still would outperform an RPi or clones. I have a stack of APU2 and APU4 devices and nothing but love and gratefulness for pcengines for making those guys. 100% good experience
KyleSanderson 4y ago
In the event the folks behind PC Engines sees this, thank you.
BadJo0Jo0 4y ago
I've been running a APU3B4 with PFSense for the past 6 years. Still going strong. Sad to hear about this.
geraldhh 4y ago
to everyone looking for alternatives: used office (thin-)clients make much, much beefier routers and mediacenters without using more power (thou some have fans running at idle load) and costing less.
- jon-wood 4y ago
  They are indeed reasonably good for things where it doesn't really matter if it falls down, but I'd be laughed out of the room if I suggested we built a business on top of second-hand thin clients, doubly so when I turned up to a client site carrying on with two USB ethernet adapters and a USB LTE modem hanging off the back to put in a machine room.
  - geraldhh 4y ago
    just tell them that it's the 'pro model'
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
  And not coming with multiple network ports.
squarefoot 4y ago
"Despite having used considerable quantities of AMD processors and Intel NICs, we don't get adequate design support for new projects. In addition, the x86 silicon currently offered is not very appealing for our niche of passively cooled boards. After about 20 years of WRAP, ALIX and APU, it is time for me to move on to different things." If I may, my current NAS runs off a 10+ years old Atom D410 which is way slower than the GX412, still perfectly adequate for managing two ZFS pools and serving them over a local network via NFS and CIFS while running some other services. I'm sure if you moved from firewalls to other things, you could find other niches in need of new products, especially now that the Raspberry Pi 4, which is comparable speed wise is nearly unobtanium and way overpriced. How much would it cost to design two new boards, say one with 1 or 2 NICs and 5 SATA ports, then one with one NIC, WiFi and a good number of GPIOs? I would surely buy a few of them, and probably others would as well.
Sinjo 4y ago
By coincidence I just ordered my first PC Engines computer to use as a router last week. Glad I got in while they're still being made. It seems like an underserved niche.
- hyperpl 4y ago
  You will love it

257 points by wahern 4y ago

My apu2d4 on OpenBSD has been running perfectly for a number of years now. Sad to see this wrapping up but it was certainly a fun experience. I given Pascal a big thanks and wish him all the best!

sjaak 4y ago
It will probably run for many more years to come :)
- transpute 4y ago
  Yes, they rarely appear on eBay. With upstream coreboot support, one could build the firmware.
  - mariuolo 4y ago
    > With upstream coreboot support, one could build the firmware. I remember building it, see https://github.com/pcengines https://github.com/pcengines .

lpcvoid 4y ago

This is a sad day for me, I have been running one of these with OpenWRT for a long time and they are absolutely stellar. I was hoping for a new version at some point, perhaps with some higher clock speeds for higher peak loads, but oh well, it was a good run. Thanks, PCEngines!

robohoe 4y ago

Nooooo....My APU2 has been kicking butt for past 5 years. Previous to that I used their Alix platform with PFSense. Those things are stable as rock. The only issues I ever had was with CF and SD cards. Actual devices are rock solid.

bonetruck 4y ago

Long time user of ALIX and APU boards, and Soekris before them. Very sad to see this news. You will be missed!

phaedrus 4y ago

My introduction to PC Engines was finding a strange embedded PC board in a pile of electronics scrap. (I think it would turn out to be an ALIX board.) Connecting to its serial port brought up a Linux prompt, but I didn't know the password. I popped the compact flash card into a reader; maybe I could see it in the password file in /etc? Hmmm... seems to be encrypted. Well I have write access too; can I just... make the password empty? I was fairly new to Linux at this time, so the fact that that worked was a huge boost to my confidence. I played around with putting different minimal Linux distros on it, and just generally having fun fooling around with a tiny x86 SBC. When I needed a new router for my home network, there was no question but that I was going to get one of these (though I got the newer APU2 board of course). I can't believe PC Engines is shutting down! End of an era.

zoobab 4y ago

I broke my Alix 1C trying to install Coreboot on there: http://www.zoobab.com/alix-1c http://www.zoobab.com/alix-1c I went once in Zurich and knocked at the door of PC Engines to buy a Wistron wifi card (it was cheaper then shipping it to Belgium), it was one guy in a house with plenty of hardware. Memories!

soder2 4y ago
No surprise the official website has no info about the company (e.g. who is the CEO of this company by the way? A name at least...?). Of course there is no info, as I suspected its a single person doing everything. One man show. Some factual mistakes I have read in this lengthy thread (not going to individually jump to each post to reply there): APU2-3-4-5-6 all models running literally the same ~10 year old obsolete prehistoric SoC / CPU. And to be precise, its clock speed is just 1.0Ghz! Not 1.4Ghz! It makes a huge difference in this case, ~40%. The 1.4Ghz is a boost clock speed, and its only possible for a single (1!) core, and only while the other 3 cores are literally idle. The 1.2Ghz boost is an interim clock speed though. Quite unrealistic sustained workload, right? So if you want to calculate performance based on clockspeed and IPC, you'd need to assume the 1.0Ghz, and not the 1.4. By the way, this CPU boost feature was broken since inception, until 2019, so literally only 1.0Ghz was possible even for single core workloads until that time. Have to mention it was a PITA for the firmware developer subcontractor (a word about this as well below) to make it work with lot of sweat and blood and tears. Thanks to AMD being a jerk, and not providing any support document for these folks. (People assume its only Intel who the dick company is. But I can assure everyone, AMD is the same arrogant profit-oriented a..hole company, as Intel. No difference! Just because Zen is successful in the past t-6 yrs, AMD is still a difficult company to deal with, if you are an embedded system integrator partner of theirs. End of rant.) - ECC: thats another misleading feature: its mentioned (very only in the schematics PDF, nowhere else you will find this technical info clearly written in the APU2 models page: only the 4GB RAM model has ECC. The 2GB models DO NOT HAVE ECC! As a proof, you can see it for a fraction of second when the BIOS boots, and you see the RAM information. If you bought a 2GB board, believing you'll also have ECC, you are screwed! Intel 210 vs 211 NIC: because the quad-core CPU in this prehistoric SoC is so low powered, it DOES MATTER that the i210 supports 4TX&RX queue, but the i211 only supports 2! So if your workload is heavy packet processing, the i210 is a must! As the i211 wont be able to distribute packets evenly among all the 4 cores, only between 2, so performance will suffer. Bonus little known fact: PPPoE protocol does not support the RSS (Receive Side Scaling) protocol, because PPPoE is NOT based on IP. So all your PPPoE traffic will hammer CPU0, and that core only. Performance will suffer. Nowhere near close to gigabit routing under such conditions buddy! Just you wont read this caveat anywhere, thanks "sponspored" reviewers, hiding this painful fact! The internet is full of people complaining about their gigabit speed not achieved, and it always turns out a PPPoE-type of subscription is in service. Firmware: because pcengines is a 1manshow company, he (she?) outsourced writing the BIOS for APU to a polish company called 3mdeb. When you buy an APU, you rely on a 3rd party company to provide coreboot BIOS support. As if you bought a motherboard from Asus or Gigabyte, but the UEFI comes from an "unknown" company. When they bankcrupt, and you go to Asus/Gigabyte, they will tell you: sorry, but the bios is not provided by us for your motherboard, go complain to that company who (was) responsible for it! Sounds strange, right? So in short, there is no such thing as a default non-coreboot BIOS in the APU product. This became an issue, when people wanted to see improvements on the BIOS, and the PCENGINES github issue tracker was full of open items. And the 1manshow pcengines company replied that its 3mdeb who writes the bios, pcengines doesnt deal with such topics. Contractually the customer bought a product, that is branded as PCENGINES, not a oroduct that has the 3mdeb logo on it, I hope you see my point. But anyway, this was sort of ok until very recently. In Aug 2022, the continuous flow of coreboot releases for APU stoppes suddenly. Feeling the coming bankruptcy of pcengines, 3mdeb backtracked from the relationship this February (the CEO of 3mdeb confirmed this on various forums). So everyone who is following the story knew, that pcengines APU is officially dead by now. Last point: it is very disappointing, that this product will be gone. While it had its limitations and weaknesses, it was a so-so performant and reliable x86 router solution. As many pointed out, full-x86-64 compatibilits, noFAN, ECC, multi-NIC support was the pros. Cannot understand why on earth there are no other zen1-2-3based embedded routers in the 10Watt-range, that consumers could buy, without paying the artificial "embedded-so-it-will-cost-100%-more" TAX? Also I have to question PCENGINES 1manshow person as well: built a product 6 years ago (if I am not mistaken, APU2 has been released in 2016-17?), the EOL of the SoC was known on the 1st day. But did not prepare another alternative, based the whole company on literally only 1 product (apu2-3-4-5-6 are all based on the same SoC, so technically they are still 1 product, even if there are differences in the # of NICs, and the SIM slots). So when the known EOL time comes, hasnt prepared for a new product? Yes I know, AMD to blame. But seriously, throwing away this whole market segment?

bityard 4y ago

We hear all the time about promising kickstarters that fail and everyone just nods their heads in agreement that "shipping hardware is hard". And surely it is. But yet, here was one guy shipping thousands of custom-designed modern-ish computers to hobbyists and businesses around the world at a very fair price for multiple decades. I have had an APU2C4 acting as my firewall (running OpnSense) at home for the past few years. It's been pretty a pretty good little box. My singular complaint is that the CPU has always been much slower than I'd like. Standard firewall functionality works fine, but doing any admin stuff involving package management takes ages, even with an SSD. I'm not sure what I will replace it with when the time comes. Despite talk of alternatives in these comments, there is nothing on the market that checks all of the same boxes that the APU2 does: 1) AMD64 2) fanless 3) low power 4) multiple interfaces 5) under $200.

TylerE 4y ago
Why AMD64? Isn’t this like the classic use case for a RaspPi?
- zinekeller 4y ago
  While a Raspberry Pi is much more powerful than your basic router, these kinds of routers are those with genuinely extra features that will strain out a RasPi (for example, multi-gigabit routing, advanced traffic shaping, and in GP's case packet-based firewall with a possibility of deep packet inspection). Until we have decent emebedded ARM-based computers, it is still likely that there would be a reliance on x86 computers simply because they exist.
- bityard 4y ago
  A valid question. The best answer is flexibility. On AMD64, I am guaranteed to be able to run pretty much any OS I want if my needs should change. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, weird Linux distros, whatever. Comparable ARM boards, however, tend to only work with Linux and have highly variable levels of support at that. Support can wane depending on interest and level of involvement of the community. A Raspberry Pi would be an excellent choice if they ever offered one with multiple gigabit interfaces. But it's the only ARM board I would currently consider for the role.

moneytoo 4y ago

I had mine APU2C4 for over 6 years, used as an all in one router, WiFi AP, NAS. Replaced it few weeks ago with Odroid H3+. Now I can have way more storage, 64 GB instead of 4 GB and performance while idling at same or lower power (3.5 Wh). APU2 (like the case) did indeed felt a bit more industrial grade though.

pietrushnic 4y ago
There is no storage limitation on PC Engines, you can get 1TB mSata and put inside and it should work without problems. Also apu2 and other have SATA port inside [1], there is also SD card slot as well as USB. [1]: https://voidst.one/posts/comprehensive-guide-to-pc-engines-apu-2-part-1-hardware/ https://voidst.one/posts/comprehensive-guide-to-pc-engines-a...

pipes 4y ago

I saw this and thought it was about the pc engine games console. I believe it's called the turbo graphics in the states.

esnowrackley 4y ago
Same here! But that hit its EOL a little while ago...

dale_glass 4y ago

Unfortunate, but at this point I'm starting to give up for doing routing/firewalling on low power consumer hardware anyway. At 10G and above, it's just very hard for such CPUs to keep up, and reasonable power usage seems to require hardware acceleration. I think part of the issue is the tiny ethernet frame size. Dealing with millions of packets per second is just hard on a low power CPU. And unfortunately due to the internet, jumbo frames are only a viable thing on the inside. So now the equation swings towards purpose-built devices that can actually accelerate routing, bridging and firewalling in hardware.

pietrushnic 4y ago
Most ARM cases would mean a tremendous amount invested in reverse engineering of binary blobs required to configure network and crypto-accelerators. Also, in most cases, it means no support *BSD like OPNsense and pfSense. That leads to fully proprietary designs, lack of transparency, and limited trustworthiness. What we were able to realize over the years of writing firmware and researching new solutions for network appliance vendors is that support for accelerators is considered a premium feature and typically is available only behind paywall corporate unobtanium. Consider very respected silicon vendors, such as Marvell [1] or NXP [2]. If you have in mind hardware (no matter if x86, Arm, RISC-V, or POWER) that would be able to mark all checkboxes that PC Engines score [3] with 10G performance, then it would be exciting competition otherwise, we are very far from community expectations, where most BSD users with open-source firmware based hardware choose PC Engines or Protectli [4]. [1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg53306.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg53306.html [2]: https://www.nxp.com/support/support/nxp-engineering-services/vortiqa-application-solutions-kits/layerscape-1043a-processor-broadband-home-router-application-solutions-kit:QORIQ-LS1043A-BHR-ASK?tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab https://www.nxp.com/support/support/nxp-engineering-services... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636960 [4]: https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=computers&f=node_coreboot&v=1&p1 https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=computers&f=node_coreboot&v=...
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Did I just get a message from ChatGPT? Because this comment doesn't quite make sense. I said nothing about ARM, and those links don't lead to quite where I'd expect.

ptman 4y ago

Turris Omnia Enterprise https://old.reddit.com/r/Turris/comments/11ns0ho/new_turris_models_on_15th_and_16th_of_march/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Turris/comments/11ns0ho/new_turris_...

elevation 4y ago

For some use cases FitPC[0] could be an alternative. [0]: https://fitpc.com/ https://fitpc.com/

rozal 4y ago

Read this as: PC Engines LOL

thayne 4y ago

What are some alternatives?

70rd 4y ago
https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64 https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64 Those boxes are at higher price point, but far exceed the apu lineup in features/compute.
- transpute 4y ago
  All firmware component source code (e.g., ARM Trusted Firmware and U-Boot) Do you know if they allow customization of the Trusted Firmware, e.g. with owner-signed TrustZone? The most recent project update was July 2021? https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64/updates https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64/upda... https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/article-youtube-suggestion-traverse-ten64.38236/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/article-yo... > [Ten64] platform (Layerscape) is somewhat interesting but sadly has been so slow to appear in reasonable products that it has been surpassed by basic Celeron-based systems ... seems to me that the Layerscape platform will go the same route as the Marvell (Armada 385 I think) ones did; one or two revisions and then radio silence where only highly integrated partners still keep using it ... it's not powerful enough as a CPU, and the hardware acceleration suffers from the same problems that basic Broadcom SoCs and higher-end ASIC-accelerators do: they get outdated and useless rather quickly
  - mcbridematt 4y ago
    Hi, I'm the person behind the Ten64. Ten64's have been shipping for a while now, though you are best to ask in our support forum: https://forum.traverse.com.au/ https://forum.traverse.com.au/ . We haven't posted much on Crowd Supply as it's a very manual process to get stuff up on there. I'm not too familiar with TrustZone, but I'm not aware of any limitations in the secure world. I haven't tried OP-TEE or any similar secure world firmware' simply as no one has asked for it. You can see all our firmware components here: https://gitlab.com/traversetech/ls1088firmware https://gitlab.com/traversetech/ls1088firmware

outsomnia 4y ago

I used these for home router + wifi until last week... they were pretty good, low power and low heat / fanless, relatively normal x86 with a BIOS tailored for embedded. I can see they're a bit niche both themselves, and using a niche cpu for the vendor and arm64 wants to eat their lunch. But it was good while it lasted. I coincidentally replaced mine just before this with 2.5G arm64 based board, also fanless.

smw 4y ago
Could you possibly provide a link? Thanks!

wiml 4y ago

This is bittersweet, I've used pcengines boards for a lot of things over the years. Question to HN: What hardware are you using today for things you would have used an APU for a decade ago?

msh 4y ago
A m1 mac mini for home server replaced the apu for me.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  Is Asahi at a state where you can ditch MacOS for this?
  - msh 4y ago
    No, unfortunatly. I run my linux stuff in docker containers.

_0xdd 4y ago

Sad day. I picked up an ALIX board quite a number of years ago and it served as my first introduction to using OpenBSD for routing. I've been using the APU2 line since then, and I absolutely love the devices. Really great low-cost hardware that, for my purposes, has been rock solid for years.

transpute 4y ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614613 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35619349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35619349

rektide 4y ago

PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. There are a variety of new Ryzen embedded cores which have really great capabilities that could fit this model. We're just not in the same world where AMD is going to sit down & lead you through design, like a much much smaller world was. And board design is harder, faster systems. It's just harder to make boards. What really sucks is that this frell over a huge market segment. Industrial embedded stuff is all crazy expensive. New embedded systems are often $700 plus. I'm also curious to know what availability on embedded parts is. I get the impression old parts aren't necessarily easy to get, much less get with reasonable discount prices. The low-end R1505G from 2019 was $80 when announced, & my vague impression is this is still about as low as one's gonna go for getting a embedded Ryzen chip. The GX-412 chips from 2014 were probably half the price. It's so awful that the gap between rpi & x86 grows. Sure there are excellent second hand markets, but the x86 market running upmarket is a terrible general situation. Decent embedded chips should be a very cost effective available baseline, should make lots of affordable baseline low frills systems available.

transpute 4y ago
> PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. PC Engines designed one of the best-regarded boards of the last decade. It's unlikely that they needed babysitting by AMD. What they sought from AMD was a low-power embedded SoC without a GPU, in ~price and perf/watt of sub-10W TDP SoC used in the fanless APU2. An SoC with different TDP and price tier would have meant no upgrade path for APU2 customers, and market development for new customers. Ryzen Embedded V2000 (2020) customers included casinos. All models included iGPU, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-embedded-socs-with-up-to-eight-7nm-cores-and-radeon-graphics https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-e... Ryzen Embedded V3000 (2022) finally dropped the iGPU, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launched-with-zen-3-and-ddr5/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launch... While we're having a moment of silence for PC Engines, they deserve credit for small biz survival through 2020-2022, with supply chain disruptions and grey markets for Intel NICs and other components. Now AMD is ending sales of embedded GX-412TC, with 6 month backlog and >30% drop in laptop sales. Why can't AMD extend sales of this old SoC until they have a replacement Ryzen Embedded V3000 SKU with comparable power profile? GX-412 is an older node. Customers want to buy it. AMD has struggled to get adoption and design wins for Ryzen Embedded. Why abandon existing embedded customers?

tiew9Vii 4y ago

This is sad. I built a home OpenBSD router several years ago using the APU2. I haven't touched it/loggied in for several years although I keep meaning to so i can update the OS. It's been sat ticking along nicely doing DNS, DNS filtering, cross subnet routing, wireguard for remote hiccup free. I'm not sure there's any equivalent now?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hyperpl 4y ago
I'm guessing protectli might be a contender here. I think they're able to router gigabit as well. I think there are some similar variants that can be had from Aliexpress but I certainly wouldn't be running those as my router.
transpute 4y ago
$200 ODROID dual NIC H3/H3+ Intel Jasper Lake, https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 $400 HP T740 Ryzen Embedded thin client from eBay, add Intel PCIe quad port NIC, https://www.neelc.org/posts/hp-t740-freebsd/ https://www.neelc.org/posts/hp-t740-freebsd/ $800 OPNsense Ryzen Embedded 10GbE router, https://wiki.junicast.de/en/junicast/review/opnsense_dec740 https://wiki.junicast.de/en/junicast/review/opnsense_dec740
- imiric 4y ago
  Those Deciso routers look amazing <3 Thanks for linking!
- tambre 4y ago
  Only the OPNsense seems to support ECC memory. The Intel boards would be so amazing if not for their artifical segmentation.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I have a Xeon D1521 board that I use which does support ECC. It was under $500 when I bought it, but can't find it now. Supermicro does make a mITX board around it with 2x10GbE for $800. Asrock (which made the board I have) sells a uATX one in mid $500 range (I think I spent $499 on mine[1]). 1: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=D1521D4I#Specifications https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=D...

rpcope1 4y ago

Wow this really sucks. I've got a bunch of these...I don't think I've ever seen anything as flexible, capable and stable at this price point ever. It really sucks that AMD is really dropping the ball here.

doctorfennel 4y ago

[dead]

1letterunixname 4y ago

Neat history but not all that efficient in terms of heat, instructions per cycle, or money. While RPi prices are still stupid, there's a variety of low-spec IoT ESP32, STM32, and pocketbeagle. Bananapis are far more capable than RPis for about +50% $. If you have more money, embedded Ryzen and EPYC such as used by Deciso OPNsense boxes (FreeBSD-based). https://shop.opnsense.com/dec800-series-opnsense-desktop-security-appliance/ https://shop.opnsense.com/dec800-series-opnsense-desktop-sec... https://premioinc.com/pages/amd-ryzen-embedded-single-board-computers-sbc https://premioinc.com/pages/amd-ryzen-embedded-single-board-...

transpute 4y ago
[flagged]
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  [flagged]
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
None of those cover the same properties, though. PC Engines did reasonably cheap full computers (embedded, or at least headless, but GBs of RAM), x86 (so you didn't need some special hacked up OS image just for your exact board), and coreboot (high quality open source firmware).
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  [flagged]

Helmut10001 4y ago

Oh no, I love my Apu2.D4 OPNsense router! Such a versatile, robust and low-tdp platform. What are alternatives? I use a protectli [1] at my second place, but it is more expensive and feels a little bit too bulky, compared to the APU. I also have an Odroid Cloudshell 2 with XU4 as a NAS [2], but the platform is not as widely supported, e.g. without coreboot support (I still love the Odroid). The Raspberry Pi Zero WH is difficult to get these days (and not powerful enough), and I find the Raspberry lineup a little bit too fragile to hardware issues, from my experiences. My APU with open coreboot firmware worked 7 years without a single issue. What I would wish for would be a low-cost embedded solution (< $400) with support for ECC memory. [1]: https://protectli.com/ [2]: https://www.hardkernel.com/

INTPenis 4y ago
I moved from my APU2 router to a HUNSN Intel Celeron router, still fanless, 2.5Gb in 4 ports, still can run opnsense, tho I run OpenBSD on it. So I'm happy with it.
- leetnewb 4y ago
  I think I picked up a similar one - haven't put it into operation yet, but seems to stay cool enough in testing.
transpute 4y ago
PC Engines APU2 offered unmatched flexibility in the sub-$200 x86 segment: low-power, fanless open-source coreboot firmware Intel NICs (vs Realtek) open schematics USB, SD, SATA or mSATA storage ECC RAM GPIO TPM and DRTM 3rd party cases for rack/wall mount supported by Linux, Xen, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, pfSense, OPNsense They are taking orders until June 2023, for shipment in ~6 months. Alternatives have different feature subsets, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636898
- jon-wood 4y ago
  We've been developing an industrial IoT gateway at work on top of the APU2 series, and there really is nothing quite like it. I'd add to that list support for mPCIe LTE modems. My only real complaint with the APU2 was that the story around TPM support isn't great - while they do technically support a TPM, its via an additional board you plug in, and availability is more or less non-existent. Apparently the CPU has a built in TPM but PC Engines were unable to get it working, and AMD weren't engaging with them on resolving that.

das-hinterland 4y ago

First Soekris now PCEngines. Sad that this market is being ceded to untrustworthy shite from Shenzhen.

vladak 4y ago
Exactly. Soekris was the first thing that came to my mind after seeing this news, having used various Soekris boxes for home router for many years. Eventually got replaced by Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 (which are now also impossible to get via common sale channels, besides ebay) running OpenBSD.
- bnabholz 4y ago
  At work we have hundreds of Alix/APUs in the field and they have been great, very low hardware failure rate (occasionally a NIC going bad). We will probably make a final order to carry us through and then it's back to the drawing board. I also have fond memories of my personal Soekris box running m0n0wall in the early 2000s (I think back then pfSense was more bloated/slow on limited hardware). My experience with that setup was definitely what made me consider the PC Engines equipment for work. Similarly I have also switched to Ubiquiti for home use.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  I have a feeling that the MIPS-based Octeon SOCs are EOL or close to it, and Ubiquiti is allocating everything to the Unifi versions of the same hardware.

anilakar 4y ago

The ALIX/APU platform is sadly the only one on the market that: - has at least three network interfaces - is a relatively straightforward x86 system you can just slap a mainstream Linux distro on - is small enough to be integrated into a custom enclosure - is affordable. It's been a reliable platform with only one broken serial port and one broken ethernet interface in some 500 deployed systems (flash endurance is another story, however).

fullstop 4y ago
Check out the Qotom fanless mini-PCs. Mine has 5x network interfaces, and it's a straight forward x86-64 system. I run OpenWrt on mine, but it's just a PC so you can install any mainstream Linux distribution on it. It comes with an enclosure, which might not be what you're looking for. The cost depends on how much memory / storage you need, obviously, but it's not that different from the ALIX/APU once you include things like power supplies, cases, etc.
squarefoot 4y ago
Other devices can fall in that category, or be very close to that, although being much faster they obviously cost more than the ALIX/APU. See for example https://www.ipu-system.de/ https://www.ipu-system.de/ That said, I have been extremely happy with my old WRAP boards; they worked for years without a hitch with PfSense (now I would use OpnSense), and didn't swap them with newer PcEngines boards just because at that time they were already a tad slow for today's Internet.
3np 4y ago
CWWK Intel N5XXX and N6XXX (resold under other names) on AliExpress ticks all those boxes. ServeTheHome has some video reviews and user forum threads on them. Still holding my breath for a Ryzen-Embedded-based APU successor but that's the closest I'm aware of.
- eqvinox 4y ago
  > Still holding my breath for a Ryzen-Embedded-based APU successor but that's the closest I'm aware of. Something like this? https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embedded-computers/bedrock-v3000-basic/ https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embed... (can't find prices yet, sadly.) Also some time this year a successor to the (Zen1 and very dated) Epyc 3000 series is supposed to show up. I've been running 2 of those and they were nice back when they were fresh. Much more of a small-server setup though.

ceving 4y ago

So sad. I bought many APUs.

marenkay 4y ago

This is a great loss. APU was my favourite system to bootstrap infrastructure in my home and labs because it was powered by coreboot and runs Linux out of the box, and also is one of the few low powered devices which still would outperform an RPi or clones. I have a stack of APU2 and APU4 devices and nothing but love and gratefulness for pcengines for making those guys. 100% good experience

KyleSanderson 4y ago

In the event the folks behind PC Engines sees this, thank you.

BadJo0Jo0 4y ago

I've been running a APU3B4 with PFSense for the past 6 years. Still going strong. Sad to hear about this.

geraldhh 4y ago

to everyone looking for alternatives: used office (thin-)clients make much, much beefier routers and mediacenters without using more power (thou some have fans running at idle load) and costing less.

jon-wood 4y ago
They are indeed reasonably good for things where it doesn't really matter if it falls down, but I'd be laughed out of the room if I suggested we built a business on top of second-hand thin clients, doubly so when I turned up to a client site carrying on with two USB ethernet adapters and a USB LTE modem hanging off the back to put in a machine room.
- geraldhh 4y ago
  just tell them that it's the 'pro model'
ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
And not coming with multiple network ports.

squarefoot 4y ago

"Despite having used considerable quantities of AMD processors and Intel NICs, we don't get adequate design support for new projects. In addition, the x86 silicon currently offered is not very appealing for our niche of passively cooled boards. After about 20 years of WRAP, ALIX and APU, it is time for me to move on to different things." If I may, my current NAS runs off a 10+ years old Atom D410 which is way slower than the GX412, still perfectly adequate for managing two ZFS pools and serving them over a local network via NFS and CIFS while running some other services. I'm sure if you moved from firewalls to other things, you could find other niches in need of new products, especially now that the Raspberry Pi 4, which is comparable speed wise is nearly unobtanium and way overpriced. How much would it cost to design two new boards, say one with 1 or 2 NICs and 5 SATA ports, then one with one NIC, WiFi and a good number of GPIOs? I would surely buy a few of them, and probably others would as well.

Sinjo 4y ago

By coincidence I just ordered my first PC Engines computer to use as a router last week. Glad I got in while they're still being made. It seems like an underserved niche.

hyperpl 4y ago
You will love it