4 ms·

Price-competitive NUCs are generally very old Celerons (J4105 and similar), which are CPU-competitive with the RK3588S but generally a little slower. Those NUCs

Price-competitive NUCs are generally very old Celerons (J4105 and similar), which are CPU-competitive with the RK3588S but generally a little slower. Those NUCs also generally have glacially slow GPUs and poor hardware acceleration for stuff like video. And a lot of the mainboards of that era can't go over 4GB of RAM, whereas you can get 16GB in an Orange Pi 5; I've got three of those in my home k8s cluster alongside some older amd64 PCs.

cfn 3y ago
I got a couple of Lenovo i5s with 8Gb for 99 Euros each on Amazon a few months ago. They even came with a 500Gb SSD and Windows 8 installed (or was it Windows 7? I can't remember, they are running Ubuntu at the moment). They are much better than a Pi and cheaper given the sourcing dificulties.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The new Intel Alder Lake N N100 up to i3-N300s are just starting to appear. Most are semi pricey but we are seeing some sub $150 offerings, new. The top end N300's are easily equivalent performance of an 35w i5-8600t. With some nice extra modern features/bells/whistles. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-processor-n100-cpu-12gb/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-p... The real challenge is though that for most people, there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost always a great trade-off. My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports, which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat. Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value, and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value. If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and more. It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade & were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But there's so much more value going to resale markets or spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get away with selling such bad performance for so long. Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they have remained far up market.
- eropple 3y ago
  Yeah I should have constrained it to new-stock stuff that isn't a repurpose of other hardware. You have absolutely been able to find stuff if you wanted to work for it. I don't really, so it's not on my radar. Alder Lake stuff is showing up now, and that's pretty great. It is not, however, particularly fast hardware, and the GPUs are still really pokey.

cfn 3y ago

I got a couple of Lenovo i5s with 8Gb for 99 Euros each on Amazon a few months ago. They even came with a 500Gb SSD and Windows 8 installed (or was it Windows 7? I can't remember, they are running Ubuntu at the moment). They are much better than a Pi and cheaper given the sourcing dificulties.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The new Intel Alder Lake N N100 up to i3-N300s are just starting to appear. Most are semi pricey but we are seeing some sub $150 offerings, new. The top end N300's are easily equivalent performance of an 35w i5-8600t. With some nice extra modern features/bells/whistles. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-processor-n100-cpu-12gb/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-p... The real challenge is though that for most people, there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost always a great trade-off. My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports, which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat. Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value, and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value. If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and more. It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade & were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But there's so much more value going to resale markets or spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get away with selling such bad performance for so long. Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they have remained far up market.

eropple 3y ago
Yeah I should have constrained it to new-stock stuff that isn't a repurpose of other hardware. You have absolutely been able to find stuff if you wanted to work for it. I don't really, so it's not on my radar. Alder Lake stuff is showing up now, and that's pretty great. It is not, however, particularly fast hardware, and the GPUs are still really pokey.