27 ms·

no, the booksize pcs of the time were pretty comparable to what you see today in terms of power. rpi was a bit cheaper and lower-power... but also vastly slowe

by paulmd 2y ago

no, the booksize pcs of the time were pretty comparable to what you see today in terms of power. rpi was a bit cheaper and lower-power... but also vastly slower. Like a factor of 4x if not more (10x?). Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory. Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory. For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model improved things a little (512mb) but still, not a good showing for a product that competed directly with these x86 nettop machines. And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w idle/12W load is not anything you're really going to notice, especially given the massive increase in performance it afforded. https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nettop-rises-again/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nett... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanless-bay-trailm-minipc/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanl... https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807.html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807... https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808.html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf Rpi team had great marketing. But it wasn’t the only game in town even back then. Nettops existed for a long time. They just didn't have the full-court press in the glossies.

p_l 2y ago
RPi also released at $35 for Model B, two years earlier.
- paulmd 2y ago
  Yes, that's always been the marketing gimmick. $35, for something with no case, no storage, no power adapter (and off-the-shelf adapters were not suitable at the time), that had a critical flaw with its system bus/all USB devices for the first 2 years of its existence. That bug didn't get fixed until feb 2014, which is basically the same time the liva launched. also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year. so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive. [0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....
  - p_l 2y ago
    ECS Liva according to reviews from 2014 would cost me about $170~180. Would still require keyboard/mouse and something to display with. Sure, it would have a case and WiFi in that price. It would also miss GPIO header, which was major selling point of initial Raspberry Pi efforts (before it became so popular for other uses, when it was still targeting education). A lot of then-common phone chargers worked. A random SD card wasn't that much of an issue. A kit with charger, NOOBS SDcard, and random assortment of extra bits to play with the electronics regularly could be acquired for ~100 USD if not less. If I wanted to play with small-size BayTrail x86, Liva was fine choice. If I needed a small general purpose computer, too. Not a very good choice if I wanted to graduate from Arduino towards somewhat more capable setup without requiring either expensive I/O boards or hacking an IO board out of Arduino or another MCU.
    - paulmd 2y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/yiR1L1d.png https://i.imgur.com/yiR1L1d.png https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png (these had a $25 rebate) these were $115 barebones iirc (add SSD and memory). https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-solid-network-box/ https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-so... $180 loaded for the whole thing (and this is indicative of what I paid for ssd+memory at the time, etc) https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png like idk what to say dude but MSRP reviews aren't always reflective of street prices back then, things used to go back on clearance sales before moore's law died. yes, you absolutely could get x86 stuff that was price-competitive with the rpi once you loaded it up. the $35 price is, as I have stated, a red herring considering all the stuff that nobody had on-hand in 2012 like proper usb chargers that could run a rpi stable, plus the massive kernel problems involved for the first few years. It's $100 loaded cost for a raspberry pi 1b or 1b+ that doesn't even work, because of kernel bugs I already linked, or just buy x86 for $75-180 and get something an order of magnitude faster that actually works and runs standard x86 distros and drivers. Stop comparing 1/3 of a pc to a out-of-the-box pc as if the price means anything at that point, this is getting to be bad-faith. Especially when the product didn’t fucking work. Like it’s the same damn story as ROCm, right? People want serious financial consideration as if they have delivered a working product, minus the delivering the working product. Come back in 5 years when your product works. I will sell you a brick with a piece of paper that says “10,000 tflops” taped to it. The perf/$ will be out of this world, but there will be some “usability issues”. PM me for details.

by paulmd 2y ago

p_l 2y ago

RPi also released at $35 for Model B, two years earlier.

paulmd 2y ago
Yes, that's always been the marketing gimmick. $35, for something with no case, no storage, no power adapter (and off-the-shelf adapters were not suitable at the time), that had a critical flaw with its system bus/all USB devices for the first 2 years of its existence. That bug didn't get fixed until feb 2014, which is basically the same time the liva launched. also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year. so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive. [0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....
- p_l 2y ago
  ECS Liva according to reviews from 2014 would cost me about $170~180. Would still require keyboard/mouse and something to display with. Sure, it would have a case and WiFi in that price. It would also miss GPIO header, which was major selling point of initial Raspberry Pi efforts (before it became so popular for other uses, when it was still targeting education). A lot of then-common phone chargers worked. A random SD card wasn't that much of an issue. A kit with charger, NOOBS SDcard, and random assortment of extra bits to play with the electronics regularly could be acquired for ~100 USD if not less. If I wanted to play with small-size BayTrail x86, Liva was fine choice. If I needed a small general purpose computer, too. Not a very good choice if I wanted to graduate from Arduino towards somewhat more capable setup without requiring either expensive I/O boards or hacking an IO board out of Arduino or another MCU.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/yiR1L1d.png https://i.imgur.com/yiR1L1d.png https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png (these had a $25 rebate) these were $115 barebones iirc (add SSD and memory). https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-solid-network-box/ https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-so... $180 loaded for the whole thing (and this is indicative of what I paid for ssd+memory at the time, etc) https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png like idk what to say dude but MSRP reviews aren't always reflective of street prices back then, things used to go back on clearance sales before moore's law died. yes, you absolutely could get x86 stuff that was price-competitive with the rpi once you loaded it up. the $35 price is, as I have stated, a red herring considering all the stuff that nobody had on-hand in 2012 like proper usb chargers that could run a rpi stable, plus the massive kernel problems involved for the first few years. It's $100 loaded cost for a raspberry pi 1b or 1b+ that doesn't even work, because of kernel bugs I already linked, or just buy x86 for $75-180 and get something an order of magnitude faster that actually works and runs standard x86 distros and drivers. Stop comparing 1/3 of a pc to a out-of-the-box pc as if the price means anything at that point, this is getting to be bad-faith. Especially when the product didn’t fucking work. Like it’s the same damn story as ROCm, right? People want serious financial consideration as if they have delivered a working product, minus the delivering the working product. Come back in 5 years when your product works. I will sell you a brick with a piece of paper that says “10,000 tflops” taped to it. The perf/$ will be out of this world, but there will be some “usability issues”. PM me for details.