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Intel’s low end SoCs are such an undervalued gem. A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down c

Intel’s low end SoCs are such an undervalued gem. A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down compatibility between ARM and MIPS based routers. I finally took the plunge and bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100. The thing has 4 cores (no SMT), a 6W TDP and boosts to 3.4 GHz and can support 16GB of ram. The mini pc I bought cost me $200, includes the processor as well 4x Intel 10Gbps Ethernet ports. At 6W, it needs no fan, and the whole chassis is metal and specifically designed to act as a heatsink, which means 0 noise and 0 moving parts. I ran a power virus on it for a few hours to test the thermals, and on a warm day in Melbourne, after hours of having all 4 cores running full throttle, CPU temperature never exceeded 90 C and the chassis barely hit 55 C. The best thing about it? Full upstream support for any Linux distro and FreeBSD. No more wondering if this particular Broadcom chipset needs a weird binary blob, no more being hostage to an OEM and having to run old forked kernels. I installed OPNSense on it, VESA mounted it behind our TV, and it hasn’t been seen or heard since. Not only has it been the most reliable router I’ve ever had at home, it’s providing various other services such as DNS server, apt cache, WireGuard server and client etc for my homelab. I’ve been waiting for ARM to get here since ARMv8 was announced in 2011, but it just hasn’t happened. Long live x86.

podocarp 2mo ago
Personally have the same experience too. I am tired trying to find out if the xyzPi of the day boards can do Linux. Vendors should also try harder. There are so many boards that release with half baked implementations or proprietary blobs. x86 always just works. Devices are also almost always just pcie devices even for those mini PCs with lots of interfaces. Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux… It's also super easy to spec out your own devices in this regime on x86. There are mini itx boards with n100/n305 with pcie slots so you can add your own cards, and the n100 has a surprisingly number of available lanes for its small size. There just seems to be no viable "just works" solution in the below 10 or 20W range apart from raspberry pi, and Intel n100/n305.
kvemkon 2mo ago
> bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100 Instead of Raspi I've got a N100 uATX mainboard with N100 (120 EUR). Fortunately it does work with normal 32GB DIMM (55 EUR, those were the days!). But I'm still missing a pico-PSU, which can be powered directly from 220V (for reasonable costs).

podocarp 2mo ago

Personally have the same experience too. I am tired trying to find out if the xyzPi of the day boards can do Linux. Vendors should also try harder. There are so many boards that release with half baked implementations or proprietary blobs. x86 always just works. Devices are also almost always just pcie devices even for those mini PCs with lots of interfaces. Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux… It's also super easy to spec out your own devices in this regime on x86. There are mini itx boards with n100/n305 with pcie slots so you can add your own cards, and the n100 has a surprisingly number of available lanes for its small size. There just seems to be no viable "just works" solution in the below 10 or 20W range apart from raspberry pi, and Intel n100/n305.

kvemkon 2mo ago

> bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100 Instead of Raspi I've got a N100 uATX mainboard with N100 (120 EUR). Fortunately it does work with normal 32GB DIMM (55 EUR, those were the days!). But I'm still missing a pico-PSU, which can be powered directly from 220V (for reasonable costs).