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Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried looking much? There's actually a fair bit of choice, and has been for the past few years, with many quad-core ARM based Pi competitors in the sub $100 market these days, all using various mobile phone style CPUs:

> https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte...

The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally.

> https://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php

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> The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the usability of the Pi

I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.

> I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional)

There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching.

I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.

> but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community

I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.

Mainline drivers or bust. Today we no longer absolutely need to make compromises and rely on corporate support for out of tree kernelsm

I don't think so. I feel like the Pi is dragging down the rest of the industry by using broadcom chips based on a GPU that has been obsolete for a long time.

How can the Pi be dragging down the industry that it created and is still dominating by a hefty margin? People already have plenty of alternatives but somehow their price/performance ratio renders them to obscurity. Perhaps that must mean something.

A small player in an industry doesn't have the volume to drag down the industry, only the dominant player does.

The dominant player in this instance is insisting on using chipsets that are effectively obsolete when compared to the competition.

As a result, the community that they command continues to work on supporting this obsolete hardware, rather than newer hardware.

Network effects exist here just like in many other industries.

Exactly this. ARM is not a platform. It's some SoC where each manufacture solders some random pins to random chips. Few manufactures publish device tress and only the dead Windows phones have UEFI+ARM (with their locked bootloaders. Fuck you MS).

If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.

> Fuck you MS

To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".

Rockchip, Marvell, AMD (barely an ARM manufacturer, but SoftIron sells them), Cavium (mostly on super-expensive servers though)

Pretty sure Rockchip has violated Linux's GPL. Rest of who you listed I've never seen/used in real life.

Maybe a very long time ago. Or you're confusing them with Allwinner.

Rockchip has the source of all the things on their GitHub, and a ton of commits in mainline Linux.

You've never heard of amd?

I think they did, but I'll take GPL violations and (possibly leaked?) publicly available documentation over GPL-compliant source code dumps (which are next-to-useless for actually understanding the hardware anyway.)

> possibly leaked

Not leaked, entirely official: http://opensource.rock-chips.com ("Hardware Support" section)

And instead of dumps, they have proper git commits! https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/commits/release-4.4

And lots of upstream linux commits with @rock-chips.com addresses.

Interesting. The docs I found before were marked "Rockchip Confidential". But the ones on their site are not complete either --- the fact that only "Part1" of the TRM is there suggests that there is a 2nd part (and possibly more.)

Yeah, I've seen the "confidential" mark on the same documents (or older versions) — these were published on board vendors' sites (e.g. Pine64's).

Not sure what would be in a "secret 2nd part"… the only thing I can think of that's missing from "Part1" is the display system. But there is a driver in mainline Linux for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

Marvell? really?

> locked bootloaders

Easily unlockable with WPInternals :)

> only the dead Windows phones

Marvell/SolidRun MACCHIATObin, SoftIron Overdrive, even the old Gigabyte boards with APM X-Gene have both U-Boot and EDK2 (TianoCore) firmwares available. I'm not even talking about big servers (ThunderX) :)

Heck, U-Boot itself can run EFI binaries, with network access for netbooting even — and it's good enough for FreeBSD/aarch64 to not even consider non-EFI booting methods.

I wouldn't put SolidRun in that list. Their hardware is garbage. I wasted money on this thing:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/review-clearfog-pro/

Their support is terrible and they only have a 14 day refund window.

I have a SolidRun CuBox running 24h/7d for about 6 years and the thing is a beauty. I agree that the company could be better though - they stopped providing updates very quickly, and abandoned their apt repository. I looked at newer models but their prices were way too high in a market where buying a Pi will mean getting less headaches as well as saving money. I don’t think their focus is on NUC/plugs anymore.

just out of curiosity...

if it's an eval board, then do they provide schematics which are typical of other eval board producers?

Having the schematic might aid in getting things working assuming the MAC <-> PHY circuitry supports what you want to do.

I've always been surprised that nobody's tried to weld ARM SoCs and the ACPI standard together yet. (How would that even work? I have no idea. Maybe the SoC would have a standardized PMC embedded in it?)

To be fair, the OP wanted a <28W TDP NUC, and honestly, I'm also a bit mystified by the question as the market is lousy with them.

If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less).

Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).

There are also Intel based boards. Apologies for sounding like an ad. I am a big fan of the upboard which starts at $90 and goes up if you add more RAM and storage. They also have a 40 pin connector that is the same as the raspberry pi. It uses a 64 bit Atom chip, and performs surprisingly well.

(There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works.

BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi.

Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.

I actually have one of these "Up!" boards as well, it is pretty awesome to get decentish x86 performance in an identical form factor to the Pi, along with built in storage, 4GB of RAM and 'real' gigabit networking. It cost at the time approximately the same as 4x Pi 3s, but was well worth it for the massive increase in performance. They deserve to be far more popular than they are.

> http://www.up-board.org/

and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads.

That's what x86 was always winning at. Power consumption is higher, however.

The Intel Atom is lower power consumption for lower performance - this is not i7 levels of performance. The power consumption differences between the Intel boards and ARM boards is irrelevant for the CPU, and most of the power needed is for USB ports (500mA per USB 2 port, 900mA per USB 3). For example I use upboards with 5V4A adaptor and over 3A is for USB, ethernet etc!

Odroid boards are pretty great, they took end-user needs seriously when designing the their later products.

At the time, they sold one of the only consumer ARM boards that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers[1].

Hardkernel has also been patching new kernels for their boards, which is a breath of fresh air. Usually, consumer ARM boards, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation's offerings, are tied to single kernel release and, unless you wanted to commit a lot of time to building your own patchsets, they'd never see a kernel update.

[1] http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/20150...

Rockchip has quite a lot of mainline Linux support http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix#Mainline... and good documentation.

> that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers

Are you sure? As far as I could tell, they had a single USB 3 controller that had a 2 port hub. One port was connected to gigabit ethernet, while the other was connected to another two port hub which is the two ports on the device. ie all devices connected to USB 3 and the gigabit are sharing the controller and bandwidth. The background is the Exynos chip used was intended for the cell phone market, where there is no need for multiple USB 3 controllers, in addition the existing USB 2 controllers.

I don't get it. Your list doesn't even include the RK3399 which is the fastest SoC you can nowadays get on an SBC for $100 and even that only has a geekbench score between 3k to 4k (RPi 3 is 1.2k and my 5 year old i5 has 10k). You'd expect to get at least a 5k score from an SBC for it to be viable.

Also this whole announcement is really petty... Qualcomm and Apple already have SoCs with scores higher than 9k on geekbench so why does ARM have so much trouble making good cpu cores? They are comparing existing 14nm CPUs with theoretical 7nm CPUs that they haven't even released yet. Of course it's going to perform better. It would be embarrassing if it didn't...

Geekbench is a bit of a bogus benchmark. I really doubt that the Rockchip board would have even quarter the actual performance on "real" programs (e.g. x264, imagemagick, povray etc.)

> "real" programs (e.g. x264, imagemagick, povray etc.)

...none of which are CPU-bound, instead relying on either hardware accelerators or the presence of specific SIMD instructions.

Geekbench is pretty good at measuring how well a chip would perform / scale as a web-app server. (Ignoring IO bandwidth, that is. A benchmark that incorporated both would be brilliant.)

x264 is an h264/AVC encoder that uses the CPU to extract maximum quality for a given bitrate. It does not support any fixed-function hardware on GPUs and the like since that goes contrary to its goals (gpu-accelerated encodes tend to have worse quality for a given bitrate and the fixed-function hardware doesn't support profiles like Hi10p that can improve quality).

Pov-ray is a raytracer. It only runs know he CPU (it has no codepaths to use the GPU).

imagemagick is an command line image manipulation suite that by default uses the CPU to perform operations in images. There is opencl support but it requires either a build option or configuration option for it to be enabled.

My own experience, comparing LAME and flac encoder speeds on an Android device (binaries invoked via a terminal emulator) to a desktop CPU and comparing the actual performance to the geekbench 4 scores showed that gb overrated the Android device by almost 125%.

I know there are plenty of different boards out there, like BananaPi, Odroid, etc, but a lot of them have questionable driver support and are still bare PCBs. The ODROID-HC1 does look interesting though.

I guess what I'd really want is a x86 device to get a more PC like experience. I can buy a tablet with battery, touch screen, and Intel Atom X5-Z8300 CPU for less than $90 [0], but there aren't any good cheap x86 alternatives for simple home servers.

[0] https://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_298397.html

Trust me, driver support is just as bad as with ARMs on those Z8300 devices.

My issue with these is they still use MicroSD cards. I basically want a Raspberry Pi with a SATA connector so I can use an actual hard drive or SSD.

You've been able to boot a Pi from USB for quite some time now, avoiding the issues with using a MicroSD card. While it isn't SATA, booting from USB still allows use of an external drive.

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