Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board
cnx-software.com
cnx-software.com
About 5 years ago, I was involved in a project where we purchased Intel based tablets based off a standard reference design in bulk for about $80 a piece - that included battery, cameras, screen, casing and more.
The cost of the board only was about ~$30 or so.
I really wondered why no one was selling these to compete against the Pi in the heyday.
The only problem we had and why we didn't sell to makers was because we didn't control the design and we had enormous technical problems with EFI/Bios 64 bit booting only and a headache like crazy trying to reinstall Linux which just randomly broke all the time.
Truth be told, I wish I pushed through with it.
- they must be booted into legacy i.e. on EFI mode. EFI mode boot does not work reliably.
- the boot disk must have MBR and not GPT disk label.
That's still less than a quarter of a second, granted. But the complexity goes to the OS instead of a reasonable separation of concerns.
Granted, the mess that [U]EFI is, it might still be the better option. But the old BIOS is only "good" because of the crazy (sunk and continuing) cost to effectively implement "good new bios" within the operating systems.
So? The OS already does it.
EFI is ridiculous complexity, more than that of early OSs, mostly just to do things which the OS would again do when it boots up.
I can _kind of_ see the logic -- when you have only 2 GB of RAM, you aren't really going to want to put a 64-bit OS on it.
Part of the issue there as well is, as I understand it, UEFI can only load EFI applications (of which the bootloader is) of the same bitness as the UEFI implementation -- 64-bit UEFI can _only_ load 64-bit bootloaders.
I will say this additionally though - the messaging around the Intel Atom line, IMHO has been absolutely terrible. If only our software could run on ARM. I was convinced at one stage they were discontinuing the whole thing and then suddenly they didn't? I don't even know anymore. They have a roadmap so I guess that's something.
TL;DR: Think very carefully before basing a product on consumer-grade hardware, especially with consumer-grade tablets. To the parent commenter, you're probably lucky you DIDN'T push through it :)
Really though, it's that we don't have the resources to dedicate to any porting or compatibility effort (I've toyed with the idea of QEMU on ARM) to do it, so unfortunately it's one of those things that gets very slowly pieced together in the background here and there. Too big a project to convince the higher-ups that it's worth the tradeoff of prioritizing it over new features and new customers.
I was really disappointed when they discontinued the project. I guess Intel wanted to invest more in the Movidius ai compute stick, since that is where most of the Edison team was moved to.
It was something about the handover process from EFI to bootloader and it was something really awkward...
We got it working, but, any update seemed to wipe it unless you were careful and it just wasn't "production" grade.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/93361/i...
More relevantly, a 5700HQ is five to six times as fast as this Atom.
Lots of these cheap Intel chips like Z3740 found in many Wintel tablets only shipped with 32bit UEFI making them un-usable on FreeBSD.
A lab desktop cluster doesn't need to be fast, but needs to replicate the environment you want to play with.
My client recently ordered the remaining stock from a large supplier (several hundred) as the recent design change of the RPi4 unfortunately gets too hot and will require an enclosure/pcb redesign
Benchmarks are imperfect, but it seems to be in the same ballpark as the Raspberry Pi 4 [1] - slightly worse in single core, slightly better in multicore. So performance wise it's competitive with competing ARM boards (you get what you pay for) but the software experience should be great in comparison with most boards, even in comparison to the RPi 4.
[0]: And Windows. And FreeBSD. Perhaps even OpenBSD http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/Fwd-Intel-Compute-... .
[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/13701853?baseli...
[2]: Sidenote that the benchmark is skewed because of the AES benchmark. The Raspberry Pi 4 like the Atom has AES hardware acceleration when run in 64 bit mode, but this benchmark is run on 32-bit ARM. This is likely because the official RPi 4 distribution (Raspbian) is also still 32 bit. Software support affects benchmarks too.
Another issue that can skew benchmarks is library optimization situation. On x86, most things are SSE/AVX optimized, but on ARM side NEON optimizations can be slow implementations or even completely missing.
AArch64 ISA has changes that eliminate some false dependency chains (more general purpose registers and NEON register layout changes). This blocks out-of-order engine from making optimal use of CPU resources. When you hit this issue, 64-bit ARM code can run quite a bit faster.
Raspberry Pi's weak spot has always been rather slow memory bandwidth. RPi4 improves this (DDR4 instead of DDR2), but it's still the weakest spot. Just 32-bits wide bus to SDRAM.
Also don't underestimate how much RPi4 throttles under multicore load. Even the cheapest $1 heatsink will make a big difference.
In general I agree, though. It'll still be in the same ballpark.
The industry been screaming murder for the last year because Intel stopped selling low and mid-tier chips as such in China aside from "new old stock"
The new 10nm Atom line refresh has been delayed 4 times already, and will very likely be delayed for the 5th time.
AMD however does not seem too much interested in China's domestic industry at all. AMD's China reseller is a company in a tiny dusty office in Shanghai.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-joint-venture-partner-...
To use the Edison CPU (without their Arduino-like breakout board) on your own hardware you needed a fine-pitch connector that was more or less impossible to solder in a typical home workshop. The Yocto Linux was annoying from a tinker's perspective because it was focused around building static firmware images and not like Raspberry Pi where you ssh in and apt-get away.
This all didn't make much sense for a product marketed to makers/hobbyists. More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86. You could compile a static binary on your laptop, scp it over and it would just work without messing with cross-compilation etc. But that really wasn't worth all the other annoyances IMHO.
...and Intel missed the point that x86 without the rest of the PC isn't that great. I suspect if the Edison was actually PC-compatible (to the point of e.g. being able to boot DOS and older Windows and run their applications) it would've had far more popularity (retro-gaming, etc.) than yet-another-maker-toy.
The Edison module connector could've easily housed a PCI or ISA (which slow, but more "maker friendly" because the speeds are low enough that standard TTL ICs can be used) bus, but all they put on it was USB and GPIO.
The Celeron J4105 (which powers the ODROID H2), is technically an Atom, and it's massively faster than an RPi 4 (2-5x), but I don't know about the Z8300.
Based on Passmark (which is an arbitrary choice), Rock Pi X and RPi 4 may have comparable performance; if that was established, and I wanted a cheap SBC, I'd definitely go with the former.
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1907128-HV-1907127HV99
it's hard to make an absolute conclusion; it seems that the Pi 4 is faster than the Z8300 in more cases, but not all.
I wouldn't categorize these results as "definitely faster" though.
Having an intel GPU is nice enough I guess. I might get one just for that.
You may have easier time trying to run some alternative OS such as one of the BSDs, Haiku, ReactOS, or even Windows.
For example, I use my Intel-based SBC as headless server. The only thing I need is two SATA ports available (which the SBC I own has), and the condition that's it's a small and cheap machine.
For a use case like mine, it's perfect. I don't need to think about using a certain distribution and ultimately depending on a producer. I used to have ARM boards, so I know :-)
It's important not to underestimate the dependency on the distributions. Intel x86 last virtually forever¹, ARM boards have a very short life². It's fine to use ARM if somebody wants a mid-term throwaway toy, but if one plans to have a stable [server] machine, it's a problem³.
¹=in the sense - as much as realistically possible
²=in comparison; the ARM boards tend to get discontinued quicker.
³=finally, consider that not every ARM board is [as supported as] an RPi.
This is true though I believe it's mainly due to them being newer developments in a field (mass produced embedded boards) where everyone and their cat makes something new every month. It's a moving target that will never settle (luckily) but given enough time it will slow its pace to sustainable levels both for manufacturers and users/developers. Give it some time, the kid is young.
As an example, I'm still waiting for a cheap enough board around which I would build what I consider a vital brick in every home network: something with enough SATA ports to make a RAID enabled server, then would cut costs in all other corners. Say 4 to 5 SATA ports, no video, no audio, no WiFi, no multiple NICs (I'd use a separate board for firewalling), no more than a serial port for monitoring and few GPIOs for blinking some leds or drive fans, monitor UPSs etc. It would be the best possible platform to make cheap non trivial file servers.
My current configuration is 2+2 disks arranged as RAID1 (I don't trust anything else) kept in sleep mode when not in use for more than 2 hours plus a fifth disk used very often as temporary storage before things are being stored on the RAID. I use a cheap Atom Mini ITX board I purchased used on ebay plus a rack enclosure that weighs like a ton. Nas4Free is the OS, which is perfect for the task although RAM usage with XFS reaches the maximum available on that board (4GB), but for home use it's still ok. It works perfectly, but I would happily swap it for a lighter ARM system in a smaller box. Unfortunately it looks like there's no solution to be used to build a similar file server, except costly boards with a lot other peripherhals or much faster CPUs I wouldn't have any use for. So why nobody makes a board like that? I would guess they analyzed the market and concluded there'not enough demand. A board like that would mean an excellent home/SOHO file server at a third of the price, but apparently the small number of people who build their own file server doesn't justify any risks in that field.
Regardless, I will probly still buy one of these Rock Pi's anyways :-)
Edit: Do you refer to this? https://blog.cloudkernels.net/posts/rpi4-64bit-virt/
Still at least some DMA issues: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues
The ODROID H2 is finally available (it hasn't been available for a long time, due to Intel not producing enough chips (or not selling them to ODROID and others, not sure)), and you can consider it a high-end SBC or a low-end NUC.
The price for board+4GB RAM is roughly 150$ vs 80$ for the RPi 4¹.
It's the lowest priced x86 system available², and the performance is significantly superior to ARM boards (in the range 2-4x of RPi 4).
¹=very rough prices; it's hard find the lowest prices, and it's not clear if it makes sense to do so
²=please no comparisons with discontinued machines (there's always somebody popping up with such comparisons...)