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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I’d really like to have a capable Arm 64 workstation. Unfortunately there aren’t many options — and this one really doesn’t tickle my fancy.

I’ve been looking into Nvidia’s Xavier NX of late but, of course, it’s not an SBSA-compliant system, leaving the user totally at the mercy of the producer (Nvidia, in this case, as is indeed tangentially mentioned by the article itself).

Whenever I mention this people usually throw in irrelevant statements such as picking up a Raspberry Pi 4 (of which I have a couple) or another SBC, but really I’m looking for something which offers PCIe and all the creature comforts (even the HoneyComb LX2K lacks PCIe beyond a single M.2 slot for the SSD and offers no wireless capabilities unless you add a USB3 dongle).

Is there a reason why somebody hasn’t (oh, I don’t know) thrown a Snapdragon 8cx on a board with some of these accoutrements and provided it in a mini-ATX form-factor?

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> Is there a reason why somebody hasn’t (oh, I don’t know) thrown a Snapdragon 8cx on a board with some of these accoutrements and provided it in a mini-ATX form-factor?

Because there is no profitable market for it. The number of people who would be willing to pay the $1000+ that it would cost to produce a board like that in low volume just aren't there, in part since you could build a dramatically more powerful x86 machine for less money.

Which is the vicious cycle. Design a board using a phone or networking chip for a production run of 1000, then the value is going to be worse than a commodity part. Which means no one is going to buy them.

If the phone/networking chip were designed upfront to to be less cost optimized for its target market (say putting graphics on a networking chip, or more PCIe lanes on a phone soc) that would help. As would assuming your going to sell 100k of them, and assuring the design and pricing is competitive with a $300 x86 motherboard+cpu combination. The honeycomb could be a good board, but its obvious they have designed it for some target market that isn't actually a generic mITX board. The CEX, and x4 SFP cages add cost, but little value vs a desktop board so you have a board that costs $800 and competes poorly with $150 AMD boards that take AM4 processors unless you happen to need 4 ports of 10G ethernet. The honeycomb minus all the networking junk would be selling in the hundreds of thousands of units if it were $100 to $250. The rpi doesn't sell millions of units because its good, its sells that many because its $50.

So really the "flaw" is all the extreme upfront cost cutting to create a product that is laser focused at a single big fish customer, then failing to provide a generic and flexible version for the open market that can be customized less expensively.

The HoneyComb LX2K has an 8x PCIe slot as well, what else would you need ? I wouldn't want wireless on it anyway, just use ethernet.

Hehe... the great thing of bringing up a requirement on Hacker News is that one will always find somebody whose instant reaction is “you don’t need that [because I don’t need it]”.

For various reasons it’s something I want. Do I need it? No, I don’t... but then again none of us really need anything beyond oxygen, hydration, and caloric sludge.

Let’s put it this way: given my predicament (locked down in a building that only has WiFi) a wireless solution is pretty much required.

As for the PCIe... the 8x slot clearly is required for a graphics card. I have several other peripherals (an SDR and an FPGA card) that would be homeless.

This! times 100. It seems common that these ARM boards vendors are like "here is your pcie slot" and then fail to provide all the basic peripherals onboard that make mITX work on x86. Or for that matter just provide a couple slots on a mATX board.

AKA, if the board is missing something fundamental (like graphics, sata, or even USB!) then the board is useless for a lot of cases which require both the missing bits + some other PCIe board. Its the same thing with soldered on RAM, 4G should be enough for everyone!

Its quite silly in many regards too, since adding a few $$ to the BOM for a graphics chip/usb/networking/whatever to bring it up to feature parity with $120 boards from asus/etc never seems to cross their minds.

I would suggest you go make your own board then. Adding DIMM slots is not trivial, and then you have to worry about compatibility with third-party RAM. There is something to be said about a wholly-integrated solution. It's more manageable from the manufacturer's point of view. Flexibility adds complexity and uncontrollable variables, which is not what you want in a product priced at the low end.

It's not always the BOM that costs you, instead it's the additional testing, validation & support.

Flexibility gives you a broader market. Its fine if your building 1 product, but if you want to sell into a market with users that have a dozen different requirements and insufficient volume to justify custom configurations your in trouble. OTOH if you can cover a few hundred different use cases with a single design without a lot of additional complexity then your better off.

There isn't any way, that every chip+motherboard+ram combination possible on the x86 market is tested. What you test for is compliance to the spec, and a few really common cases to sanity check everything.

Then the OEM/final integrator is on the hook for validating/supporting a design. And it works the majority of the time you can buy RAM, or pcie cards, or whatever and plug them in. That is the point of standards. Plus, on the bleeding edge the standards almost always have fallback modes which are considered easier to get right (lower clocks, well understood previous generation, whatever). So when something isn't fully conformant it still works, just at a degraded speed.

The problem is most of the arm vendors can't built compliant parts to save their lives. From nonstandard usb, pci, ram and networking gear. It only tends to work because they hack it together in that one configuration that happens to work because its got a couple capacitors sprinked on the board, or a software quirk that bypasses the broken functionality. Just look at all the stuff wrong with the rpi.

SBCs already are extremely flexible for their market segment. Their market segment just happens to NOT be "developer workstations". The developer workstation market is heavily dominated by x86 because the ecosystem and performance per $ offered by AMD/Intel/nVidia is due to trillions of dollars in development costs over the past decades. ARM is not directly compatible with that ecosystem, so has to re-invent a lot of wheels, and the capital is not there to go head-to-head in commodity PC market when you have a compatibility disadvantage, and your high-end performance is not comparable.

Adding an actual system OEM/integrator means another person needs convincing there is a market and adds additional markup.

The struggle to put together functional boards is just indicative of the complexity of the problem. Even some x86 boards are garbage.

Except that "Developer workstation" is really "generic product that conforms to multiple targets". Drop a quad port NIC into one of them and you have a router, put a RAID controller in and you have a NAS. Attach a high speed A/D and you have an industrial controller, etc.

None of those options really work for the majority of the arm SBC market which are repurposed phone SOCs. Yes, they are flexible as long as a large part of the target is touchscreen + wifi and attaching a USB SDR. Or they get misused as massively overspeced micro controllers that happen to need a network connection (aka IoT).

So its really that latter case where they are successful because they are "generic" microcontrollers. Many of the uses cases would be far better/cheaper handled with a cortex-M and a custom board. But using a $35 rpi to read a GPIO and send a packet is the "generic" solution for someone not willing to spend $500k on a custom design to create 1k devices at $2 each.

I added more color in my comment, but who wants to take on the supportability of your desire for third-party quad-port NIC or RAID controller? Even the DIY enthusiast PC market is a small % of the revenue made by the PC/Server market as a whole. It's already niche, and making a niche of a niche, sounds like a great way to pigeon-hole yourself into unprofitability. Too expensive for microcontroller/kiosk, not enough volume due to those unwilling to take on the compatibility concerns around ARM.

The microcontroller and kiosk markets are actually relatively large, and a good niche to be in. Adding the complexity needed to make a full-blown x86 competitor is extremely risky.

There are integrators out there using ARM in networking and NAS gear, but they are building the board to their spec, validating it against a small sampling of add-in hardware, screwing the box shut with a "warranty void" sticker on it, and charging a healthy markup for the service.

Its called the "Edge" market for one.

And just to extend the "whitebox" market is the largest slice of the x86 market. But even so, I just saw a number the other day that the desktop market is ~12B in revenue for intel. So, its might be small for intel, but that would be a huge segment for many of companies in the arm ecosystem. Think of what would happen if a company like rockchip managed to acquire 20% of that market.

PS: I'm aware of the vendors building ARM NAS's, security appliances, and such, and if you look at their product lines, overwhelmingly they are x86. The arm parts form a small fraction of their designs. Frequently the lowest end products with the highest volume and tightest margins. The higher end products are just boring old pentium/xeon parts with fat margins.

ex:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/series/smb vs https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/series/home (and only a portion of those are arm)

PPS: I think a lot of people are really confused about the "desktop" market. The desktop market is an artificial segmentation of a generic technology stack. Intel puts it in a different bucket for business reporting reasons, but the core technology is the same between a random desktop board they make $ on and a random board like those in the synology appliances above. The largest differentiator tends to be whether or not the part supports ECC (and some of the desktop parts come with that feature) and who supports it. So from a technology perspective its the same fundamental thing in a 2U chassis with 16 spinning drives as it is in the tower under a desk. Which is why in the parent article you see a 32 core "Server" being sold as a workstation. It could just as well be sold as a NAS. The problem here, is like those arm NAS's the arm vendors are only shooting for the high volume markets, which naturally happen to also have the lowest margins because they are the most competitive... Or the ones with the highest margins. See the problem? AMD unlike intel doesn't do as much artificial product differentiation (which is why a lot of people like them). Their server class parts are basically the same as the desktop, they differ only in scale. So they make the margins in the areas that are truly low volume/high technology while scooping up volume with thin margins elsewhere.

One wireless solution is an AP with ethernet bridge, no?

> “you don’t need that [because I don’t need it]”

You got that response because your post sounded like the LX2K only has the M.2 slot and no other PCIe at all, when it in fact has a regular ×8 PCIe slot.

> the 8x slot clearly is required for a graphics card.

The HoneyComb LX2K is not a desktop or mITX replacement. It's a network/routing platform, as shown by the onboard 100GE QSFP28 port. The ×8 slot is clearly required for more networking :P

> I have several other peripherals (an SDR and an FPGA card) that would be homeless.

... where are you putting those on an x86 Mini-ITX board with one PCIe slot?

Clash of ecosystems? At interfaces: ARM is far more customizable than x86 - but on chip. And at targets: ecosystem revolves around low-power.

e.g. (21 TOPS) Xavier NX is for devices "constrained by size, weight, and power budgets."

Indeed. At this price, I'd think a beefy x86 or a totally Windows-proof POWER9 would make more sense.

Check out developerbox.

https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/

Which is an even worse option vs the emag. The 1Ghz A53's in that thing make single threaded perf of the emag look look like a speed demon.

The honeycomb (or even the mcbin) are better choices if you just want a PCIe slot.

At least it's not vulnerable to spectre

Doesn’t seem very impressive. Thanks for the suggestion though, I had never seen this machine before.

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