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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see how people have basically reinvented the standard motherboard, as people have been building PCs from in the DIY x86/x86-64 community for 30 years.

We've gone from what a raspberry pi was originally intended to be (a $25-35 computer) to something the same size, complexity and price as a standard Taiwanese mini-itx or micro-atx x86-64 motherboard and lower-end Intel or AMD CPU, with the same complement of I/O.

I had the feeling this was inevitable when I saw people putting active DC powered fans on heatsinks on the rpi CPU some years ago.

Sort of like how a modern Toyota Corolla has incrementally evolved to be a whole lot fatter, heavier, feature laden and costly than the same model name of car 20 years ago.

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I really think the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop, very much like the IBM PC became the de-facto x86 machine. I really wish the boot procedure and all that wasn't so proprietary.

It's unfortunate that the RPi foundation doesn't acknowledge this potential more.

It feels like the RPi is stuck in the middle between being a low-cost board for GPIO tinkering and being a low-cost general-purpose computer, being not really that good at either task. Maybe they should create a coreboot-enabled board that is a little more pricey, starting at 60 or 80$ or something, for the "ARM-PC" (the RasPC!) market and separate that from the board for the tinkerers.

Like the '400' model built into a keyboard released fairly recently?

RPi foundation has its goals and it follows them well. I hope they will not get distracted by "ideology".

The 400 model of Pi has a potential to start something comparable to microcomputer boom in the 80s and become first step into ARM desktops (again) I believe and also become the standard for machines used in education - if someone will play this out well. Smartphones and tablets dominate consumer market nowadays for sure but these are largely entertaining devices only not offering much when it comes to education; of course you can install apps but you're still limited by form factor.

> Really think the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop

I'd say it already is yet still isn't particularly useful in this role.

As soon as it gets able to run YouTube without visible performance problems and adds some spare PCIe lanes so you won't have to sacrifice USB 3.0.

By the way I wonder why does my almost-decade-old smartphone run YouTube (in a browser as well as the app) perfectly while Raspbery Pi 4 seems having much harder time doing that.

> the RPi has the potential to become the de-facto ARM desktop, very much like the IBM PC became the de-facto x86 machine

Your use of "de facto" implies a significant presence in the retail marketplace such that consumers choose the product readily without seeking options.

The RPi is unlikely to ever achieve this in 2021 and beyond. However, the RPi 400 is a brilliant device. I recommend it over just about any other computing option except maybe a mid- to high-end Chromebook.

From the point of view of sustainability, the RPi 400 is a much better option than a Chromebook.

Good CPU, but the GPU is only 32 GFLOPS https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-raspberry_pi_4_b_broadcom_... https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244519

I think the de-facto ARM desktop is already here. It's the M1 Mac.

With its blackbox boot procedure and all of the security stuff you have to disable to even run a pared down kernel with limited support for basically everything since the system architecture is also a blackbox, I'd disagree. It's unlikely to be reversed engineered into a defacto standard like the IBM PC was.

The rabbit hole gets deeper still: there are at least three in-progress ITX or ATX motherboard designs based on the Compute Module 4: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

sure, why not, I guess? At least if people want a really low cost desktop, or something like a computer powering a kiosk, there's a plethora of low cost but functional mini-itx, microatx or atx sized steel cases. If you go to newegg and sort by price, for instance:

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true

If you look further there's some much smaller slimline desktop mini-itx (170x170mm format) barebones cases that are probably about the same price.

vast economies of scale in standardized mounting formats and open standards, like the dimensions/mounting holes for a normal ATX power supply...

Many of them probably are unaware of these things: https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 (random result sorted for low price, just search for "picopsu") Once paired with a fanless Mini-ITX board they make for a really compact system that can be supplied by a single 12V line.

That has an appeal, but it lacks the peripherals and support that comes with the raspberry pi.

The great things about the pi, if not the greatest, is the sheer amount of documentation for doing all sorts of things.

Trying to get access to the i2c on an intel board? yeah its possible, but its not easy.

It shouldn’t be hard to use a PCIe GPIO card in a PC for bare metal programming or “in conjunction with third party OS such as MS-DOS(R) or Linux(tm)”, factory automation companies might still be doing exactly that. I think why those are not brought up often is cost.

If you really want to do something like that, you could always connect an Arduino or RPi (or similar) to a PC over serial/USB. Then you could use it as a kinda-gateway device. Taking commands from the primary PC and interfacing with low level peripherals over i2c, etc. But for the cost of this, it would probably make more sense to just wired the gateways up directly to Ethernet to allow one system to control all of the devices... which is how I imagine most factory automation is done. No need to have an extra PC to manage network control when an Arduino can do that by itself.

Aside from the hobby aspect, one reason why Arduino and RPi are so popular for these types of projects is that they are effectively cheap enough to devote to an individual project. You’d wouldn’t want to devote an entire PC just to manage a sensor or control a door, or... but an Arduino for $10 or RPi for $30, sure.

There are small and cheap adapters to take a serial/USB line and transform it into a i2c one, but the i2c bus on most motherboards is already accessible and documented because it's what operating systems use to read various sensors on the board.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html

If the i2c but is used for example to do r/w on gpios, then other products can be used, for example:

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/

There's been considerable movement to just get rid of the 3.3v and 5v lines from power supplies anyways. Newer motherboards are being built with the ability to just take 12v and convert it on board, essentially the circuitry on that miniPSU you linked.

I'm also getting into this as well. Currently working on a PCB schematic for a compute module 4 with a full sized nvme, usb port and ethernet port for clustering.

I see a few appealing reasons to spring for the rpi variants:

- Lower power profile

- In theory no need for noisy fans

- Exploring ARM

Personally, I'm excited for a mobo that let me cluster N different CM4s with an array of SSDs. I like the idea of building a little Kubernetes cluster on a Pi array for the fun of it.

It's fun, but even with SSD is going to be slow. I built that for "fun" (without ssds) and an hour later put it to storage and then setup vmware on a spare PC, because it was so slow.

You can build a fanless x64 PC quite easily: 4-core Intel Silvermont/Goldmont or AMD Ryzen Embedded V and R series can be passively cooled. Many of those ITX boards come with a 19V DC-Jack power-in so you can use a laptop power brick and eliminate the PSU fan as well. Fujitsu used to have some nice designs, I think now it's owned by Kontron. Asrock also has a good selection for more retail-oriented products.

Of course you can also passively cool a full-fledged desktop CPU if you want but that's a different category in terms of price and performance so I am not talking about that.

As for power, I have Puma-based x64 4-core boards that idle at 5W and consume 12W at full load (measured at the wall). Goldmont should be similarly efficient. RPi4 is about 7W at load I think. Not a huge difference.

Yeah, you can even go back much further in time if you're not too worried about performance. I've been running a fanless Atom J1900 based mini-PC as a home server for ~8 years nonstop now. It's trivial to build such a system but at least back then the cost was literally 10x to 20x the price of a rPI today. I would guess that even though it's an 8-year old CPU it's probably about 2x as fast as an rPI 4B, and for something that's been chugging along for all this time the cost/depreciation over time vs. a much cheaper rPI isn't really an issue for me.

Lenovo has ThinkEgde with passive cooling, not sure how price to performance compares there.

No doubt x86 can be passively cooled, but presumably that means giving up the competitive price point that the OP mentioned with respect to the chip and mobo?

That carrier board doesn't seem to have a price yet, but if you don't mind buying used (and saving some perfectly capable devices from becoming e-waste at the same time) you can usually get a second-hand thin client for the price of the RPi CM module alone.

> - Lower power profile

RPi is many things, but the latest generation is anything but low power. It IDLES at 60 degrees celsius, which means it really burns quite a bit of power just sitting there doing nothing.

According to a quick Google search, the idle power for the 4B (not sure about the CM4) is 2.7W: https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption. That seems quite low, no?

The IO pins are the big difference.

If you wanted to solder/connect some ICs to your PC, you were limited to using the parallel/serial ports.

We get a much more direct access to the CPU with these SBCs, which is what makes them so special.

It's more like they are a microcontroller on steroids, rather than a stripped down PC.

Absolutely - but in the context here of low-budget desktops, having GPIO is something relatively few users want? I personally tend to use an RPi Zero W instead of an Arduino/ESP* for little projects because I like having networking, cron, etc.

Not really "reinvented", since everyone knows what a motherboard is. A "normal" motherboard just isn't something you can easily design and make yourself.

While the Pi is in many ways not the "best" basis for such projects, its the one that is the most initially accessible, or at least appears to be, compared to other SOMs. Hence you see more small projects based around it.

What I personally don’t understand is why most ARM alternatives (odroid, raspberry, banana pi, beagleboard etc) always think in such small dimensions.

I mean, a 128 core ARM with 1TB of RAM would crush any x86_64 alternative easily. ARM has no limits in parallelization, why is there nobody using that advantage?

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