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Comment by ChristianGeek | Hacker News Reader

Once you get to this size and price, there’s no point in using a Pi…there are much more powerful options available.

I guess it makes sense as a development board: if you are building a product around a Pi Compute Module you can use this board for quick prototyping before building your own product-specific board. But any hobbyist looking at this should seriously consider the various Pi alternatives around the $200 mark first. Or just buy a used PC.

For the sub-$100 price point, you often can't beat discarded thin clients. There's a steady of stream of units always hitting eBay, including ARM ones like the HP T-series and x86 ones like Dell Wyse units.

If you really just need something that comes with a case and power supply, might already have wifi, and has a few USB2 ports to plug things into, these are great options.

This is spot on. I mention in the post and the video it's an expensive board, and very specialist.

The target audience is basically 'person who wants ARM64 PCI Express development board', and even there, some of the PCI Express implementation on the Pi's BCM2711 is... weird. Therefore some devices have had a hard time getting drivers going on the Pi (case in point: graphics cards and Coral TPUs I've tested). I plan on testing Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's SOQuartz too.

I think some people still want a cheap(ish) CM4 motherboard that just has one x16 slot, front panel headers, and maybe a 24-pin ATX power supply connector. I think that could be made for under $100 and would also solve a lot of needs for debugging purposes.

I can see someone making a very powerful open source WiFi router out of this. The Pi can run passively cooled unlike most Intel or AMD CPUs. You wouldn't be doing any DPI on the network traffic without slowing things down, but this thing with some networking hardware cards could become very interesting to many people.

The cost is too high because it's a niche product, of course, but such a board would be able to replace my home router/server quite capably with a good WiFi antenna and some ethernet ports.

How many networking cards? I know we tend to think of internal buses as infinitely-fast, but a single PCIe 2.x lane is saturated at 500MB/s, which begins to look a little skinny once we're considering 10GE or even Wifi 6.

A single NVMe drive will saturate that.

Indeed, the maximum bandwidth I've gotten out of anything is around 420 MB/sec from a single NVMe drive. Add in more devices and you basically divide the bandwidth proportionally. Round trips can even slow things down a bit more.

A 4 lane PCIe switch would allow for a much cheaper board and still be plenty to saturate the available bandwidth. Maybe 2x 2.5Gbe with one hooked to a switch, plus wifi.

Around this price point there are already ARM boards (and passively cooled x86 machines) available much better suited to this kind of use case, like the Honeycomb LX2K.

There are other platforms that are maybe better suited to that role though. I am not very up to date with the hardware but I remember PCengines being one.

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