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Comment by deadbeeves | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get what people use these devices for.

Vortex86 SoCs were once quite commonly found on embedded boards used in industrial automation. Outside of that I'm willing to bet you'd find them in semi-embedded applications like point-of-sale devices.

A previous company I worked at used a Vortex86DX embedded board as a replacement for an older Pentium/Celeron board that went EOL. It was one of the last x86 CPUs made that still supported the ISA bus that the product used to talk to custom hardware.

I'm always shocked how many legacy hardware/systems are still in widespread use. Companies such as DM&P that produce the Vortex86 likely have a nice solid revenue stream and will for decades.

They're small, unobtrusive, silent, low power, useful and fun.

I use a OrangePi Zero with 512MB of RAM [0] as a local DNS, webserver, torrent client and download box. It provides hostnames for devices at home, downloads my LibreOffice and Linux images, allows me to test small static webpages in a package no bigger than a literal match box.

It runs Debian based Armbian and is rock solid after updating it to Debian 11. It makes my life easier and helps me learn working with constrained systems which allows me to be better at my day job.

[0]: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/

OrangePi zero has nothing to do with Vortex86

They’re equally constrained systems, even if they are not used for exactly same things.

I care for the constrained resources and the form factor. CPU architecture is just a secondary item in my list.

Industrial control systems

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