Hacker News Reader

Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Good! We need more small systems. Not just CPUs-on-a-board for hackers to prototype with but an alternative to Intel NUCs and smaller fully integrated computers with inexpensive low power CPUs.

It's astonishing to me how behind the ARM ecosystem is on this. I still can't buy something like a low-end amd64 computer easily with ARM. There's a few laptops and a few cantankerous oddballs like the ROCKPro64. Then again it's Pine64 mentioned in the RISC V article, so maybe we have more years of oddballs to go.

View on HN

I strongly suggest you take a look at the FireFly 3588 ITX board with the latest high-performance Rockchip SoC and PCI-e.

https://en.t-firefly.com/product/industry/itx3588j

before I even look, is this in-stock?

Allegedly ~15 of each model are in the store at the moment.

Looks to be 113 of them in stock right now

That board has the kitchen sink.

4 big cores and 4 little cores at 8nm, 2 gigibit ethernets, an AI processor, Wifi6, 5G, 32G RAM, PCIe 3.0, M.2, 4 SATA, 2 HDMI, VGA, HDMI in, RS232, CAN… and idles at 1.3W. Typical ~4W, max 20W.

$460 for basic 4G RAM, 16G storage, prices go up from there.

That's a pretty good idle power just to keep all those links up.

Sadly no SMMU :(

The RK3588 TRM says that it has MMU-600 r2p2.

Hah, apparently I missed that when I looked a little while ago. That's a very pleasant surprise. Looks like PCIe, SATA, USB and Ethernet all sit behind it.

    power consumption
    =================
    Idle:    1.3 W
    Normal:  4.8 W
    Max:    20.0 W

Well this looks interesting for a NAS. Not cheap though at $ 459.00 for the most basic package.

4xSATA ports so it will be a fairly modest NAS, also at that price point it has a lot of competition from budget CPUs and mini-ITX mainboards.

It looks like it could be a pretty nice little SFF desktop. The low power draw means you don't need active cooling and it has everything built in so you won't need some dongle (other than power) to integrate. The only issue is that it's not Intel so if your employee needs to run MS Office or be managed from the domain it won't work. But for the receptionist or for a kiosk or many other uses this could be pretty nice, especially if you are trying to cut down on energy use.

It also has an M.2 slot for the I/O heavy stuff. There is a natural limit to how fast you want to stream movies from disk, so I wouldn't care. Its just that for the same price, I can get a Synology with a 4C Celeron which wouldn't be much worse at far less effort.

It also has a PCIe x4 Gen 3 slot that you could drop a SATA card in if you really want to go big.

A 10 second search turns up plenty of options that will turn that port into 10+ SATA ports for like $65. Dunno about the driver situation in that case though.

The single M.2 slot would probably be used for the OS and maybe a cache. Having just 1 fast drive in an array usually isn't a win.

> The low power draw means you don't need active cooling

If it's a desktop, you can put on a large heatsink, there are plenty of passive enclosures for the standard intel NUC

> But for the receptionist

Seems like those would be better off with an 'all-in-one' computer in a monitor, less cables and you need a screen anyway

"Supports UEFI Boot" ← This sounds good already for booting generic Linux distributions, now the question is how well the mainline kernel supports this board. Having to use a special-patched kernel is a no-go if you care about using this board after a few years when it becomes niche. The Libre Computer boards are a good example in this regard (https://libre.computer/products/) they are very niche but since the mainline kernel supports them and they use UEFI by default, you can use most generic Linux distros without a problem.

I visited the FireFly offices in Zhongshan a few years ago and expressed interest in helping them get hardware to open source maintainers. A number of devs (predominantly European) expressed interest, I provided the details, and FireFly never sent the hardware. Didn't exactly breed confidence in their brand. The earlier hardware of theirs required off-tree patched kernels to run, and had middling documentation which is far too much development overhead unless you're doing volume. Unsure how much that's changed, I stopped looking.

Hilarious you’ve visited them in Zhongshan… I had no idea that was were they were based. I worked in Zhongshan between 2003 and 2006.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com