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starlabs.systems
starlabs.systems
That's a bit steep. I am all for OSS but comparable machines (even newer than Renoir) are considerably cheaper.
I've been toying with the idea of grabbing a 5800u/H unit off AliExpress since Pis have been hard to get by, and kind of old and slow. There was a 5800H/16/512 for just 300 euro last weekend. Kind of regret not pulling the trigger on that one.
They advertise coreboot support, but on specifications it says CoreBoot is coming soon. AFAIK Coreboot does not support Zen3 or any recent AMD CPUs. How will they be able to offer it?
So everyone is seeing a different price apparently.
Not sure if this is a social experiment or a joke. Or both.
However, based on the other products in their store it is the same for me in the store and at checkout. Nothing fishy about this.
Pretty awesome to see this become more common.
Also, the APU used here is already fairly outdated for a mini PC. So I'm not sure what makes this valuable over the many other mini PC options.
P.S not affiliated, just curious.
I see this has open source firmware. Great. You will be giving up a lot with that chip compared to M1 though. Asashi Linux may not be 100% complete but I hear it is pretty good. Might warrant a consideration if you can run your software in the ARM world. In my mind there is just too much to give up when going back to such a legacy platform such as this one.
https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-for-creators#
(vs. the Byte Mini's 45W), but they mostly have base frequencies above 4.4GHz. One of the slower chips in the current lineup beats the M2 on absolute performance (with a higher TDP):
https://versus.com/en/amd-ryzen-7-7700-vs-apple-m2
It's per core speed is comparable, but it has twice as many cores.
This old (2018) chip is 45W, but it's boost is only 4GHz:
https://versus.com/en/amd-ryzen-7-2700e-vs-apple-m2
so that's a lower bound on the AMD side. It's about the same speed as the M2 when using all cores (half as fast per core).
Assuming they're targeting something AMD just released, and not something 5 years old, and the "up to 4.4GHz" is talking about base frequency, not turbo, then I'd expect this to be extremely competitive with the M2 Mac Mini. (As it better be, since it seems to be more expensive than the Mac!)
I wish they'd say what processors they are targeting.
I have 32GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, that cost me $200 total. The CPU and barebones mini pc (5600G, ASRock DeskMini) I bought are about $200 each. So $600 total.
Meanwhile I can't even buy a base model M1 or M2 mac mini with 32 GB of RAM, and 24GB of RAM is $400. 1 TB of storage is another $400.
The Mac option turns out to be roughly twice as much, for a pretty comparable system (including single core speed!). Even if I want more storage, I can have it for an extra $100 or so.
Yes for storage the M1 is more opaque. They claim this is the only way they can provide truly secure trusted boot. Its questionable but at least the theory seems to be holding up. I give them the benefit of the doubt just because the machine truly feels like it is from the future. It is like the desktop perfected. If it was anything less than the rocket it is we'd be having a different conversation and I'd give more credence to your claims. As it stands to me, the value of the platform exceeds that additional memory/storage upcharge.
>>The Mac option turns out to be roughly twice as much, for a pretty comparable system (including single core speed!). Even if I want more storage, I can have it for an extra $100 or so.
Are you sure about this being "comparable"? This is so much legacy in these x86/64 designs that either they are slower per given clock or they have to compensate with increased fan speeds/power consumption. The minisforum I have was a popular Ryzen 5 machine being pushed by all the youtuber people two years ago. (Minisforum DMAF5). It was slow out of the box and is now even more slow about 2 years later. Even this system being advertised here has to use a GaN Charger to cover up the fact that they are needing a more powerful wattage than the equivalent Mac would need (65w vs ~45w) That right there is more evidence that the design can't possibly be more efficient than the M1. (not to mention the PSU is integrated into the case on the Mac!)
This is such a common trope with PC people, they ignore design and value it at 0.
To answer your question, my memory is 3200MHz with probably not great latency compared to the Apple solution.
Someone else mentioned USB4 for external storage, which honestly isn't a terrible solution.
Cool. Sell it to me? I have tons of use cases for it.
2 HDMIs seems excessive. It would be better to have DisplayPort instead.
Why would you want to make it less useful?
One is a Jonsbo N1. The other a Jonsbo N2.
Jonsbo N1 is a pretty good case if the only thing you care about is getting a a small footprint as you can stand the case vertically.
Jonsbo N2 is a better more convenient case in a "cube" shape that feels smaller despite being similar in volume.
One of my builds uses an AM4 motherboard with unregistered ECC. With AM4 motherboards you're limited to any "pro" AM4 cpu, four SATA3 ports, and 2.5 gbe.
The other uses a used SuperMicro X10SDV-4C-TLN2F with registered ECC. With the Supermicro board you're stuck with an old integrated Xeon with insufficient cooling but get dual 10gbe ports and six SATA3 ports.