PC Engines APU router platform EOL: order by June 2023
pcengines.ch
pcengines.ch
It's sad to me that PCE hasn't upgraded to newer chips & it's sad to see even barebones Ryzen embedded boards costing so damned much. What a great space for computing, and it's so unfortunate that there's such a vast rift between rpi and low end industrial-embedded.
The design support ask is complicated, and definitely AMD is not the company it used to be in this regard, but I genuinely don't think these very heavily integrated SoC should have a bunch of hands-on support from AMD to make them go.
Reciprocally, my god, there have been such shit Ryzen embedded offerings. The cost is astronomical. The flight upmarket is just so notable. I want to hope there are some decent low-end available x86 CPUs still about, it's just that no one is interested in trying to play a margins game & the market expects everyone to pay industrial-computing prices, is under-utilizing AMD's offerings, but I genuinely don't know. AMD better have some solid sub $50 chips. Sell some cut down dual core x86 with some PCIe damn you. Do something. Please.
It sucks so much that there's just nothing else to even lean on. Nothing else other than x86 has decent IO subsystems, with a fair mix of USB/PCIe/ethernet. ARM and RISC-V have some slowly upmarket march from the bottom but none of these have anywhere near the flexibility, capability, or use of even this decade old GX-412C.
- 700 euro OPNsense Ryzen Embedded fanless router
- 700 usd Protectli Intel vPro fanless router
- used HP T740 thin client with Ryzen Embedded & PCIe slot + Intel quad port NIC
- used Lenovo 1L micro-PC with PCIe slot + Intel quad port NIC