ZimaBlade: A single-board x86 personal server for cyber natives | Hacker News Reader

ZimaBlade: A single-board x86 personal server for cyber natives

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Uses an older end of life processor (Celeron N3350) from 2016 with known reliability issues--- probably obtained cheap due to liquidation.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-apollo-lake-refresh-...

Are these CPUs actually the bad ones? The only image they have of the CPU has SREKH stamped on it. This sSpec maps to the F1 stepping of that CPU, which the article you link says is the fixed model.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/95598/i...

I was/am surprised by the cost of these, they seem cheaper than I'd expect for a limited run niche item, although I don't have any expert knowledge on what something like this costs to build.

There’s some more discussion on CNX (link below) in the comments but sentiment seems to be documentation is not clear on the exact chipset used for the 3760 or 7700. Hopefully Zima can clear this up quickly.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/09/01/zimablade-inexpensiv...

> “According to a spec table they sent me a few weeks ago, the ZimaBlade 3760 has a Celeron N3350 dual-core chip with turbo speeds up to 2.4 GHz, while the 7700 has “Intel Celeron E3950/J3455 quad-core” with speeds up to 2.3 GHz.

It sounds like maybe they hadn’t finalized the selection for the 7700 yet, and either there’s a typo for the top speeds for the 3760, or they switched processors.”

I certainly wouldn't buy one without knowing what the chip is going to be. As OP points out the original Apollo Lake chips were failing before the warranty was up.

Agree, certainly seems like the bad one checking their Discord which is disappointing. Image of another response below.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1146844624690880535/1...

I am Lauren, the founder of the Zima team. We are a company that has been in the personal server field for three years. We initially started with a Kickstarter campaign in 2021, focusing on promoting the use of personal servers. In 2022, we developed an open-source personal server system called CasaOS, based on Apache 2.0, and released it on Github, where it has garnered over 12k stars.

The Zima product line has always had a partnership with Intel. We source all our materials directly from official brand channels, from the selection process to procurement. To convince the Intel team, we have engaged in extensive communication and collaboration. I believe that a low-cost, small-sized server based on x86 architecture is a meaningful product for the market, which is why we defined the ZimaBlade for this generation of products.

I love stuff like this but I’m trying to understand what the mass appeal would be compared to a NUC or Brix which seem more technically capable and also have a very small form factor.

As near as I can tell, the differentiators are the ability to daisy chain them into a cluster over a high speed bus, a relatively low price, and some platform/App Store play like Synology or QNap.

So it’s somewhere between a Brix and an RPi, I guess, in the price/performance balance, and then the software ecosystem is part of the selling point as well for most people. It seems like you’re buying the guts of a qnap without the drive bay hardware, and btw you can build a cluster of ‘em if you have that need for performance or HA.

Cool. Will be interested in seeing how it evolves.

I suspect TB4 in the NUC could do the same job as the bus (can’t see the bandwidth listed)

Still trying to find an upgrade to my HP Gen8 Microserver (with the Xeon). This still isn't it.

Gen10 microserver?

This is still old, and the product line doesn’t seem to be updated?

What does this computer offer that cheap minipcs from the likes of Berlink and Minisforum don't offer already?

You can fit it in your pocket. But you can do this with MeLE and LattePanda ones as well.

So I'm guessing the advantage here is just a bit of price competition.

> So I'm guessing the advantage here is just a bit of price competition.

The minipcs from Beelink and Minisforum are slightly dlarger than a Raspberry Pi, but they ship with AMD Ryzen and Intel i5 8th and 11th generation, and sell for around 300-400€.

I don't think this competes on price too.

It offers two external SATA ports for storage, and external PCIe x4 slot. It can be a cheap ZFS receive box for backups. It could actually run TrueNAS, with 3.5” HDDs (although we will have to check if it could power them up too, through a Y cable).

My first question about the CPU is “does it support ECC RAM?”. If this is a server, it will need it.

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