Radxa X4 low-cost, credit card-sized Intel N100 SBC goes for $60 and up
cnx-software.com
cnx-software.com
For $60 that seems pretty killer. And I assume x86 means less "idiosyncratic" software. I wonder if its WiFi supports AP mode; this might be a nice little WAP.
Edit: I really want to see pricing for 16GB RAM; this could be a good desktop!
Edit 2:
WiFi 5 & BT 5 for 4GB RAM model
WiFi 6 & BT 5.2 for 8GB RAM or more models
It does. My N100 mini PC runs plain ol' LMDE. Intel chipset/GPU/etc drivers are and have been rock solid on Linux since forever. Very much a "just works" situation
I'm curious how the RP2040 shows up when running Windows, even if that isn't what I'd do.
Word of caution: These things never get acquired for that price. When everything is said and done, the real total price is closer to double. I'm talking about supporting knick-knacks, import fees, shipping fees.
I recently ordered a ODROID-H4 PLUS ( N97, not N100 ) and it's looking good, but it's more upmarket than this SBC.
ODROID H4+ is faster than Radxa X4, due to the higher clock frequency and due to having a 64-bit DRAM interface, while Radxa X4 has a 32-bit DRAM interface.
Radxa X4 is cheaper, when considering the price including the DRAM & WiFi (under $100 with 8 GB DRAM), and it is much smaller, having the credit card form factor. An advantage of Radxa X4 over almost all other small SBCs is that its USB 3 ports are 10 Gb/s ports, allowing fast links to USB hubs or external SSDs or USB Ethernet interfaces.
When compared to the SBCs using RK3588 or to Radxa NIO 12L, the only cheap SBC with a CPU including a quadruple Cortex-A78 (from Mediatek; comparable SBCs from Qualcomm or NVIDIA are very expensive, starting around $500), Radxa X4 is cheaper than most of them and whether it is faster depends on the application. The N100 CPU will be faster in single thread, but it can be slower in multiple-thread applications, when, depending on cooling, its clock frequency may drop to lower values than for the SBCs using Cortex-A76 or Cortex-A78. Many of those SBCs use 64-bit DRAM interfaces, so they may also be faster for programs that happen to be limited by the memory bandwidth (vs. Radxa X4 with a 32-bit DRAM interface). The GPU of N100 is also much faster and it has much better software support than the Arm GPUs. USB and PCIe should also work better on N100.
There is also AAEON UP 7000, which is a very similar credit-card-sized SBC with Alder Lake N, but it is 2 to 3 times more expensive.
This year, Intel has introduced a refresh of Alder Lake N, with the code name "Amston Lake". The Amston Lake CPUs are branded in the Atom x7000 series and they are intended for embedded applications. Radxa has said that there will be future variants of the Radxa X4 which will use some Amston Lake models instead of N100, including 8-core models.
This is really cool.
[1] page 22 https://dl.radxa.com/x/x4/radxa_x4_v1.11_schematic.pdf
You can run on the N100 a program that would monitor continuously the RP2040, e.g. by reading periodically the state of a GPIO pin or of a variable in the internal memory. Such a program can shutdown all the SBC.
Sadly most(?) x86 systems don't offer a non-visual way to access BIOS/UEFI settings (like ARM boards usually do with uBoot over serial), so the utility of such monitoring without video input is limited, but just being able to remotely reset a system via a built-in chip would be very useful.
The fact that these are available with 4 and 8 GB of RAM now and with Pi-compatible GPIO could mean some excellent home project opportunities.
This board is a full intel computer plus a rp2040 driving the pi-style GPIO pins. It should basically be able to do whatever a pi can do.
I've been watching for an SBC you could use to make something like a TRS-80 Model 100. They ran off 4-AA batteries and would get you 20 hours of continuous use. That translated to at least a week of real world use (you wouldn't want to be typing on one for 4 hours a day...)
That was in 1983. Today, it seems like you should be able to make something similar that will run for weeks or months on AA batteries.
Much higher than a raspberry pi, but still low in comparison to any desktop server
Most well designed N100 systems that have only a moderate number of peripherals have an idle power consumption under 5 W.
So in my very-much-not-an-expert opinion, I don't think it would be feasible to run a modern computer off of AA batteries, let alone for weeks.
The idle power consumption of such a SBC like Radxa X4 must be significantly below 5 W, probably around 2 to 3 W.
That is still too high for standard AA batteries, but rechargeable batteries should work.
If a long battery life would be needed, it is likely that one can shut down the N100 CPU and wake it up either periodically or on USB activity caused by the RP2040 MCU. That should reduce the average power consumption to fractions of a watt.
A modern MCU will absolutely run circles around the processing and memory capabilities of the Model 100, and can probably even do that for 20 hours using four AA batteries.
However not even the fastest existing MCUs, i.e. those with Cortex-M85 cores, can reach processing or memory speeds comparable with CPUs like the Intel Alder Lake N series or the Arm CPUs using Cortex-A78 or Cortex-A76 cores.
The fastest MCUs may have a clock frequency of up to 1 GHz, but most of them have clock frequencies many times lower (this is because the MCU cores use shorter pipelines), while the SBCs use clock frequencies between 2 and 4 GHz.
The Cortex-M7 or Cortex-M85 MCU cores have an IPC (instructions per clock cycle) that is 2 to 3 times higher than the IPC of most other MCU cores, but even their IPC is 2 to 3 times lower than of Alder Lake N, Cortex-A78 or Cortex-A76. Due to the much higher clock frequency and IPC, the SBCs are much faster than any MCU.
Due to the MCU clock frequencies being under 1 GHz, not even their cache memories can have throughputs as high as the DDR memories of the SBCs, which use 4.267 to 4.8 giga transfers per second.
So any modern SBC will run circles "around the processing and memory capabilities" of any MCU. However, you are right that in many cases the speed of a SBC is not needed and a MCU is good enough.
A SBC is typically needed when you want a USB 3 interface or an SSD, because extremely few MCUs have any peripheral interface faster than 1 Gb/s Ethernet.
But in context: It simply can't take very much grunt to provide a modern take on a ridiculously-limited portable computer from 1983.
The TRS-80 Model 100 that is the context here had an 80C85 processor running at a scalding 2.4MHz, and featured as much as 24 kilobytes of SRAM.
And that's a pretty excellent spec for a portable computer in 1983, but it's a complete snoozefest compared to a RP2040 dev kit like the Pi Pico (at a cost of around three US dollars).
There are all kinds of Linux Capable chips available between 0.3W to 5W, and with LPDDR1 or other older standards, you can get very good and cheap prices while still only sipping power.
Also an interesting addition for a platform that is clearly meant to compete against RPI in general.
A person can run any computer they wish from solar and battery, given sufficient quantities of panels and cells.
How many watts does it draw in idle, surfing the web, and watching a YouTube video?
My home router is a $80 N100 + 4x 2.5GbE box, passively cooled.
You can buy a cheap OCuLink adapter and and put it in that port.
It only has 9. shrug
"there's dozens of us"
Note: the problem I had, is I had a system with an old Rpi, I did made a physical clone, new board, copy the SW, but on a new OS (bookworm) and surprise! Nothing works!!! Raspian is a chaos, and using systemd in an embedded system is just Not For Me!