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Comment by nirav72 | Hacker News Reader

At $60 - its able to run anything x86, plus hardware transcoding and a cpu about 3x more powerful than a RPI 5, not sure why anyone would even want a raspberry pi. Not to mention the built in 2.5G nic with PoE and m.2 slot. Adding a PoE and m.2 hats on a raspberry pi would add another $25-40 to the price. Hope they ramp up production on these Radxa boards.

Edit: another source with better image of the form factor. It might actually fit a raspberry case.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/07/19/radxa-x4-low-cost-cr...

View on HN

i've done the rant many times before [1] but frankly rpi has almost never made sense. there were always things like the ECS Liva/Liva X for $100-125 that were fully-featured, for roughly the same price as a rpi once you consider all the shit you'll need to get that $45 computer booted up. The Liva (and similar booksizes/net-tops, and similar things like AM1 platform from AMD) benefited hugely from using standard drivers and standard BIOS versus a massive amount of early ARM jank (the early RPi days a lot of things were actually soft-float, let alone niceties like UEFI!).

the best argument for rpi has always been the combination of GPIO and linux. But that's a double-edged sword too, because linux isn't really very good at hard-realtime. And you can always just get a Bus Pirate or similar tool for doing just plain GPIO. And nowadays the ESP32 has basically completely displaced it for a lot of those sorts of "GPIO glue" roles.

If you didn't need that, like if you just wanted a low-power fileserver or HTPC... the x86 stuff was better, because it actually worked reliably, at roughly the same price. Like literally just go buy an off-lease mini-tower or USFF mini-pc for $10 from a surplus store, even.

This goes doubly when you consider all the problems with the early rpi. Like basically it uses USB 2.0 (unidirectional 500mbps) as a system bus... but it also dropped USB packets under load due to bugs in the firmware[0], that nobody outside the Pi foundation could address because Broadcom didn't release the documentation for like 5 years.

[0] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297

yeah, even for GPIO interfacing, there are far cheaper options (ESP32) than the raspberry Pi out there. The Pi was an appealing piece of hardware about 10 years. But now, not sure it makes sense to use as a low cost server.

There's raspberry pi pico and pi zero that compete against esp32.

The product in title uses a rp2040 for gpio.

I for one prefer the raspberry products (nice sdk for pico and much more features for not that much more power use/cost on pi zero)

I do have ESP32s as well but they're mostly stuck to micropython.

one big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single digit watts. that advantage has decayed over time though...

A good number of the mini PC's idle under 12W. My i5-6500t does. Yeah they ramp up under load to 30W, but a before rpi5 to start to ramp up like that would've been way more compute than an RPi could offer.

Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting.

Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available.

Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.

the n100 mini pc i got here runs at around 3.5 watts while running homeassistant with a unifi network server while having around two dozen devices connected. under debian 12 minimal.

How are you measuring that? I've been scouring the web for low-idle-power builds and 3.5 watts is far below the best builds I've found (assuming that 3.5 watts is measured at-the-wall).

The futro S740, popular with selfhosters in Germany, gets similar wattage for people [0]. On a slightly older CPU (J4105).

I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under full load.

[0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...

I've measured about 5w from the wall with Pentium J5005 based Dell thin client which has a tiny fan, one SSD, two RAM modules. No idea how N100 compares to J5005.

N100 runs slightly hotter, I've seen it more like 6-8W

Just a cheap measurement adapter you plug between the wall and cable.

The nice thing about n100 Is its ability to disable the iGPU in the bios, saving you a little bit of power. But you have to reset the bios on the board to regain any output if you might need it later.

Sounds interesting, could you please share brand and model? Also, do you know how many SSDs/HDDs you can put inside? Could be a good replacement to have a low power NAS.

Unless I'm running on battery, that's a pretty abstract win to me in the US. My i5-6500t's 10W for all 8760 hours of the year is 87kWh; less would be nice but my power bill is already under $10/year at that rate.

It is great that something on par is so affordable & even lower power though! And what I bought was a value because it was used, where-as now you can buy new. It's felt like the atom lineup was kind of slow rolling things & there hasnt been much availability for cheap AMD systems. These low price low power e-cores systems have really changed the game, have expanded the value proposition a lot versus the used-x86 mini PC or io limited ARM market's long stalemate.

Apple claims that the latest Mac minis draw 7 W at idle:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253

E.g., Apple M2 Pro chip, 32GB unified memory, 8TB SSD.

Apple's still the only company that matches other Arm boards/servers on efficiency (perf/W) + idle power draw. AMD has been doing a little better, Intel slightly more so.

I am keeping an eye out for a cheap M1 Mac Mini on my local Craigslist because once you yank it out of its huge metal case, which is like half PSU, the board itself is quite small. Apparently, the PSU only outputs 12W across the entire power connector, so easily powered by a barrel jack. I quite like the idea of playing around with macOS as a SBC OS, but even just designing a smaller case with sufficient cooling would be fun too.

> Apparently, the PSU only outputs 12W across the entire power connector

What is your source? Because, according to the link shared by op, they can consume up to 50W or 100W depending on the model.

Whoops, meant 12V not 12W. Meaning it can be powered off of a big enough battery bank or a simple barrel plug power brick.

Interesting, but they can jump up to 50W or 100W depending on the model. Which such a big swing, you really need to consider your specific use case to see what will be the actual power consumption.

no, the booksize pcs of the time were pretty comparable to what you see today in terms of power. rpi was a bit cheaper and lower-power... but also vastly slower. Like a factor of 4x if not more (10x?).

Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory. Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory.

For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model improved things a little (512mb) but still, not a good showing for a product that competed directly with these x86 nettop machines.

And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w idle/12W load is not anything you're really going to notice, especially given the massive increase in performance it afforded.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nett...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanl...

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807...

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications

https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf

Rpi team had great marketing. But it wasn’t the only game in town even back then. Nettops existed for a long time. They just didn't have the full-court press in the glossies.

RPi also released at $35 for Model B, two years earlier.

Yes, that's always been the marketing gimmick. $35, for something with no case, no storage, no power adapter (and off-the-shelf adapters were not suitable at the time), that had a critical flaw with its system bus/all USB devices for the first 2 years of its existence. That bug didn't get fixed until feb 2014, which is basically the same time the liva launched.

also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year.

so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive.

[0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....

ECS Liva according to reviews from 2014 would cost me about $170~180. Would still require keyboard/mouse and something to display with.

Sure, it would have a case and WiFi in that price.

It would also miss GPIO header, which was major selling point of initial Raspberry Pi efforts (before it became so popular for other uses, when it was still targeting education).

A lot of then-common phone chargers worked. A random SD card wasn't that much of an issue. A kit with charger, NOOBS SDcard, and random assortment of extra bits to play with the electronics regularly could be acquired for ~100 USD if not less.

If I wanted to play with small-size BayTrail x86, Liva was fine choice. If I needed a small general purpose computer, too.

Not a very good choice if I wanted to graduate from Arduino towards somewhat more capable setup without requiring either expensive I/O boards or hacking an IO board out of Arduino or another MCU.

https://i.imgur.com/yiR1L1d.png

https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png (these had a $25 rebate)

these were $115 barebones iirc (add SSD and memory). https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-so...

$180 loaded for the whole thing (and this is indicative of what I paid for ssd+memory at the time, etc) https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png

like idk what to say dude but MSRP reviews aren't always reflective of street prices back then, things used to go back on clearance sales before moore's law died.

yes, you absolutely could get x86 stuff that was price-competitive with the rpi once you loaded it up. the $35 price is, as I have stated, a red herring considering all the stuff that nobody had on-hand in 2012 like proper usb chargers that could run a rpi stable, plus the massive kernel problems involved for the first few years.

It's $100 loaded cost for a raspberry pi 1b or 1b+ that doesn't even work, because of kernel bugs I already linked, or just buy x86 for $75-180 and get something an order of magnitude faster that actually works and runs standard x86 distros and drivers. Stop comparing 1/3 of a pc to a out-of-the-box pc as if the price means anything at that point, this is getting to be bad-faith.

Especially when the product didn’t fucking work.

Like it’s the same damn story as ROCm, right? People want serious financial consideration as if they have delivered a working product, minus the delivering the working product. Come back in 5 years when your product works.

I will sell you a brick with a piece of paper that says “10,000 tflops” taped to it. The perf/$ will be out of this world, but there will be some “usability issues”. PM me for details.

Never understood RPis, because as a Intel user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a NUC, making a case locally with a 3d printer, and then using ZFS or Btrfs for the computer's filesystem.

A also "Never understood why people go grocery shopping to make their own food for $25 when they can go to a restaurant for a $200 meal, or go through the gabage behind the restaurant to pick up some throwaway scraps for nearly free."

RPis used to be cheap.

hm guess the zeitgeist didn't like my take on Dropbox except I have linux

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23797092 for this.

I have a solution which was developed and tested by another person under rPi. I know it's working on exact model. All I need to do is to buy exactly the same model of rPi, install the same OS, and deploy that solution there, as many as I need.

You need to be very naive to think that replacing rPi with a completely different thing will not bring any problems. Hell, even changing the rPi model does!

The only reason the exact model matters at all in the first place, is because of arm and broadcom.

Sure. And another thing that matters: the producer of a faulty USB cable that led us to waste several days of work. And another: shitty battery producer that led us waste several more days.

This "little computer land" is flaky and hard, and rPi matters because it gives at least some common ground. I wish it'd be more universal, but it's not.

It's not just them, the majority of SBC manufacturers are on these bizarre old Linux forks that have been patched all to hell and will never see mainline. Kind of same situation with most smartphones, too (as they are all the same SoCs).

There are some very noble projects (like PostmarketOS for phones, and Armbian for SBC) who try to be "mainline first" to keep these fascinating little devices going longer (and more reliably). They do an amazing job considering what they have to work with, but these are not big companies with a lot of resources behind them, so if you care about this sort of thing (not you specifically, that's for anyone reading) then consider perhaps lending a hand (or a few bucks)!

Cheers! :)

But x86 boards have vastly fewer kernel & driver support problems.

It's not even close, not even in the same order of magnitude.

The problem is not "sbc", the problem is "arm sbc"

Running on a random "unsupported" x86 board is no more of a problem than an unsupported laptop. There are sometimes no drivers for some peripheral but it's nothing like arm where you can't even boot without a dtd and most of the hardware has some freak custom interface instead of just pcie and usb and well known chips.

Every single arm board is like it's own whole different platform. A Bananna Pi Foo A and a Bannana Pi Foo A+ both with nominally the same cpu and specs might as well be a trs-80 and an appollo guidance computer when it comes to bringing them up.

IMO the logic is reversed. Wintel phenomenon created enormous incentives for everyone to follow IBM PC "spec". That was odd, and it's ARM SBC situation that is more normal.

What I've ways felt was a major advantage for Raspberry Pi compared to all of the other SBCs is that the Pi actually got regular updates. Maybe other SBC manufacturers started doing that too since I first got my hands on a Pi, but it definitely didn't use to be the case.

The ECS Liva would cost me €200 (€278 when avoiding webshops that look like scams) without memory. An RPi5B is €88. I don't think I'll get more than twice the use out of an ECS Liva if all I want to run is Pihole.

And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to bring a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It was created to aid schools in teaching kids about computers. They've changed their tune ever since just about everyone with a computer project started buying out their reserves, but making things easy for professionals was not part of the plan from the start.

If you have cheap access to better computers, make good use of that! I still find the RPi to be competitive for cheap, low-power compute, though.

The ECS Liva X is 10+ years old, it’s a product I bought in 2014. You’re seeing elevated prices from scalpers who are selling stock of a product that was discontinued 8 years ago, buying a new-in-box GTX 760 is going to run you a premium as well.

At the time, I bought one Liva for $100 and then two Liva Xs for $125 each a year or so later. All of them were 2gb memory/32gb emmc models.

I like to use a single remote for both my TV and Kodi, and the raspberry pi has the CEC HDMI thing which makes it possibke. It's not that common in SBCs AFAIK.

Had the same problem when moving from a RPi to a mini PC, and solved the problem using this external dongle: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

Unfortunately it's not cheap, although the same functionality could be offered by a USB equipped small microcontroller "sniffing" 2 wires from a pass-through HDMI port.

I partly agree, the RPi Zero W is my ideal small physical computer with a full OS. Running it only from the overlay filesystem (to keep those terrible SD cards from becoming corrupted). Pi-Hole I run from a docker container on a fanless NUC-a-like. But for anything that needs GPIO, the Zero W is great (nice that this Radxz has a RP2040 built in to cover that).

> And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to bring a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It was created to aid schools in teaching kids about computers. They've changed their tune ever since just about everyone with a computer project started buying out their reserves, but making things easy for professionals was not part of the plan from the start.

I go into this in my previous comment that I linked above, but I think it was a shitty product for that niche too. The original non-microSD version had massive problems with the SD cards slowly softening and deforming enough to cause unreliable contact with the socket, which was one of the failure modes that caused corruption.

Another were the power brownouts, etc. People forget because usb chargers have gotten so much better over the years but 10 years ago a regular usb charger could generally not run a raspberry pi stable under load. Worse, it would appear to be stable and just silently corrupt the SD card due to voltage brownout (writes don't "stick"). Today we are seeing the same problem with the RPi 5s, where they have simply exceeded the capability of what can be delivered at 5V and aren't reliable.

You could not even PXE boot them without having a SD card installed to provide the blobs, so there was no getting around this at the time.

Pointing to the "you can pull the SD card and reflash it!" as being some kind of massive advantage is ignoring the massive downsides the SD card brought with it, again especially until they finally switched to microSD so the cards didn't melt and warp. I cannot fathom someone trying to run a computer lab on raspberry pis, that would have fucking sucked.

RPi is the only ARM SBC that I've seen good broad support for. You can run their Linux distro as well as mainline distros. Every other SBC I've tried has required some boutique distro with custom drivers that weren't generally available or worse still, just didn't work.

I will say, when the scalping of RPi happened over the pandemic, a lot of the x86 mini-pcs became a much better option in terms of TCO. I invested a bit into DeskPi cases for 8gb RPi 4b models. In the end, a $150 or so N100 box is a much better deal, with the case, psu, memory and storage. But it, of course, depends on what you're doing or trying to accomplish.

Well, it's a very standardized platform that is readily available and guaranteed to be available for some time.

This is why some hardware projects reply on it and the intricacies of its GPIO timing.

I agree that if you want a small computer to run your home NAS on, then sure, there might be better alternatives.

But if you want to (say) plug one into your old Amiga (with a PiStorm) so that it emulates the CPU's bus timings and runs as an incredibly fast M68000 CPU, there's no way around the RPi (unless you want to do a lot of hardware development yourself... if that's even possible since on most of these Chinesium clones, the GPIO is hidden behind a ton of bridges, busses and/or MCUs which would kill the latency in those tightly constrained use-cases)

I assume nobody would bother porting the hardware-related code to the "Chinesium Clone of the Week" every few months

I am happy to pay the NOT made in China tax for the RPi.

Why?

to strengthen local industry

post-covid this should be crystal clear.

You are at mercy of other countries if you do not produce anything.

Probably need to look into where all the components are manufactured too. Final assembly is only one step in the process.

Still incrementally more resilient.

Something tells me Broadcom doesn't agree.

If you have the know-how and factory to do final assembly, it's at least one more step in a long supply chain you have mastered. Broadcom or no Broadcom.

"At least" is certainly right. You'd be adopting the lowest-margin, most competitive and lowest-hiring work from China. And you'd still be paying a price-premium for a dubious improvement in quality, if any improvement at all.

Eventually people have to realize that America cannot re-take the jobs we sent to Mexico and China. The modernization we enjoy today is entirely predicated on the abject abuse of people that are protected by inferior governments and weak economies. To import their jobs means to import their standard-of-living.

I wasn’t thinking of jobs as much as strategic optionality in case of conflict.

Same problem, just worse. If America can't source butt-cheap STM-32s then our efforts at assembling boards might as well go up in smoke. But that's easy enough... just bootstrap domestic refineries for every precursor, purchase a few billion dollars worth of ASML products, hire and train a few thousand workers while you build a dozen-odd factories, convince Texas Instruments to license ARM hardware officially at-cost and design an American-made core, validate and sample the new chip to your assemblers and pass the research/development costs onto the consumer with every device!

That's the problematic bit. Now you have an officially-licensed and tested STM-32 core that can serve as a drop-in replacement at 10,000% of the cost of an identical Chinese bootleg model. Part of the problem is that the US has to pay for ARM licenses that China refuses to acknowledge, but another part of the problem is that our supply chain's just not built to compete. We're a digital import-state.

So it's about time to reverse some of that.

The fact that it has an RP2040 MCU makes this a pretty darn compelling product

This board needs some supporting hardware that RPi doesn’t - a fan and wifi antennae, if I remember. Radxa includes these with a case as well, so the added cost is trivial, but at that point the footprint’s more than doubled.

(That’s not to say that this isn’t preferable; just that it makes different trade offs that in some cases don’t work.)

The Radxa X4 is already sold out and pulled from listings by the manufacturer. I expect massive markups for awhile just the RPi 5.

I think the price points for Pi 5 are staying where they are ($60/80 was launch price for Pi 5 4/8GB, respectively).

The fact the boards have a 1 and 2 GB resistor option for memory means I'm guessing those were planned (or are planned still?) and would logically slot in at a $40 price point.

That would give back some of the price-advantage for many Pi use cases, since at least for me, about half the things I use Pis for, I could do within 1 (preferably 2) GB of RAM.

Already sold out? How many did they make 100?

I know right. Also they have the 16gb version which is nowhere to be found.

3x? Geekbench scores seem similar for the pi 5 and this machine.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7095621

I think it's highly dependent on the workload under test. The N100 includes Quick Sync (and the Pi 5 does not) so any processing that includes video transcoding will be a lot faster on the N100.

Can confirm, I run a Jellyfin server with an N100 and the thing is a transcoding beast when you set it up right

Cool to hear… especially in the power specs for that proc. If you don’t mind, What specs does the transcoding machine have and what’s an example of a workload it handles well?

16G single channel ram, 512G NVMe SSD.

It can transcode a 4K HDR10 movie encoded at 60Mbps down to 1080p SDR ~15Mbps at around 78fps. 4K HDR to 4K SDR at around 35fps I think. Those are typically the most intensive workloads I throw at it. Dolby Vision encoding is a bit harder on it, I think it uses OpenCL rather than VPP tonemapping for that, so those can drop as low as like 28fps when going 4k DV -> 4K SDR, but for my purposes that's the most intensive workload and those would all be 24fps movies, so it generally just works great.

I also have a fair bit of anime encoded in Hi10p h264 format, and it has no trouble decoding and re-encoding those (to h265) with burned-in subtitles. We're talking 90+fps. I note Hi10p mostly because hardware decoders for it don't exist.

It's at the encoding step that we usually see it getting close to its limits for transcode speed, hence why 4k HDR to 4k SDR is the most intensive load. It's probably also safe to assume that when transcoding down to 1080p Jellyfin puts the scaling down filter first in the ffmpeg pipeline so that the tonemapping processes are less CPU/GPU/memory bandwidth intensive as well.

True, but the fact a pi can even compete on paper in some areas with a modern intel chip is pretty impressive. 3x isn't the power difference for all workloads but probably is for common ones like transcode etc.

I think we often forget just how far the pi has come from the armhf days.

It’s an impressive system for sure, but I will happily pay a price premium for the Pi ecosystem where I am unlikely to be the very first person trying to deploy any particular package.

It is highly unlikely you will be pioneering on x86 deployments as well.

It's an ordinary x86 board that can run any x86 Linux distribution. You are vastly more likely to be the first person trying to deploy any particular package on a Pi than an x86 computer.

So with this board, I can just plug in a LibreELEC image and start watching digital media on my TV from my sofa, while controlling it with my regular TV remote via CEC?

That's the kind of thing that the Raspberry Pi's combination of consistency and popularity does provide.

No, but you can run multiple docker containers on it for years without the fear of your SD card failing from excess writes as it uses standard M.2 SSDs

If a CEC compatible media player is what you need, then the Pi is a good choice. Or if you need GPIO.

Otherwise they're horribly overpriced compared to N97/N100 minipcs, with the exception of the Zeros.

I haven't had any issues with SD cards failing in Raspberry Pis.

But I've only got about 14 machine-years of using them so far. On a long-enough timeline, I'm sure that failure is inevitable.

The various Android phones I've had over the past decade and a half, however: Now those have killed some SD cards.

YMMV.

(BRB. I think imma dump RetroPie onto an SD card, plug in a PS3 controller, and do some trouble-free some vintage gaming on the Raspberry Pi that was doing media center duties with CEC a minute ago. If I have time, and it seems fun-enough, I'll get the controller working with Bluetooth.

And then I think I'll plug the LibreELEC card back in and crash out on the couch watching a movie.)

> the 40-pin GPIO header handled through a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller.

This part would be a reason why: very low GPIO throughput since you're limited to what can be shoved through serial and it all has to be must be manually processed by the extremely slow RP2040. The main upside with something like a Pi 4 is that it has zero overhead access to it via kernel api, so you can pipe hilarious amounts of data through its pins or address i2c devices directly from python with existing libraries for almost every sensor, etc.

The Pi 5 using it through a PCIe southbridge is quite a lot worse, especially since it broke all compatibility and it still can't even drive even a simple WS2812 led strip yet a year after release. They've thrown away the last 10 years of community support and development since the layout was standardized with the Pi 2.

RO2040 isn’t slow - it’s literally one of the fastest on the market. It’s a dual core microcontroller that can easily run both cores at 133-250+ MHz.

https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

The GPIO on RPi is not very useful for precision work and you’re limited to using SPI (usually to talk to an auxiliary microcontroller). The GPIO on RP2040 is so good that you can use it as 24 channel 100Msps logic analyzer in a pinch.

https://github.com/gusmanb/logicanalyzer

Yeah anyone calling the RP2040 slow for GPIO hasn't used it in anger. The PIO is amazing.

Smaller CPU aside, how do its GPIOs compare performance-wise to the older PRU contained in TI Sitara CPUs used in BeagleBoards? Many complained about the small number of channels on TI processors (only 4 if memory serves) therefore I wonder if it could be considered a successor where very fast digital I/O is needed but power and memory to run Linux is not because it's being hosted and run on a bigger nearby CPU.

The issue with a raspberry case is that N100 Radxa boards have the N100 on the bottom. That's where the heatsink has to go.

The X4's biggest problem is the Pi form factor, which yeah, is Radxa's mistake, but also a good reason not to buy a Pi 5, cause you'll also need a heatsink, which'll then interfere with your GPIO access, fan header, and so on. If I have a small eInk display HAT, I'd much prefer not sandwiching the hot bits between the really hot bits and my display.

Shoot. Forgot about that. Wonder if the cooling cases or the solution available will be bulky.

According to your link, this board doesn't have built-in PoE, but requires an "optional hat". It links to a "currently unavailable" listing on Amazon, without any price info.

However, I agree that if it costs as much as a RPI, it looks really great.

the product page seems to indicate it has built in PoE https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/

It says "PoE Support", but requires a separate HAT (the transformer alone would take up too much board space to fit on the Pi-sized footprint). It has a 4-pin PoE header just like the Pi.

I would imagine it would need at least PoE+ with a 30W power budget.

The N100 SoC needs ~10w, so with accessories, maybe 15-20 should be enough, unless I'm missing some massive inefficiency in PoE itself

How about running arm software?

what can you run on ARM that you can’t run on x86?

Run arm apps natively?

What apps? Name one.

Doing development for ARM is easier when you have an actual ARM machine. Any project with assembly in particular.

I find pushing builds into an image and running them under qemu-system-aarch64 far easier than screwing around with hardware.

Not the parent but in developing and testing server software it's necessary to have the target architecture available because all sorts of random crap changes between architecture to the point that once things become more than trivially complex, the probability if things breaking when the CPU type is changes becomes close to 1.0.

It was $60 + $70 for shipping + $70 in taxes/dues

I think hardware transcoding is a bit overrated since pretty much every device nowadays can decode most formats at a good resolution and frame rate.

I would hardly call hardware video decode/encode overrated. A hardware block will do the work with a fraction of the power that the CPU would take to do it, and in the case of something like a Pi 4 or Pi 5, you're now spending all of your limited CPU on video, rather than doing something useful.

Maybe not a problem when you're plugged into the wall, but for those of us using Raspberry Pi's (and other computers) in mobile situations (laptops, robots, drones, etc.), the power consumption is a huge concern.

My main usage of the Pi 4's video encoder was to record the video from the camera "for free" while the CPU was nearly maxed out doing stuff in OpenCV.

You misunderstood what I said. Transcode is not necessary. Pretty much every device that comes in the Happy McMeal box comes with HEVC and h264 decoding capabilities. So you just stream the data directly to the device which does the decoding with little energy as you mentioned. Transcoding is unnecessary.

Some folks have media libraries that can be used outside of their homes, and sometimes they use them with very limited bandwidth.

With transcoding, I can keep my high-bitrate 4k scan of Steamboat Willy at home, and stream the content to my pocket computer with the shitty free wifi on a public bus if I feel like it.

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