Pineboards AI HAT enables Hailo-8L and NVMe boot storage on a Pi 5 | Hacker News Reader

Pineboards AI HAT enables Hailo-8L and NVMe boot storage on a Pi 5

pineboards.io

46 pointssthlmb28 comments

Manufacturers are pushing the Pi 5s PCIe interface to the absolute limit now, well beyond what's practical, but it's fun at least.

https://geekworm.com/products/x1011

Four NVMe drives multiplexed onto a single PCIe lane? Sure, why not!

https://pineboards.io/products/hat-upcity-lite-for-raspberry...

The OP also has a board which breaks the lane out to a full size PCIe slot, so you can put a 4090 in there. You shouldn't, but you can.

We used to multiplex drives onto a SCSI bus.

We also once multiplexed everything on a single ISA or PCI bus.

It's not necessarily the most performant thing for parallel[ish] operations, but there's nothing broken about the idea. It works.

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Seems they aren't affiliated with Pine64 either...

I actually see that as a positive

Man I had high hopes for Pine64 but open source software is also not great. I'm talking a $400 phone with cameras that don't work. Which isn't Pine's fault but yeah.

Well it is. Their entire business was to work with the open source community, and they haven’t.

Business? I never saw them that way, and I don't think they do either.

I don't know. I think this is a bit pointless. I'd rather see "a hat" for Intel N100.

I have Pi 5 and I wish I bought N100. It's unstable, loses internet connection after few days and I have to manually power cycle it. NVMe is patchy, I had to buy a few modules until I found one that is working, but I don't trust it.

Seems like RPi 5 was rushed to stay relevant, but it wasn't thought through.

Those small AI modules use the same form factor as standard WiFi cards so you don't really need a specialized hat, you could just plug that module straight into many N100 machines in lieu of WiFi.

edit: as mentioned below, make sure the machine you buy has a socketed WiFi module.

That might not work; I recently disassembled a mini PC with an Intel N95, and the wifi chip was soldered and integrated into the mainboard. Now, if the SSD was NVMe, I suppose you could use that for PCIe (possibly with some sort of adapter?) and boot from some other form of storage, of course.

Yeah just make sure to buy one of the models with a 2.5” drive for storage, or one with two NVME slots. Then you get to keep WiFi as well.

Any N100 board that has a PCIe connector exposed is basically mini ITX sized, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a SBC imo.

There are lots of problems with the Pi 5 (the absurd power draw, the lack of eMMC, breaking 10 years of GPIO compatibility), but the PCIe connector is definitely not one of them. In fact it's probably the best thing about it by far because it sets up a new standard, and soon every random SBC will have the same PCIe out port so they can run all of these compatible boards. Some might even support more than one lane eventually.

There are card-sized SBCs with the Intel N100. Very cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007348

I’ll be posting my review of that in a few hours…

Please, please, please, can you run a memory benchmark? Would be great to see how it compares against the rest: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2404119-TJ-2404112NE14&g...

I can give it a go. Review is linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41145937

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2408033-NE-2404119TJ50

Ah thank you! That's actually quite a bit lower than I would've expected. Especially how it lags behind the rest in write perf.

Also found this geerling review [0] today (which mentions yours as well) which does list slightly higher numbers but he notes that he used actual thermal paste to get better cooling with that gaping heatsink box, which seems to have helped on at least a few fronts. If your cooling theory about the G2 holds, then the memory might be overheating on the X4.

[0] https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/48

There wasn’t any easy way to cool the RAM itself - in fact, I wouldn’t try to cool it using the same heatsink since the CPU would likely transfer heat to the RAM.

I suspect this is just a matter of timing tweaks in the BIOS.

Yeah it does have the 2242 slot, but anything larger won't fit, nor will PCIe risers.

That aside, it does have some impressive specs (twin ufl ports for external wifi antennas are dope), even though the LPDDR5 is bottlenecked by a dumb 32 bit bus. I was looking to buy one the other day but it's currently out of stock everywhere and the 12/16 GB versions that would be most interesting are nowhere to be seen, so for now it's not really something anyone can buy.

It's actually only a 2230 slot which is a little disappointing.

I have N100 from beelink and it came with NVMe slot. The purchase price, including RAM and SSD was around ~$140 (16G RAM, 256GB SSD). And the performance is in multiples of Pi. Never had any issues with stability but I never put any more serious load on it either.

My last Pi is 4 and Pi5 is just completely pointless to me.

Don't even bother with the N100 anymore, IMO, unless board size is a strict requirement. You can buy i5-12450H and i9-12900H mini PCs in the $200-$400 range on Prime Day/Black Friday.

I agree that the RPi5 doesn't make much sense. NVMe needs to be built in at a minimum, and the specialized PSU requirement is a PITA.

What I take from this is that if I have a project in mind that I want to do right now and it requires a very small computer, then I should not do that project.

Instead, I should wait a few months (or most of a year), triple my budget, and make room for a larger system.

Or go ahead and make whichever choice right now and regret your purchase later, or don't. The keyword was IMO.

Obviously if $200 is tripling your budget then you're leaving some unneeded peripheral out. The N100 probably won't work either as the cheapest one on Amazon is apparently $120.

The median of the price range listed is $300.

N100 boxes are available for purchase today (not just sometime in the mysterious future) for less than $100, delivered.

$300 ÷ $100 = 3, hence: Tripling the budget.

(I could have picked the high end of the range, just as you selected the low end, but that would have been disingenuous of me. $300 is right in the middle.)

The range I gave is based on CPU/RAM/SSD specs obviously, so your N100 system should be specced to match.

Here's an i7-11390H/16GB/512GB system you can buy today on Amazon from a somewhat reputable Chinese brand for $170. Its CPU is ~50% faster than a N100 single-threaded and ~80% faster multi-threaded:

https://www.amazon.com/ACEMAGIC-11390H-Computer-Desktop-Supp...

A similarly priced system with a much faster CPU will be on sale in 3 months, maybe sooner. Feel free to spec a similar N100 system on Amazon (or Newegg or a similarly reputable vendor with no-questions-asked returns) for much less.

I don't need that shit, though.

I don't need to spend the extra money. I don't need to wait between 3 and 11 months.

I do need a computer today. And if an N100 meets my needs today, then I'm buying one -- today.

Srsly.

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