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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 พ.ค. 2024
- Mixtile Blade 3 - www.mixtile.com/blade-3/
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0:00 Intro
0:08 Raspberry Pi History
1:00 Mixtile Blade 3
3:11 Cost...
3:49 Mini PCs are better
4:52 My main problem with SBCs today
7:05 I want ARM to succeed
8:52 Conclusion - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I totally agree. I cringe when people recommend a $200 raspberry pi kit when someone says they want to learn to code. Just get a cheap mini pc because it will be more powerful, more compatible, more useful, and is still power efficient and small.
Choices
"but what if I want GPIO?"
Then you aren't asking for an SBC. You just need either the serial port on a miniPC, an m2/mpcie GPIO add in card, or an arduino.
SBCs have gotten so bloated that they just provide what 4th gen minipcs do but "on usb power", and then throw in GPIO to pretend like they're still for tinkering.
On what planet is a mac not for tinkering, but an SBC with everything soldered is?
I think they have drifted from their initial purpose a little bit, when it was like $25 or so it was great but with costs of $200 it makes much less sense. In my mind though the real value is interfacing with electronics through the GPIO, not just to be a device to learn to program which can be done on anything.
I got a 4GB PI5 for $60, the cooler, PS, 256GB (400mb/s flash) all for under $100 total. It overclocked to 3.0ghz, can overclock the gpu to1100. It can play PS2, Gamecube, runs Ubuntu. It's nowhere near tapped on potential. The Pi4s I had got better over time too. From the manufacturer and the community making/fixing software AND the TH-cam videos showing how to do things. I have 7 Pi's in front of me. 3 running, 4 are portable. 1 of anything would not really compete with using Pi's like browser tabs. I have Android playing a tv show on a boombox (tape deck has pi4 with 5" touchscreen in place of the door.) Then this desktop w/ Ubuntu writing this comment, and another Ubuntu next to that running another instance of TH-cam to watch. I've forgotten what waiting is like, using what some people deem to be "slow" computers. There is an 8th Pi4 hanging out nearby, sadly that one lasted about a week when I made a mistake with the USB. I was sad but still had 4 others at that time. Now it is parts in the future. I can't imagine using a Mac or blowing one up, and just being okay with it. Or the cost of 7, err, 8 of them retail from new. GPIO just means fan, power and ground to me. I agree don't buy the kits, buy the parts separately and have a better experience. Don't run micro SD, use a USB flash that runs faster and overclock them all.
@@AgalmicAutomata just brought an ESP32 and having lots of fun with it. 5 bucks on ali
The defining feature of this blade is the cluster box, most notably the interconnect. PCIe can do high speed networking (just like Ethernet) but very, very few companies have really tapped into that, outside of high-end enterprise products like NVMeOF drives.
It would be interesting if they are open and proactive with software development to test out their clustering setup using PCIe as the backbone (what those U.2 connectors are for). It would give lower latency and higher bandwidth than Ethernet, and supposedly would get us closer to a node-to-node ideal where CPUs are almost talking directly to one another like some dual CPU motherboards do.
However, my fear is they won't get enough traction with the high-ish price to be anything more than a small niche player, especially since individually the nodes themselves aren't too incredible.
Agreed. There are certainly niche scenarios where this would be badass but price, software support, and cheap x86 machines are huge deterrents.
Shouldn't we already be there with PCIE tunneling over USB4/Thunderbolt? Why is thunderbolt networking still such a nightmare to set up lol
NVMeOnlyFans? I'm in.
Could anybody give me an example of a niche where these kind of cluster-boxes would be used? Maybe i'm an old school person but I see SBC's in a company-setting still as a expandable microcontroller with only a few functions.
@@Peter_Enis given the RAM capacity, NPU (for which some legit galaxy-brained devs *reverse engineered* open source drivers; idek how that’s possible lol) and the GPU (which gets full upstream kernel support as of 6.10, around the corner) there’s probably a bunch of use cases for some ~AI~ things. I’m sure there’s businesses that would want to run object detection on multiple fairly high quality live video/surveillance camera streams. To be able to do that locally, free from fees and subscriptions to cloud based services? is probably worth the a $3K (incl. some big ass drives) one-time investment to many. And that’s just one, specific, use case.
As an aside, Im actually curious about what was causing @raidowl to have GPU issues; the panfork drivers for the RK3588s GPU on using armbians 6.1 kernel has been really capable on my Rock 5B, though I have yet to try Jellyfin
"Do you guys remember 2014?" Brett I barely remember what I had to eat yesterday.
You had 2 pieces of toast, scrambled eggs, a cliff bar, Subway, grilled salmon with asparagus and mashed potatoes, and half a Hershey's bar.
@@RaidOwldamn it. I’m hungry now.
@@RaidOwl nope
@@c1ph3rpunk not his fault I was the one that said food.
My stack of refurbished Lenovo 1L PC's keep looking good.
I have like 15 of them at home either DELL or Lenovo :D
@@jirimasarik:D
Same. Price/performance is outstanding
Tell me you don't understand the point of an sbc without telling me.
Mini PCs come with a case. No extra charge.
"If the software support is ass, who gives a shit?" So much win.... 🤣
SBC's are still great for embedded projects, learning, prototyping, or serving as some sort of intermediate device/controller in a larger system. But for personal computer purposes, mini-PCs are definitely the way to go!
That pricing is crazy, I gave up on sbc's during the pi shortage.. Just so much easier with x86
The folks at MixTile sent me one of their boards last year some time I think. I couldn't even force myself into faking interest in it once it arrived with just the board in the box. No cables. No instructions. Nothing. The team I spoke with were slow to respond and I eventually just threw it in a box and forgot about it.
Jeff Geerling is on a flight to your house rn ....load up
Who is Jeff Geerling and why should I care?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 red shirt Jeff is coming to your house rn……..you’ll see
@@James-xg4jr Aren't red shirts the one that always end up being vaporised or falling off cliffs in the first five minutes?
No chance red shirt Jeff is indestructible
I'm with you 100% on this. The SBC market has lost both its vision of what an SBC is going to be used for (learning) and what makes them practical (cost.)
I teach a class in which I want to show students how to build simple interfaces using GPIO pins. At one point, the way to do this was to get a Raspberry Pi and go to town. But during the great pi shortage, this became impractical. Then I learned about the MCP2221a breakout board available from Adafruit for $6.50. This connects to a PC (or Mac, if you are so inclined) via a USB, and gives you four GPIOs as well as I2C connectivity. Way more practical. Couple this with a BYOC or a cheap mini computer, off you go. (Bob's your uncle, Fannie's your aunt, and so forth.)
So yeah - you can download Scratch for free on your PC if you want to learn programming that way (or python if you are being more practical), a USB-connected breakout for GPIO or remote sensor capability, And a $100 mini PC for desktop functionality, and you are already ahead of the game.
Totally agree, the whole SOC ecosystem isn't as cool as it was. The whole mini pc craze is where it's at now and for good reason.
Totally agree. I gave up SBCs awhile ago. I bought a n100 mini PC with full x86 support. I put my Raspberry Pis in the loft and I don’t intend to use them again anytime soon. Kudos to Intel for developing the n100 with great hardware encoding, if a little slow. 😊
I concur 100%. I wanted to get an arm low power sbc for my OPNsense build but there was always something lacking, cough, 2.5ghz Ethernet. So, I went with an Intel N100 box which had 4 of the desired Ethernet ports and only cost $164 with replaceable 128GB NVMe drive and 8GB of ram. It may not sip the electricity as slowly as the sbc arm box but it does what I need and if I get bored with it, it will be a lot easier to repurpose since there is so much software available for it.
Reliability of a lot of those are garbage. Read some of the reviews.
Bought a N100 T8 Firebat 16gb ram, 512ssd and Windows. Had it setup and working within 5 minutes. Remember to set ddr5 speed to 4800 and increase tdp from 15w to 30w in bios. 140usd with shipping! Playing Steam games on it is so easy!
I disagree. People are treating SBC like a general purpose computer, which it could be, but SBC is really awesome as a cheap embedded system and for hardware tinkering, especially with GPIO and low power consumption. Raspberry Pi zero is good enough for most small projects, and cheap enough, too. I have plenty of mini PC and I love using them for homelab, but I won't deploy them for air quality measurement or home automation node or robotics.
I also agree with this. Raspberry pi Zero models, and the 3A+ are still what the Raspberry pi were originally meant to be. I have a raspberry pi 5, and have literally never even powered it up. But I do have it . . .
For less resource intensive services that are to be run 24/7 in the home, running headless and consuming little power and passively cooled, therefore running silently, a Raspberry Pi still can't be beaten IMO.
@@nddulac I agree about the less power hungry models. Their main advantage apart from their stellar software support is their low power consumption for 24/7 services. I just picked up a cheap second hand pair of 3Bs. I wish the Zero was as low priced as it was when it first came out but it's still a great option.
Honestly, with how expensive current gen SBCs are, I think most people are better off with an older or lower model (Pi Zero whatever) If someone needs to do Raspberry Pi things.
Otherwise the sweet spot is something like an Arduino or a big boy MCU like the STM32 series for embedded projects + a mini PC for homelabbing. For how outrageously expensive newer SBCs are rn you can get both devices.
The problem here is with "cheap". Those recent SBC are at a price point they simply stop making sense.
I'm a big fan of Libre Computers' range of SBCs. They're dirt cheap ARM boards, but they have fully UEFI-complliant bootloaders on them, meaning you're not limited to whatever janky images they provide. They upstream drivers and configuration for all their hardware (what a novel concept!), so most up-to-date distros simply work. They've been a joy to use.
I definitely agree on the software support point.
Pre-ordered a Rock Pi 5 back in early 2022 because RK-3588 looked so good, waited almost 6 Months for it to be delivered, experimented with it for an afternoon and it could not even boot the distros I standardized my homelab on. Waited almost another year (during which it was just sitting on a shelf), tested it out again and decided to sell it that weekend.
The fact that there STILL is no standard way to boot/initialize SBCs so they all need every distribution to create a special image just for them (even if the SoC, NIC, USB controller, etc. already have generic kernel support) is so infuriating!
There is ONE x64 TrueNAS ISO for everything from an old Intel Celeron to a brand new AMD EPYC Server Processor, but even two SBCs with the same SoC need different images...
No wonder most distros don't bother supporting that mess (apart maybe from the couple most widespread models) and support is basically hacked into a few (sometimes outdated) versions of Ubuntu/Debian by the Manufacturer. I know about Armbian, but that's just one project with a rather limited scope...
Performance is more nuanced, especially below 100€ (new vs used, power consumption, GPIO pins, etc.), but for anything above that getting a mini PC with upgradable RAM, a proper SSD, included case and power supply, as well as the standard x64 OS and application support is just plain better for a homelab in almost all cases.
I recently got an AMD EPYC 7551P 32 core bundled with a Gigabyte ATX SP3 Mainboard for 350€. Paying that for an SBC that can boot 3 operating systems, all based on Debian is just not worth it.
I think that the Raspberry Pi 5 is a good mix between performance, cost and efficiency. I am planning to get one for my homelab because my Rock Pi 4B isn't really cutting it any longer - especially when I want to run more complex services on it like VS Code Tunnel or Kasm. I had the issue where my whole internet was down because the Rock Pi crashed and so did all containers on it (with pihole being one of them)
The Pi 5's SoC uses a considerable amount of energy, given its intended applications. It's not really competitive with an Intel N100 on a perf/watt basis, especially if what you want to do isn't well-optimized for Arm. But throwing out SBCs altogether is really stupid. Just because there are people who want an RPi to be a super amazing media server doesn't discount its other uses in things like weather monitoring, IP surveillance, 3D printing, robotics, etc. where GPIO is useful, if not necessary--a random Chinese x86 mini PC ain't gonna give you GPIO or PoE.
tl;dr the unwashed masses want SBCs to do everything as well as x86 at a fraction the power use and are butthurt that it isn't happening
Can you really blame the unwashed masses when the rpi4 'desktop' edition was marketed to be capable of being used as a desktop?
@@longdang2681 People were already trying to use pi's as desktops before that kit was released, they just leaned into that dumbass trend. I kinda hope all of those idiots move back to x86 where the should have always been as it should quieten down all the noise.
People act like the pi zeros, pi2 and 3 stopped existing when the 4 and 5 released, they are still here, still cheap and run all of the projects you can find just as well as they always did.
@@backgammonbacon The pi marketing team should have known better than to actively mislead people into buying their product for a use case that it was unsuitable for. Now they are doubling down on that mistake and releasing faster pi's; because faster speeds is what is going to turn a specialist computer into a general purpose computer? What do you tell the average Joe when they say that they have bought the 'desktop kit' version to use as a desktop; and it's from the biggest name in single board computing?
The thing what not many remember about what the PI was supposed to be these days nobody keeps confined to. I mean these SBC thingies were supposed to fuel the tinkerer/maker scene to do small I/O stuff and not "cosplay" as a "Cloud Engineer".
Whoa whoa whoa. My shitty little cluster of pi's doesnt need your sass. I mean...you're not wrong, and I dont plan on buying anymore Pi's for homelabbing because mini-pc's just give you more bang for your buck. But still, my pi's are doing their best 🤣🤣🤣
Lol I mean...I still love PIs. I just think the combination of their cost going up and mini pc costs coming down has put them in a weird place.
@@RaidOwl absolutely. Now Im just itching to find more mini-pcs that I can power via PoE. Thats the main thing that sets SBC's apart for me. Hows that Neosmay holding up?
@@ImARichard It's solid. I wish they made one with more pcie lanes though.
You get to state you have _heterogenous_ home cluster if you have few pi boards there too :)
My mini-PC with a Ryzen 5700u idles at 3w and draws 10w when playing 4k videos while multitasking. It already comes with a case, 16GB RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. A Raspberry Pi just can't compete with it unless you have a specific use case that you just have to get a Raspberry Pi.
That said, I do own a Raspberry Pi 5, Pi 4, and Pi-Z w and they are great gadgets but are simply to expensive currently to recommend. 😔
TLDR: You only need raspberry pi if you want GPIO pins.
There are cheaper solutions for that as well. I use the MCP2221a breakout ($6.50 from Adafruit) which connects via USB to provide GPIO capability on my laptop. Yeah - that's right . . I can make LEDs blink, so don't mess with me!
You can use an esp32 for gpio for way cheaper
I love the compact nature of these devices and how little power they consume, especially the Pi Zeros which have enough juice to handle a network wide adblocker, a Wireguard server and still host something like Navidrome.
For desktop usage, even the RPi by now reaches the point that x86 is more affordable and of better use. Kinda sad given these things were designed to told kids how to code initially and give a low priced entry point into computing but that's how it is.
If you weren't buying these to use the GPIO pins, then it's never been worth it.
Used tinyminimicros ftw! Started with a NUC but the lenovos with dual nvme and pci slot are slept on
Thank you... as I was looking into building out an ARM based system for homelab but at low power I too found that mini PCs or just older Ryzen 5 3800 (I think) is nearly the same cost to buy and run but is WAY more power!
Refurb Lenovo and HP SFP machines for me, I am so over Pi’s for most use cases. Not being able to get a Pi, or one less than $250, for 3 years broke me of them. Sorry Eben, we moved on.
i still have one running - but where to find a proper stable cable to connect the mini-HDMI ?
and matching monitor that is neither huge and microbic.
My beautiful raspi5 is sitting basically unused, whats the oppositer of fomo? Buyers remorse doesnt quite line up, because i'm glad I got it, just wish I had the passion to work on it.
Totally agree. In fact, I bought a BeeLink EQ12. It doesn't fulfill every need, but it was zero hassle.
No case to buy. No hat to buy. Correct power supply came in the box.
The only "extra" I needed was an ethernet cable. Even then, I could get away with wifi since that radio is plenty fast.
SBCs for embedded applications, 1L pcs or NAS with docker for running services, desktop as a desktop, need a cluster? virtualise a regular computer or server. I have a raspberry pi 3, and 4. Sold em as they sat on the shelf.
you hit the nail in the head i feel the same way , you know what i buy ? laptop motherboards instead of SBCs , SBCs just too expensive ... if i need an sbc i go on ebay and i look for a motherboard for an old laptop , i get it and then i figure out how to get video out and put power in .
Most of these use heavily modified versions of Linux. You need to use their images and it’s very rare for a board to be able to just boot an ARM64 installer through UEFI and go with the installation as normal. I’m getting rid of mine and just using a 4 year old laptop as home server.
Thanks Owl! Was looking at self hosting a site on a pi cluster but the cost is making that idea much less appealing.
I realize this happening too. I have a bunch of ARM SBCs lying around, which I badly want to find a use case for, but all ideas I had so far were easier and better achievable using a VM on my Proxmox, which runs on [drumroll] an x86 mini PC! 😅
The reason I have raspberry pi’s in my rack is Poe support. I can setup a 10 node cluster with all plugged only into my switch no extra ports on the wall taken up.
Yeah thats pretty badass. ARM still has the edge in power efficiency for sure.
@@RaidOwl His 10 node cluster is probably less powerful than an used HP Mini with 4 core i5 while using about the same electrical power as the HP. It's a conversation piece but, seems kinda pointless from a practical use case. I bought a $12 PC from "Good Will", slapped in some ram and a drive and probably have a machine just as capable as this cluster.
I could not agree more. At one point ARM SBCs were amazing for what they cost. They were cheap enough that when you got bored with one you could throw it in a drawer to slowly decompose into it's component elements without a care. They haven't been that since the pi 4 became unobtanium. Glad to see someone saying it out loud.
May have to keep to the Turing pi 2 + rockchips/Jetsons
I think this situation is even harder with RISC-V sbcs too, since they're on a still relatively new ISA and most of them also can't even match the same functionality, let alone the same baseline performance at cost to most of the ARM sbcs, most particularly the current Pi boards. Their software support is also a mega miss if you want something working right out of the box because you're not only tinkering, but also building up things that aren't even in there yet. Though I do kinda hope that at some point, we'll get actually decent RISC-V boards later down the road, but at the moment it's just not there yet, dare I say in a weirder position than all these newfangled powerful ARM sbcs that make it hard to choose.
_Maybe one day, there might come a better choice with enough support to go somewhere from there._
I could not agree more. I have a dell tiny running my service 24/7 - would not trust anything else
I've like this guys sensibility. I've delt a small amount with a Samsung smart TV Android like software and some Samsung pads, Never Again! I don't get sucked in to the High end Intel (core whatever) chip circus either. My current machine is a retired workstation Dell Precision Tower 3420 sff; core I7-6700; two drives a ssd with windows 10 and a NVME-m.2 with Linux Mint; 64Gb of DDR4. This machine never gets turned off (maybe restarted ever so often). I do have to reboot to switch drives. This is a used $250 machine, and I don't game on it just TH-cam streaming. I use the Linux drive the most. My productivity software is Libre Office and some Google programs ie Google Earth; Google Maps; G drive; Contacts. My monitor is the Samsung 55" TV and I only occasionally watch live TV and fall asleep watching the "Snooze" (News) the rest is TH-cam.
@@bjre.wa.8681You never turn that off? What’s its power consumption ? In most places in the world that would cost more to run 24/7 for a year than the actual hardware 😅
The Pi peaked with the 3B+. After the whole shortage shit show, it really has not been better. I am glad these mini PCs are a thing and are a much better option if you want to dual boot Windows and Linux with complete compatibility for software.
The Intros always get me!
In Canada a Pi 5 kit with basic case and 32gig sd card will run you $270 roughly. A pi 4 with 64gig sd is about $250. I just looked up a mini PC with 16gig and 512gig drive on Amazon with prime will set you back $249.55! what is the better deal???
Like many here i hopped off the sbc hype train when the pi3 came out ad hopped on the 1ltr x86 train im currently running 6 hp elite desk 800g3 and plan on expanding my collection asap
I remember many years ago when Playstation 3 Clusters were a thing, many used Yellow Dog Linux because, as mentioned in Wikipedia: "It was created for high-performance computing on multi-core processor computer architectures, focusing on GPU systems and computers using the POWER7 processor.". It was based on RHEL/Centos.
Small pc with intel n100, turn off turbo mode, change wattage to low and installed true-nas, everything works perfectly fine with decoding and rest. Linux, windows works perfectly fine with min wattage power or more if you need, like my settings > L1 15W and L2 to 25W (30W max but overheat is short time).
100% agree.
When I computed the Price/(Performance/Watt) metric, that's how I ended up with three OASLOA Mini PCs that had the Intel N95 processor.
Yes, there were systems that were cheaper, but less performant, just as there were mini PCs that were more expensive, but also more performant, but when I optimised for all three variables simultaneously, that was the best option for my use case (Windows AD DC, DNS, Pi-hole (which became AdGuardHome)).
Ever since I picked up that 2012 Mac mini and ran proxmox on it, my raspberry pi has been little more than a dust collector. Well articulated. SBCs are too expensive to be worth it anymore
Good call. Even Arm laptops are not all they are supposed to be. We deal with them at work and they have some power and use little energy but there are software problems. This will mature in time, but SBCs are limited by poor Arm drivers and software support as they are primarily Android devices sold as SBCs.
I think Risc V will be very important, as hopefully the drivers will not be as locked down. This will take time to mature of course, but for now it's x86 if you want to use it.
The big selling point of SBCs for aspiring developers/tinkerers were thanks to a 'capable' chip with onboard pinouts, but both x86 and microcontroller options are much cheaper and very capable now. So, yeah, completely agree!
The thing the SBC's have going for them best is 5V power. Not needing to plug it in to 110 makes a big difference in small form factor computers.
The HDMI In and Out made me instantly think of using at as a capture device maybe along side a more powerful rig to do AV1 encoding.
*it
I don't see the point of a lot of these arm SBC's with poor software support, as a tinkerer I'd rather play with an risc-v board since those are more hands on to get working and get an OS running on since those will hopfully be really cheap once they start getting mass produced more and more performant
The Raspberry Pi Pico or Raspberry Pi Zero generally suit my purposes just fine. If I need 8GB of RAM or an 8 core CPU for my project it is probably going to be running on my Docker or Proxmox server and neither of those is running on an SBC.
Just buy a second hand desktop - got a i5 8400 for 46GBP (about $60 USD) 6 months ago.
For server use it will be cheaper in the long run to buy a modern N100 based PC even if it costs three times as much. Just because of power consumption.
While this board is expensive and rather for industrial use at least I assume that with their interconnect. Other RK3588 based boards are way cheaper and are great for people who like to tinker (when it comes to anything besides compute) like with the linux kernel. I’ve been using a RK3568 based one as a 2.5GbE NAS for 1.5 years and also do Jellyfin with RK3588 and try to contribute documentation. For consumers it just isn’t the x86 run and go experience but for most of the home lab stuff like Pi-Hole, HomeAssistant, etc. which you want to run 24/7 on a low power budget these boards are nice
I think you nailed it in this video. The CHIP and Pocket CHIP were really cool devices but there was no software support for them. So now I have devices that do minimal things because there is no software support for them. To make matters worse, they do not have a straightforward setup should the software get corrupted.
Indeed, when the price of the new Pi5 full set in my local area was only slightly cheaper than that of a MINI PC, I hesitated to purchase it.
I have a proxmox cluster that is built out of a couple of ryzen 9 and core i9 mini PCs from the last couple of years. I run kubernetes, TrueNAS, OpnSense, Jellyfin, and HomeAssistant on the cluster and everything's working just fine. I gave up on ARM SBCs after the dismal software support. Most of my SBCs are bricks that only work with really old Ubuntu builds that the manufacturers stopped supporting or Armbian (I sympathize with the maintainers/developers of Armbian). The price of new rockchip based SBCs is just way too high for me to tolerate such shoddy software support. The next ARM SBC I buy would need to support mainline Linux.
The world of embedded systems seems to continuously escape software practitioner’s understanding. SOC are literally everywhere in industrial automation. OT endpoints are different than traditional purist IT endpoints. I agree with you on one thing - all of us need to individually & collectively fiercely fight for open source. It is our only path to combating wealth inequality & innovation. Long live open source.
I’d love to see a miniPC with 4 or 5 m.2 drives like we’re seeing over on the Pi side. A little 4”x4”x4” NUC with dual 2.5G LAN on an N100 cpu would be killer. I’m too lazy to be compiling my own software from source so x86 is gonna be my jam for a while.
It sucks to see what is happening to the SBC market when the whole point of the RasPi and other SBC's was to be affordable, and to provide a low barrier of entry those wanting to learn more about technology/homelabbing.
Great video.. .Those prices are outrageous and that is understating it... Its about time these corporations wake up and think about what consumers / enthusiasts want...
just get smol $120 mini pc that will crush that garbo board
Great video. If they are making them then I assume some businesses must have a use for them in clustering like JeffGeerling said ( thankfully I can see it from here as I type, I'm Smart !! ) But seriously I recently found out that MSI Cubi 12M or N makes a 12th Gen with a 3 year warranty and has 4th Gen PCIe for one 2280 NVMe and a spot for a regular SSD, Dual Channel RAM for 64GB max ( not the N100 models like all of them though ). It also has 2 LAN ports. The one i3-1335U was $240 a few weeks ago but is now $259 or $261 ( barebones ) so at that price I don't know. Depending on use you may want to just spend some more and get the i5 version of the Minisforum MS-01? Unless you were set on a N100 of course, having 2 LAN's, one 2.5 GbE and one 1 GbE could open more doors down the road what you could use it for. I think the Cubi i5 model is just that much more expensive that you almost have to go with the MS-01 i5 model, except for the fact that 3 year warranty is very, very enticing. I do Not know how Minisforum handles warranties yet. I almost just bought the MSI Cubi 12M i3 just for TH-cam HTTC and run a few containers for Joplin for sure and ??, already had a Logitech K830 that I never use. I just checked and that Cubi i5 is $400 with just one left. IIRC they use Realtek though. That's one of the reasons I didn't buy it as I know Linux has issues. I probably would of screwed around with Proxmox for awhile instead to be honest, didn't want too many swear words because of Realtek. I wish they would come out with a 13th Gen with Intel i226-v dual LAN's then I assume all of you guys would review them. An i3-1335U for $325 at launch with dual Intel LAN's and a i5 for $438 at launch with dual Intel LAN's at launch with 3 year warranties to put a hamper on so many Chinese stuff would be _Nice_. Now I'm thinking I'm just going to do a new Proxmox desktop/server build and be done with it. Or is that _just the beginning_
I use SBCs for projects. And pick the model by needs. Mostly, a pi zero 2 OR pi 4 is enough. Pi 5 for big stuff... all under $100.
I’m at the same point as you on this especially when you take the AMD or even the intel N100 offering I have a couple of these that idle around 8watts and to be honest when you add all the addons needed for a sbc. They will be fairly cost neutral
These ARM-based SBCs don't scratch any itch I have. As a homelabber, they're too restrictive compared to the polyvalent PC and require too much tinkering to deploy and configure. As an embedded developer, they're too niche and far too expensive to built a product around for the long term.
I’m just stoked we have so many compute options to choose from these days.
I have to agree. Those "high power" Arm SBCs make no sense - they cost as much or more then complete mini PCs but offer a fraction of their power, I/O and software compatibility.
I gave up on SBC with RPI3, now that the prices are astronomical-oh hell no!
I definitely know where you're coming from here on SBCs in general. SBCs are cool, and I like them, but they're not as compelling as they used to be. Price is always a factor. The Pi 4 shortages and price hikes certainly turned things around and made them less appealing overall. In the last few years, I've overwhelmingly favored used office PCs with the tiny/mini/micros being the obvious picks, but I also have a SFF Lenovo. Obviously, that can't compete with SBCs and 1 liter PCs in terms of being compact. And I also just recently picked up an old Zotac mini PC that looks extremely similar to, but is legally distinct from a NUC for less than the original MSRP of the Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM. And it has two ethernet ports. SBCs still have some advantages, but not as many for general use now that mini PCs have become so inexpensive. It just changed the value proposition. I think a lot of that comes down to the availability of those used 1 liter office PCs. When the Pi was new, those either didn't exist or were brand new. I remember seeing them for sale used back in 2016, but they were still expensive compared to SBCs. Now that they're all over the place, they've quite inexpensive and a great value.
I run a lot of stuff on Raspberry Pi 4 boxes... offsite backup, Asterisk, mail server, IRC server, home security system, etc. But I agree that the cost advantage of the Pi is basically nonexistent now compared to mini-PCs.
The one good thing about Raspberry Pi is excellent software support. Everything just works and there's a massive community. I'm happy with my Pi setup and have no plans to change it, but if I were starting out today building up my network, I'd probably go with x86 mini-PCs.
Thank you! Other channels hype up SBCs far too much. Back in the day of the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 units (which I own multiple of), SBCs were cheap and easily accessible. Nowadays, there are a ton of SBCs to choose from but they're so expensive. They aren't worth it anymore, especially if you want to use it for something that an x86 can do, and do it much better. As much as I love watching Jeff Geerling and all of the neat Pi stuff, it's gotten far more niche as this stuff is so expensive, and really not all that capable compared to their x86 counterparts.
IMHO Buying a SBC and using it as a desktop has always been brain dead.
They are incredibly useful for IoT and you can’t beat a Raspberry PI Zero 2 for bang for buck for that. A full Linux system with GPIO for £15 is incredible value.
My home server is a CM4 based box with a 1TB SSD. It boots and is running within 2 seconds and is my email server, webserver, home automation, media server for the whole family, friends and associated clubs internet domains.
Zero performance problems and its low energy means it’s costing me 100s of pounds a year to run 24/7.
Linux is perfect for headless server and IoT based solutions.
I completely agree. Also three to five time higher idle power consumption is quite pointless when it's 2W vs 7W or so. And 7W for i5-6500T running some docker containers so it already has like 1% load.
I can understand that RPI3B and below have some sense: it can powered from powerbank for hours or even day, it's relatively cheap, it has some GPIO pins, it's good enough for hosting some rather static website and maybe it's more limited by I/O speed of USB2 rather than CPU power, it can be a good datalogger and it has many scenarios where it's good enough.
But then there is a gray zone for me: if you want something more powerful, with more RAM, better I/O speed, you can get better models with 2GB, 4GB or even 8GB of RAM and better processor from Arm to some Intel Celeron. Problem is they may be sufficient for one project, maybe two. For general purpose it would be limited either by RAM (2GB are fine to run browser in OpenBox with 4 tabs and restart it from time to time, not much else) or by slow CPU and it's not upgradable. Some refurbished minipc, maybe even miniitx board is not much more expensive than high end SBC (refurbished PC can be cheaper) and they are about as powerful as 5 year old notebooks. Plus they have enclosure, upgradable RAM, NVMe drive or SATA SSD.
+1 SBCs without mgf distro support are worthless within a year. So that leaves you exclusively with Rpi, and they have priced themselves out of the market. Those x86 mini PCs are awesome, i have 3 of them in a CEF Proxmox cluster all at 2.5Gb and they dont miss a beat.
Nailed it. Software support is just not there yet.
I blame the the rpi4 'desktop' edition. Before that everyone knew that rpi were specialist computers. Whilst you 'can' use a rpi4 as a desktop computer; it's makes for an awful experience; mostly because people looking for desktop computers are looking for general purpose desktop computers with no code writing required. SBC's are not lame, they were just marketed really badly at your average Joe for whom they are completely unsuitable. A niche product that is currently marketed at the masses.
Yes. I own a pi 400, but have literally never even turned it on. Because . . why?
@@nddulac I wanted the retro style 'in keyboard' computer design that is the pi 400. Then I realised that a modern netbook not only had the built in keyboard but also touchpad, battery, screen, etc. For those that don't require specific things like the gpio, then the x86 equivalents are just more usable. When I see rpi4 owners struggle to boot from sata SSD, usb SSD, or connect and use other peripherals; it reminds me of how hassle free my netbook has been.
I remember getting a cab to Maplin to buy the raspberry pi in 2012, (I still have the board marked 2011) both cab and pi cost about £30. The last pi I got was a pi 4 and it cost £120, sbc game done changed.
Used be about inexpensive access, now a majority of stock is consumed by universities and colleges so by the time the average consumer gets a look from scalpers they are well over priced.
I went with an intel nuc for my last build, and there are much cheaper microchips if want the gpio.
SBCs seem to mostly make sense if they're cheap, but if they aren't they become much harder to justify
I'm only considering them to play with their implementation of tcp/ip over pcie
The SBCs made to just be Linux boxes plus GPIO were never interesting to me - it's just more mystery meat ARM SOC stuff. But there's a generation of ESP32/RP2040 microcontroller SBCs that are really cool because with those, you can go in and do some bare metal bitbanging stuff, no Linux, and stay in total control over the hardware. A lot of them are used as retrocomputing devices, some paired with real retro chips, others emulating them. I have an "Agon Light 2" and it's a wonderful hobby kit.
I want to see something with ARM cpu in mITX form-factor. I know that there are some mITX boards for RPi4 CM and one from Firefly with RK3588, but I want a proper mITX ARM powerhouse. Maybe it won't happen, since it might not be practical, especially from the perspective of size.
Ampere sounds promising. If we can get a stable Windows for ARM running on it I’d be so hot for it.
@@RaidOwl It indeed does, but the prices bite pretty hard for now, plus they don't seem to have something more desktop-oriented. Hopefully they'll succeed in developing cheaper/smaller options, if they'd take that path ofc.
Other than that - let's wait and see
Maybe there will be a qualcom x elite mainboard in the future.
@@erk_0483 hopefully...though my guess - maximum that would happen is something like NUC/mini PC similar in size
Raspberry Pi still manages to remain pretty tame and reasonable imo, and I would still recommend an rpi in quite a few contexts.
That being said, seeing SBC become this race to the top for who can get the best ARM CPU performarnce is odd considering how stagnant the software is. Hardware is only as good as the software it can run, and that reflects really badly on SBCs right now.
Agree. You can get a mini x86 system. New or used for a lot better price.
I am fascinated with how much ewaste has been created with all of the RPis, Esp's, Arduinos, etc...
It's the I/O which is shit, something I took for granted with regular x86 motherboards...then you try and plug a couple of things into a Pi which the CPU can run but the hardware controllers just don't have the bandwidth.
Yeah on paper they always sound cool then I get them and I'm like "uhhhh I'll just spin up a VM on my server or something"
Oh yea, I started with a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 around 4 years ago.
- After a few months I realized it wasn't going to be powerful enough if I wanted to get serious with docker (back then)
- Now I have 3 dell micro computers, each one with a 1TB NVMe (for VMs) and 2TB SSD (for my gluster cluster, yeah I probably have to migrate to something like ceph)
- 1 of the dell micros has 64GB of ram, the other 2 run 32GB of ram (will upgrade all to 64GB eventually)
- I'm using xcp-ng (I know, everyone's into proxmox these days)
- I can run whatever I want, I'm even running a 3 control plane kubernetes cluster, a docker swarm cluster, I'm even running windows 11 VM on the 64GB machine.
- So yeah, Instead of going with SBCs I'd get micro computers and spend my money on upgrades.
P.D. as per the user manual, my micro computers are supposed to accept a max of 32GB of ram, but they worked with 64GB. Haven't tried 128GB.
The pi zero, pi 3 and pi 2 are all still being sold and are all very cheap still. If you are worried about performance you are looking at entirely the wrong product category.
Yeah, any SBC with price higher than Raspberry pi is a bit off for me,
used to have RPi as daily driver (RPi3B+ then to RPi4B-4GB) and that's it.
I changed that to N100 mini PC, with Linux Mint, sometimes moonlighting to w$11 for some windows only games.
my main servers used to be RPi4B-2GB and RPi2Bv1.2, those were upgraded to N95 NUCs as well running Ubuntu Server, the aesthetics looking much nicer than the DIY ones.
some RPi3B+ and NanoPi Neo boards (NPiNeo1 and NPiNeo2) are still doing some intermittent server loads, but are off 80% of the time.
with the prices of SBCs going over U$ 50, it has become unattractive for small time tinker like me.
though I bought RPi5... it remains boxed at this time....
honestly if you need ARM and a lot of power, none of these rockchip systems is as well supported as asahi on a mac mini, but for anything else, the right answer is "your old laptop" or a 5 year old dell from a dumpster behind a school.
They serve a purpose. People try to press them into service for things that a cheap used PC would do better. I use SBC's for the GPIO connector to control hardware. Otherwise I use a PC.
As ARM servers (ampere altar)workstations and laptops grow in coming years , ARM SBCs are just the ARM mini-PCs. It’s true the raspberry puff has lost its way a bit but during the shortage they got criticism for prioritising industrial customers … ie proving they had succeeded in creating something that wasn’t just a toy
for the lab where it’s always plugged in, i buy your argument, but if you are trying to do anything mobile or off a battery an ARM sbc is much better.
I agree
When he said, "If the software support is @ss, then who gives a sh!t?" ---- I felt that.
For power consumption, the less powerful SBCs are still better than mini PCs for those who want to run a simple service 24/7 like a web server or an Asterisk PBX.
35 USD sounds great, where can i get one?
I really agree with this. I don't think it is so much that SBCs have gotten so expensive. They have gotten more expensive so it doesn't help but inflation is part of that. I think that, as you pointed out, that mini PCs have just gotten so good. In 2014 a PC in this 200-300 range would probably have been a lot bigger, like one of the 1L PCs that are common for businesses. And in this price range they probably would have use a Celeron Processor that was old by 2014 standards which means that performance sucked. Now though like you have said you can get a mini PC with a decent older laptop chip like the 5700u and actually get good performance out of it. So yes SBCs have gone up in price but what is killing them is that good mini PCs actually exist now and aren't all that expensive.
I used to work in a computer store running the service dept covering some of the floor when they needed help. The biggest issue is that people don’t have a clue what they want the computer for. You must have some idea what you expect the hardware to do before you get it home and realize it won’t do what you want. The pi not playing movies is usually overcome by a Kodi like OS just being a media player for it, but don’t expect that it will replace a regular PC for anything other than very basic stuff. An SBC is just for experimenting and not much else, expecting it to be used for heavy gaming is ridiculous, buy a real computer.