zlacker

>>ekianj+(OP)
The review shows ARM64 software support is still painful vs x86. For $200 for the 16gb model, this is the price point where you could just get an Intel N150 mini PC in the same form factor. And those usually come with cases. They also tend to pull 5-8w at idle, while this is 15w. Cool if you really want ARM64, but at this end of the performance spectrum, why not stick with the x86 stack where everything just works a lot easier?

>>eleven+O7
With RAM it will be costing notably more, with 4 cores instead of 12. I'd expect this to run circles around an N150 for single-threaded perf too.

They are not in the same class, which is reflected in the power envelope.

BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread? Y'all Intel shareholders or something? I run both but not to the exclusion of everything else. There is nothing I've failed to run successfully on my ARM ones and the only thing I haven't tried is gaming.

>>baobun+q9
x86 based small computers are just so much easier to work with than most second- and third-string ARM vendors. The x86 scene has had standards in place for a long time, like PCIe and the PC BIOS (now UEFI) for hardware initialization and mapping, that make it a doddle to just boot a kernel and let it get the hardware working. ARM boards don't have that yet, requiring per-board support in the kernel which board manufacturers famously drag their feet on implementing openly let alone upstreaming. Raspberry Pi has its own setup, which means kernel support for the Pi series is pretty good, but it doesn't generalize to other boards, which means users and integrators may be stuck with whatever last version of Ubuntu or Android the vendor thought to ship. Which means if you want a little network appliance like a router, firewall, Jellyfin server, etc. it often makes more sense to go with an N150 bitty box than an ARM SBC because the former is going to be price- and power-draw-competitive with the latter while being able to draw on the OS support of the well-tested PC ecosystem.

ARM actually has a spec in place called SystemReady that standardizes on UEFI, which should make bringup of ARM systems much less jank. But few have implemented it yet. I keep saying, the first cheap Chinese vendor that ships a SystemReady-compliant SBC is gonna make a killing.

>>bitwiz+Rx
> I keep saying, the first cheap Chinese vendor that ships a SystemReady-compliant SBC is gonna make a killing.

Agree. When ARM announced the initiative, I thought that the raspberry pi people would be quick but they haven't even announced a plan to eventually support it. I don't know what the hold up is! Is it really that difficult to implement?

>>baby_s+WN
The Pi boots on its GPU, which is a closed off Broadcom design. Likely complicates things a bit.