Single Board Computers are lame

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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

[deadlast]

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.

[JeffGeerling]

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.

[jaygreentree]

"Do you guys remember 2014?" Brett I barely remember what I had to eat yesterday.

[byronservies]

My stack of refurbished Lenovo 1L PC's keep looking good.

[IWDA]

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!

[stargeezer]

"If the software support is ass, who gives a shit?" So much win.... 🤣

[DBTechYT]

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.

[Netist_]

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.

[ws_stelzi]

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".

[NTMAN]

That pricing is crazy, I gave up on sbc's during the pi shortage.. Just so much easier with x86

[DarioEspina]

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.

[otter-pro]

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.

[Momi_V]

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.

[Parasclepius]

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.

[James-xgjr]

Jeff Geerling is on a flight to your house rn ....load up

[MegaManNeo]

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.

[playlist]

If you weren't buying these to use the GPIO pins, then it's never been worth it.

[theglowcloud]

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

[backgammonbacon]

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.

[keithmiller]

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. 😊