Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.
Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of performance per watt but it is already pretty far into the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.
It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be.
Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support.
The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
Were people actually doing that?
Can also plug in a power bank. https://us.ugreen.com/collections/power-bank?sort_by=price-d...
The advantage is that if the machine breaks or is upgraded, the dock and pb can be retained. Would also distribute the price.
The dock and pb can also be kept away to lower heat to avoid a fan in the housing, ideally.
Better hardware should end up leading to better software - its main problem right now.
This 10-in-1 dock even has an SSD enclosure for $80 https://us.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-10-in-1-usb-c-hub-ssd (no affiliation) (no drivers required)
I'd have another dock/power/screen combo for traveling and portable use.
Right?
Proprietary and closed? One can hope.
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...
However many of these ARM chips have their own sub-architecture in the Linux source tree, I'm not sure that it's possible today to build a single image with them all built in and choose the subarchitecture at runtime. Theoretically it could be done, of course, but who has the incentive to do that work?
(I seem to remember Linus complaining about this situation to the Arm maintainer, maybe 10-20 years ago)
I think it's a good thing that people are realizing that these SBCs are better used as development tools for people who understand embedded dev instead of as general purpose PCs. For years now you can find comments under every Raspberry Pi or other SBC thread informing everyone that a mini PC is a better idea for general purpose compute unless you really need something an SBC offers, like specific interfaces or low power.
Is it the lack of drivers in upstream? Is it something to do with how ARM devices seemingly can't install Linux the same way x86 machines can (something something device tree)?
As a weird example, the Raspberry Pi boots from the GPU, which brings up the rest of the hardware.
The flash images contain information used by the bios to configure and bring up the device. It's more than just a filesystem. Just because it's not the standard consoomer "bios menu" you're used to doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just different.
These boards are based off of solutions not generally made available to the public. As a result, they require a small amount of technical knowledge beyond what operating a consumer PC might require.
So, packaging a standard arm linux install into a "custom" image is perfectly fine, to be honest.
I've still been on the hunt for a cheap Arm board with a Armv8.3+ or Arvm9.0+ SoC for OSDev stuff, but it's hard to find them in hobbyist price range (this board included, $700-900 USD from what I see).
The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos looked good but unfortunately SWD/JTAG is disabled unless you pay for the $2k model...
Neywiny•3d ago
But at a certain point I guess it just breaks? And they need an objective "I gave these tokens, I got out those tokens". But I guess that would need an objective gold standard ground truth that's maybe hard to come by.
cyanydeez•3d ago
Neywiny•2d ago
andai•1h ago
Is this a thing? I read an article about how due to some implementation detail of GPUs, you don't actually get deterministic outputs even with temp 0.
But I don't understand that, and haven't experimented with it myself.
kingstnap•1h ago
The main difference comes from rounding order of reduction difference.
It does make a small difference. Unless you have an unstable floating point algorithm, but if you have an unstable floating point algorithm on a GPU at low precision you were doomed from the start.
geerlingguy•1h ago
I couldn't imagine recommending any of these boards to people who aren't already SBC tinkerers.
coredog64•21m ago