SBC / Low Power boards general - Raspberry Pi and what not

[Trans Fat 41g]

If an SBC's system on a chip is on a daughterboard, is it still an SBC?

Versatility in a super small form factor is a good selling point, regardless.

 

[Pee Cola]

Raspberry Pi 5 has just been released announced. Due to start shipping in October (h/t @davids877).

Key points:
- New SoC 4-core A76 2.4Ghz / VideoCore VII GPU 800MHz
- new IO chip leading to faster data SD card support, both USB 3.0 ports maxing out at 5GBs whilst running simultaneously etc
- 4GB $60, 8GB $80
- No 1GB or 2GB model available yet
- Single lane PCIe 2.0 connector (ribbon connector)
- a power switch (!!)
- 3.5mm audio jack has been deleted
- needs an active cooler
- supports USB boot

Official Rpi PSU is now 5V 5A (up from 5V 3A for the Rpi 4/400)

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Possible 16 GB model in the future according to Jeff Geerling. Future 1 GB and 2 GB models are indicated directly on the board itself.

It looks like the PCIe lane can run at PCIe 3.0 speed, but is only rated for 2.0.

RK3588 is faster and more power efficient, but with the usual problems.

Since Cortex-A76 has cryptographic extensions, those operations can be 45x faster.

 

[DavidS877]

Raspberry Pi 5 has just been released.

Announced.
Supposedly shipping in October. We the people should see them in 2025.

I put my pre-orders in anyway.
Maybe I'll finally upgrade those Pi 2s I'm using to Pi 3s as I cascade upgrades.

 

[tehpope]

Seems like they increased throughput too. There's a new custom i/o chip onboard. Emulation looks great from this early point. Probably be a lot better down the line.

I might get one in the future. I'm fine with my rk3588. Its collecting dust atm, but I don't have a desk setup in my apartment yet.

 

[Pee Cola]

Seems like they increased throughput too. There's a new custom i/o chip onboard. Emulation looks great from this early point. Probably be a lot better down the line.

Will be interesting to see how realistic the Rpi 5 would be as a daily driver desktop machine. Obviously not for AAA gaming or video editing, but for office apps and online stuff it should be surprisingly capable assuming you have a HDMI monitor with built-in speakers or don't mind using Bluetooth audio.

If there's an Rpi 500, I hope the extra room will be used to add a 3.5mm audio jack. I can see it being a bit more chonky than the 400, mainly due to the need for active cooling (not sure if the massive heatsink of the 400 would be enough to stop the 500 from cooking). It'd also be nice if the hypothetical 500 had a keyboard that wasn't inspired by Sinclair, but I'm not expecting any miracles.

 

[tehpope]

Will be interesting to see how realistic the Rpi 5 would be as a daily driver desktop machine. Obviously not for AAA gaming or video editing, but for office apps and online stuff it should be surprisingly capable assuming you have a HDMI monitor with built-in speakers or don't mind using Bluetooth audio.

If there's an Rpi 500, I hope the extra room will be used to add a 3.5mm audio jack. I can see it being a bit more chonky than the 400, mainly due to the need for active cooling (not sure if the massive heatsink of the 400 would be enough to stop the 500 from cooking). It'd also be nice if the hypothetical 500 had a keyboard that wasn't inspired by Sinclair, but I'm not expecting any miracles.

It looks like there's a port on the board for a a/v jack. I'm not sure if that will be on the final boards.

To the right of the HDMI 1 port.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Will be interesting to see how realistic the Rpi 5 would be as a daily driver desktop machine. Obviously not for AAA gaming or video editing, but for office apps and online stuff it should be surprisingly capable assuming you have a HDMI monitor with built-in speakers or don't mind using Bluetooth audio.

If there's an Rpi 500, I hope the extra room will be used to add a 3.5mm audio jack. I can see it being a bit more chonky than the 400, mainly due to the need for active cooling (not sure if the massive heatsink of the 400 would be enough to stop the 500 from cooking). It'd also be nice if the hypothetical 500 had a keyboard that wasn't inspired by Sinclair, but I'm not expecting any miracles.

I used the Raspberry Pi 400 as my introduction to Debian and therefore a sliver of desktop Linux, it's was surprisingly solid despite the limited scope that ARM naturally imposes. Definitely need to not use SD cards as the primary boot-up and storage solution, however, that's going to require a contingency stock of micro SD cards to be anywhere near viable.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

I used the Raspberry Pi 400 as my introduction to Debian and therefore a sliver of desktop Linux, it's was surprisingly solid despite the limited scope that ARM naturally imposes. Definitely need to not use SD cards as the primary boot-up and storage solution, however, that's going to require a contingency stock of micro SD cards to be anywhere near viable.

I had issues with my Rpi 4 corrupting micro sd cards so I used the USB boot. It's a much better option and faster too. I see no purpose to continuing to use micro sd when usb 3 drives that are the size of the port itself exist.

 

[Pee Cola]

I used the Raspberry Pi 400 as my introduction to Debian and therefore a sliver of desktop Linux, it's was surprisingly solid despite the limited scope that ARM naturally imposes.

I mainly use my 400 for DOS gaming with Dosbian. It's just a pity the keyboard is shite, otherwise it'd be in my rotation of daily driver machines.

 

[attractive_pneumonia]

it's was surprisingly solid despite the limited scope that ARM naturally imposes.

Arm has a chicken-and-the-egg problem to a large extent with software and this is something Linux Torvalds talked about at length before and related a story about how he eagerly bought some computer he thought was great back in the 1980s but had an offbeat ISA, this ISA being offbeat meant that there was no software for it and the thing was basically limited to just what he directly coded. Since then he has made a habit of just going with whatever was the dominate ISA of the era, even though ARM is used heavily in the phone scene the processors have no large presence in the desktop sector. That is, until the most recent Macbooks with the M1 or M2 there was no way to square this, now there is a heavily used device with ARM and the M1/M2 chips you can still run stuff designed for x86. In theory we should start seeing development of software designed for the quirks of ARM rather than ports of x86 programs.

I've been waiting for a long time to see a SBC hit the point where it was viable as a daily driver, meaning basic web browsing, 4k videos in a browser from Youtube without stuttering, and office applications without issue. I've always had a desire to just get a SBC, velcro it to the back of the monitor and stuff a server, a real one, somewhere in the basement with a decent GPU in it, and just play games via something like Nvidia's Gamestream whenever I felt the urge while doing basic Linux stuff without some hotbox taking up space on a desk. This is just one of those things you can see is right on the horizon, and has been for a few years, just the hardware and software have not mated yet.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

I've been waiting for a long time to see a SBC hit the point where it was viable as a daily driver, meaning basic web browsing, 4k videos in a browser from Youtube without stuttering, and office applications without issue. I've always had a desire to just get a SBC, velcro it to the back of the monitor and stuff a server, a real one, somewhere in the basement with a decent GPU in it, and just play games via something like Nvidia's Gamestream whenever I felt the urge while doing basic Linux stuff without some hotbox taking up space on a desk. This is just one of those things you can see is right on the horizon, and has been for a few years, just the hardware and software have not mated yet.

Some of those cheapo NUC style Celeron mini pc can do that but those are like $100+ so not that cheap. Seeing how the new Rpi is getting more expensive, I don't think price is getting to be that big of an issue though.

 

[Core1036]

Some of those cheapo NUC style Celeron mini pc can do that but those are like $100+ so not that cheap. Seeing how the new Rpi is getting more expensive, I don't think price is getting to be that big of an issue though.

Speaking of the NUC, there are a lot of pretty decent NUC clones from China that are branded as "fanless / industrial PC" and while using the most generic hardware possible, there are quite a few decent low power X86 (and now ARM) machines that may or may not come with a Windows license. In addition those systems also often have legacy I/O so that's worth looking into for a headless server, provided you are okay with yourself being the only support.
See image attached for example appearance.

 

[DavidS877]

Speaking of the NUC, there are a lot of pretty decent NUC clones from China that are branded as "fanless / industrial PC" and while using the most generic hardware possible, there are quite a few decent low power X86 (and now ARM) machines that may or may not come with a Windows license. In addition those systems also often have legacy I/O so that's worth looking into for a headless server, provided you are okay with yourself being the only support.
See image attached for example appearance.
View attachment 5371209

They also make nice routers.

 

[Core1036]

They also make nice routers.

Agreed, if you like RouterOS or OPNSense they are pretty nice system. I seen rackmount x86 boxes with 8 or more ethernet and (Q)SFP(+) controllers on board, but since those often have PCI-Express slots you can generally cobble whatever you want with those, but the rackmount kit ends up having loud fans and the associated power consumption.
There are also a ton of boards with a RockChip something and multiple ethernet interfaces searchable as "pfsense router" or "linux router"on whatever marketplace you use.
Also, wipe whatever is installed on there and use your own image, only god knows what can be on there. Trust me.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Some of those cheapo NUC style Celeron mini pc can do that but those are like $100+ so not that cheap. Seeing how the new Rpi is getting more expensive, I don't think price is getting to be that big of an issue though.

The cheap new thing are the N100 and other quad-core Alder Lake-N systems. They are around $150 but can get below that, and usually have better ports, sometimes 16 GB RAM. Then there are refurbished options, usually 6th-8th gen Intel with 2-6 cores, which can crush RPis and be found at under $100 in the US.

 

[888Flux]

Raspberry Pi 5 has just been released announced. Due to start shipping in October (h/t @davids877).

I would not buy the Pi 5 until they have their logistics sorted out for other models. I still can't get a hold of any Pi Zero 2's and it's been around 3 years. I am very skeptical of the claim that shipping will start in October.

 

[attractive_pneumonia]

Some of those cheapo NUC style Celeron mini pc can do that but those are like $100+ so not that cheap. Seeing how the new Rpi is getting more expensive, I don't think price is getting to be that big of an issue though.

Oh I know about NUC, I have a Chromebox-M004U laying on top of my printer doing nothing as I write this. I wanted a fanless device so I got that and scrubbed off the useless ChromeOS for Linux immediately. That device bred my favor for command line applications, the processor was weak even amongst NUC so I had to learn how to be more optimal in my usage of resources.

 

[DavidS877]

I would not buy the Pi 5 until they have their logistics sorted out for other models. I still can't get a hold of any Pi Zero 2's and it's been around 3 years. I am very skeptical of the claim that shipping will start in October.

I ordered 4 Zero 2 W Jan 17, 2022. They shipped 8/24/2023.

Digikey says a Zero 2 W order today would ship October 12... 2023... Their site must be broken.

 

[Yandex Captcha Solver]

Looks like the Pi5 is a pretty major upgrade in the terms of GPU performance. About 3-6x the Pi4's performance depending on the load per Phoronix. The CPU performance looks very good as well between 1.5-6x the Pi4's performance as well.

So the Pi5 looks to be a major upgrade for a $5 price increase. Hopefully with Sony taking over the production role for the Pi Foundation, there will be better availability than the previous gen and has alternative parts in case another supply chain disruption happens.