> https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte...
The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally.
I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.
There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching.
I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.
I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.
If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.
Easily unlockable with WPInternals :)
> only the dead Windows phones
Marvell/SolidRun MACCHIATObin, SoftIron Overdrive, even the old Gigabyte boards with APM X-Gene have both U-Boot and EDK2 (TianoCore) firmwares available. I'm not even talking about big servers (ThunderX) :)
Heck, U-Boot itself can run EFI binaries, with network access for netbooting even — and it's good enough for FreeBSD/aarch64 to not even consider non-EFI booting methods.
To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".
If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less).
Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).
(There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works.
BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi.
Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.
That's what x86 was always winning at. Power consumption is higher, however.
At the time, they sold one of the only consumer ARM boards that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers[1].
Hardkernel has also been patching new kernels for their boards, which is a breath of fresh air. Usually, consumer ARM boards, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation's offerings, are tied to single kernel release and, unless you wanted to commit a lot of time to building your own patchsets, they'd never see a kernel update.
[1] http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/20150...
Are you sure? As far as I could tell, they had a single USB 3 controller that had a 2 port hub. One port was connected to gigabit ethernet, while the other was connected to another two port hub which is the two ports on the device. ie all devices connected to USB 3 and the gigabit are sharing the controller and bandwidth. The background is the Exynos chip used was intended for the cell phone market, where there is no need for multiple USB 3 controllers, in addition the existing USB 2 controllers.
Also this whole announcement is really petty... Qualcomm and Apple already have SoCs with scores higher than 9k on geekbench so why does ARM have so much trouble making good cpu cores? They are comparing existing 14nm CPUs with theoretical 7nm CPUs that they haven't even released yet. Of course it's going to perform better. It would be embarrassing if it didn't...
...none of which are CPU-bound, instead relying on either hardware accelerators or the presence of specific SIMD instructions.
Geekbench is pretty good at measuring how well a chip would perform / scale as a web-app server. (Ignoring IO bandwidth, that is. A benchmark that incorporated both would be brilliant.)
I guess what I'd really want is a x86 device to get a more PC like experience. I can buy a tablet with battery, touch screen, and Intel Atom X5-Z8300 CPU for less than $90 [0], but there aren't any good cheap x86 alternatives for simple home servers.
