What people don't often consider is how poorly Intel's offerings age. Intel prioritizes speed over safety, so generation after generation has gotten slower and slower over time due to all the software-based mitigations that are needed, and Intel has shown zero indication that we could believe anything is different now.
Also, they intentionally cripple their products. It's 2023, and pretty close to 2024, yet the N100 platform only supports up to 16 gigs? Seriously? I have a number of AMD Athlon AM1 systems from 2014 - almost a decade old - that support 32 gigs. Ever run a SearXNG instance? 16 gigs is fine, if you don't plan to run much else.
Sorry, Intel, but you just aren't relevant in the low power space. I'm more than happy with my Orange Pi 5 (which, incidentally, has a 32 gig version).
As far as intel’s offerings aging, tell that to the 10 year old thinkcentre with a haswell cpu in it I have that I previously used for wev development and want to turn into a hypervisor that can run a nas and other services.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231803/...
9.3 Watts IDLE
with Samsung 980 Pro NVMe and 64GB ECC RAM after doing only small optimizations (powertop, etc.). I'm not sure why Intel / Fujitsu does not share these (or more modern hardware) for the "consumer market", but for my personal use case it is a pretty impressive system.
There is a forum user `m.gutt` using the Corsair RX550 with a Gigabyte C246M-WU2 Mainboard running (best case)
6.65W [1]
My Router is now a Banana Pi BPI-R3 with OpenWRT drawing 4.3 Watts idle (I only ordered it, because the GL.inet MT6000 was not available now) and I think the Intel System is on another level, although it cannot really be compared because of the network stuff...
[1] (german): https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/selbstbau-nas-im-1...
I was looking at something like this for my router needs, and I'm currently running OPNSense (but I'd be OK with switching to Linux). I've read many comments about these being wonky, on HN and other forums. What's your experience with them, especially under high load?
[1] https://cwwk.net/collections/frontpage/products/12th-gen-int...
In the last few years more is demanded from these ARM boards, so is the price demanded from who makes them. Some x86 boards are right there in some of that territory..
If this is not something which would run on a solar panel back in the woods then additional +5W is nothing in the common household.
Also you are assuming infinite power availability. If you are off the grid and have power from solar or wind, then lower wattage might be preferable.
Would like to pick one up but need it to auto reboot after power loss. Anyone have one to check if this is true?
The only way to know for sure is from a review of the desired product, if someone happened to check the BIOS menu.
I wish AMD would play in this space! They are so up market, it feels like.
I do think AMD is still missing out though on a market segment. They have embedded chips like a V3C14 (a quad core v3000, zen3) which should be physically smaller offerings, should be a cheaper alternative to these mini-pcs. But in practice, there's few boards or systems available and what offerings there are seem to be boutique gear, at high price points.
Smaller & cheaper & lower power computers that can be tucked into various ubiquitous & pervasive computing scenarios remain really interesting to me. It's stellar that desktop class machines have gotten as small & affordable as they are, but I still hope to see this segment of sub-tier systems grow.
Of course you can just get some PCI board to help you with more disks, but I was hoping to remove that in terms of space.
[1] https://www.clearlinux.org/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYffFkbO14A
[3] https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/
[4] https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/pr...
Otherwise they are very similar boards.
Also thank you for reminding me of clear linux.
Perfect would be mini-itx N100/200, two M.2 slots, two Intel 2.5 GbE NICs, 16/32 GB RAM, a fanless heatsink and DC powered. Don't care much about anything else on the board; 3x USB and whatever video is cheapest is all that's needed.
The N100/N200/N305 parts only have 9 PCIe lanes, so one of the two M.2s would need to be cut back to 2x lanes (call that the boot device, whatever.)
Once you’re above 512KB block sizes though, the 5B runs away with it, peaking
at 2756MB/s on the sequential write test.
There's no mention of 2000+MB/s in them.
Your CPU doesn't have to be perfect, just your solution shouldn't be actively hostile.
If the machine was doing nothing but image inference then i'd go with the ARM. If it was a desktop replacement i'd go with the Intel.
There are fanless N100 mini PCs, like the Asus PN42 and the Zotac CI343.
I've got 4 SATA HDDs using a flashed Dell Perc H310 and 2 SATA SSDs.
I was able to remove my Nvidia GPU because the N100 supports QuickSync.
Using a single 32gb stick of DDR4 but I do miss having ECC RAM, considering I am using ZFS.
Despite the above, I couldn't be happier! My NAS is as close to silent as is reasonably possible.
It also is RISC-V, instead of legacy ISA.