My last Pi was a 4GB Pi 4. I looked at a Pi 5, but with HDMI adapters, USB extensions (too close together), M.2 HAT, clock battery, fan and case, I decided to buy a N5105 system. It cost more, but I now run pfSense, Windows 11, Ubuntu all in one box, with plenty of storage and RAM.
Mine finally left that drawer and is running full duty as an AdGuard proxy, wireguard VPN and full-time stats visualiser. Nothing glamorous, but I can run a few ssh windows and keep tcpdump scrolling by and, bmon and htop doing their thing.
Haha, wonderful! I have considered making my N100 mini PC my home workbench computer, mostly because the one I've been using there has a fan and is annoying after a few years!
“C’mere kiddo, I’ve got an Ethernet driver problem for you to figure out. It’ll be educational!” 😂 I’ve got a whole pile of “educational opportunities” in my basement but I want my kid to LIKE computers and not despise them-which is why her projects get Raspberry Pi’s.
I never understand why reviewers of SBC's keep saying statements X-times faster than RPi. The litmus test is always "How many products from this vendor still get support 6 months down the line?" In most cases a lot of the SBC's are built around SOC's meant for a specific Android version, and good luck getting long term Linux support. To be honest, I don't care how fast SBC's are. They are not about speed. I couldn't have agreed more with you during this video!
"I don't care how fast SBC's are" lol then why get anything other then the original raspberry pi? As someone that emulates retro I 100% care about processing power. "good luck getting long term support." so... it's like everything else in the IT industry?
@@jspringer86 long term support matters for a lot of people though, and whether this is the case or not in rest of the IT industry is irrelevant to that. Even the current Raspberry Pi OS supports the original Raspberry Pi, while you simply don't have this kind of support anywhere else.
@@jspringer86 because it's much more than an emulation station. And while I don't care might be an exagerated statement, I know that if I'm building something based on Linux, going from Rpi 3 -> 4 -> 5 was just a package and firmware update away. And I never had to deal with the worry of sticking with ancient modules, because otherwise I would end up driver less.
@@jspringer86 You don't always get the on-paper performance with the less-supported boards, it's practically a lie. I try to stick to RockChip stuff as it tends to get mainlined and get good community support for drivers, making it age like wine instead of becoming e-waste.
There are plenty of arm chips with good video encoders (basically every network security camera has to have one), but as mentioned in the video, the problem is software support.
@@nezu_cc In some cases, I wouldn't necessarily blame the software, because in some cases, even the Pi, they use proprietary firmware blobs that may only work with some versions of Linux. The actual encoding and decoding support has gotten much better in Linux, but if you can't use the company's drivers, then that suddenly makes it a whole lot harder to use the hardware.
I used a rpi4 as my primary computer for two or so years, and from my experience, it's software support that matters most for medium-high end SBCs. I saw significant improvement in usability on the pi4 over the two or so years, and I'd hate to have to go through that rough starting phase again.
At $185 for the LattePanda MU, forget it. I bought 3 GMKtec NucBox G3 Mini PC's with the N100, 8GB of RAM each, 256GB M.2 NVMe, 2.5GB Ethernet/Wifi 6E.. for $120 each. And the RAM/SSD is upgradable. And there is an extra M.2 slot to run another SSD or external GPU. And you get a Windows 11 Pro license. And you can get that price all day on Amazon and have them the next day.
well the MU is not a home pc, is more like a maker unit, the idea is for you to have all sorts of I/O to make custom devices on your own. If you just want a box with a browser, IDE, and some low-end games, then don't look at the Latte, or any sbc tbh
@@ezforsaken I'm not using them as HomePC's. I'm using them as server nodes in a cluster. They have functionality beyond being used as low end desktop PC's. Outside of a few slim use cases for things like embedded engineering that would require a powerful but efficent processor like the n100 in a tiny package, I'm not seeing a lot of advantages to paying $185 bare minimum for a LattePanda. Most projects are going to be fine with the much cheaper Compute Module 4 anyways as far as embedded goes.
@@ezforsaken I agree, this is technically the original point of the SBC. Which is what makes me wonder why this one has barelly any I/O. I mean, just like Op mentioned, for just that might as well get cheap laptops instead. And for just I2C and UART in this one carrier board, it ain't worth it. Might as well make my own IO expansion card with USB through a micro or through PCIe and it'd still be cheaper.
It's not even about "destroying" Raspberry Pi (Jeff needs to stop outsourcing the writing to Redshirt). There is clearly room for a number 2 in the market (an Avis to Rasberry's Hertz, in rental car terms, or, if you like a Lyft to Rasberry's Uber), and it's been very clear what that takes - dedicated support. And a strong number 2 in the market would only make Raspberry better - it would make them work that much harder. With apologies to Jeff, this has been obvious for years. What's crazy is that as obvious as it is, no manufacturer has taken up the challenge. I think it's worth thinking deeper about what that would mean - maybe challenge Jeff to do that, because his knowledge on this far outclasses mine, for sure. Would that mean picking the top five or six Linux distros and ensuring they run on new SBCs out of the box? Guarantee five years of support? What's the kind of minimum viable level of support that would start to separate the sheep from the goats in the non-Pi SBC market? Another thing I've wondered - is it possible to have a Raspberry clone? Or a near clone? Is that a viable path for a second player to emerge?
Honestly any of these manufacturers could start by waiting to ship a product until (a) it's available more globally, not just through one or two Asia-based resellers who take 1-2 months to ship, and (b) the firmware/main Linux OS is actually somewhat stable, meaning all the top advertised features and interfaces work as advertised. Just doing that would be beyond any of the current offerings, and once you offend a new customer, good luck getting them to consider you again! Libre Computer might be the best at that, right now (based on my limited use of their products), but they are a smaller team, and don't have the most compelling hardware (unlike some of the rockchip board vendors).
@@clementpoon120 not in all aspects, mainly efficiency. If you run it in your house as a server it may be important for you, but indeed, this route (e waste PC) is what a lot of people is doing.
@@clementpoon120 An e-waste PC probably doesn't have GPIO headers or fit in an embedded application. Old, second hand PCs are great if you just want a cheap desktop or server, but if you want to do almost anything else that you can do with a Pi, they're completely useless.
Back in 2013 I built displays for a interactive exhibition. We had 12 32" TVs and a 42" touchscreen built into a tabletop. The TVs where close to the exhibits showing how they where put together and what they do and point the "very special handheld terminals" - i.E. cheap chinese phones -- to the internal website with even more information. While the Raspberry Pi B was good enough to play the videos and function as an iBeacon, the Touchscreen Tabletop needed a little more oomph for the CSI effect I had in mind. So I bought a Cubietruck and a Radxa Rock and startet setting them up in Kiosk Mode ... .... .... and ended up buying an Intel NUC with i3. Since then I hate the A20 SoC in the Cubietruck and the Mali GPU in both with a passion! I won't use anything without Raspberry Pi levels of Linux support ever again, my life is to short to bother with the others.
The only limitation for the N100 is the 16G of RAM limit. I have one of those cheap microITX N100 mainboards ($129(ish)), in a NAS case running on M.2 drives, Proxmox hosting pfSense, PiHole, a few more smaller VM's and a bunch of containers, and a NAS (passthrough for 4 x 2T SSD's)... power draw hovers at only 27w ! The N100 may be a real contender, a lot of punch for smaller power reqs. I'd like to see what the N100 SoM can do.
I really hope Intel doubles down on the next N100-class chip, too-like, the pressure from Arm (and eventually maybe RISC-V) on the low end could make Intel's low power chips that much better.
@@JeffGeerling There is a retailer called LittleBird, who also run a secondary Pi-centric retailer called PiAustralia, but I presume since our dollar is weak against the USD, it's just plain expensive to get decently-priced Pi's over here.
That is my point. The Pi5 came to late and with bad specs and there is no Pi500 nor a Pi6. The mini PCs with server spec grade hardware (64GB, 48 Cores, GPU option) running as full feature blown homeserver - doing all that stuff we did 10+ years ago with our 2-3 Pis - that is the new reality. The ESP32 that recently came alive - that can even boot a mini linux - will also chew on the Pi-Universe. For me - no Pi5 - (I would consider getting a Pi500).
I wrote mobile software in the early 00's for Qualcomm and later Kyocera Wireless (who bought out Qualcomm's handset division). Back in those days getting ahold of an ARM compiler was a PITA. They were SUPER expensive and single seat licensed - they were basically node locked. So once you installed it somewhere, it was a PITA to get it installed somewhere else. Say you got a new machine or whatever - yeah, you can't run the ARM compiler you payed over $1k of year 2000 dollars for. There were some enterprising groups working GCC ports, but they weren't quite there yet and didn't produce the same optimized code as the ARM compiler (back in those days on those handsets saving even 100 bytes of RAM or NAND storage space was paramount). The landscape is way different now - the ARM port for GCC is very mature and I don't even know if they still sell an ARM compiler since GCC produces pretty well optimized code now (plus we don't have the same resource constraints we did 20 years ago).
In the Acorn world, the reliance on the Norcroft compiler probably contributed to the demise of the company. As C++ became more widely adopted, all Acorn was able to offer was a version of Cfront, and so they failed to deliver competitive libraries and frameworks for their platform. Then again, the company seemed to accumulate and attract people with this mindset that BASIC and assembly language was all anyone ever needed. I think that the compiler on Acorn's Unix was just the Norcroft compiler, rather than something with Unix heritage. There was also a C compiler from a third party for RISC OS that was reasonable, but probably not great, and this was updated to provide C++ support that, as far as I remember, was ambitious but flawed. Its developer took a job in the States for a well-known corporation and never got round to finishing the product. It does surprise me that support in GCC took a while to mature, but I think that people forget that ARM wasn't this "dead cert" architecture worth spending colossal amounts of time and money on until a while later. That will have left that lucrative, exploitative niche you mention.
@@paul_boddie Very interesting insider information. All I know is we had to write firmware for BREW handsets, and the only commercial compiler I recall being available at the time was actually from ARM. I still have the box in storage somewhere ;). We were trying to cut costs, and I did some research for open source alternatives which led me down the GCC path. They did have a cross compiler for GCC at the time, but the elf size was way larger than what the commercial compiler was spitting out. In some cases it was just too big and it wouldn't fit on the handsets at the time. Other times the code was just so under optimized that it ran like crap compared to the code generated from the commercial compiler. It was definitely a hobbyists toolset at the time. I'm really happy to see it matured. I truly wonder how much Raspberry Pi had to do with that? Plus the resurgence and wide acceptance of *nix OS. It was a great way for a neophyte to get their feet wet without too much worry about ruining things. Oh, you just did rm / -rf? Re-flash and you are good to go ;)
Acorn offered a site licence for its Norcroft compiler, from 1989, rather than £199 per perpetual commercial licence, £99 per educational. Not forgetting GCC added ARM support in 1993, if not that optimised, a native GCC compile and static link of a C++ Hello World came out at twice the size of a Norcroft effort. The whole GNU tool chain had been ported to RISC OS by 1994, with ARMLinux appearing in 1995. That's ignoring the AT&T RISCiX BSD distribution that cost a few thousand per seat, from 1988.
Well said Jeff. You can pretty much build anything with a RPi w/o building boards because there is so much 3rd party support and product availability. That lets you focus on what you’re building. I am doing that right now with a project. It will be a bit more expensive than I want and complete in
As a casual hobbyist, support matters. I have a 2 Pi 0's and 2 Pi 4's performing different functions (pump monitor, web server, file server, dashboard), and all of them have been running for years (still regret getting rid of 2 Pi 3's for next to nothing). Hardware is reliable, cheap, and the broad support base keeps me attached to these.
Lattepanda is great and all but question is if it does not have GPIO why not use generic N100 miniPC. I think it is same as running homelab on RPI. It is great, but offers no advantage compared to any small miniPC with good power consumption. Most of the time those miniPCs are cheaper and have same power consumption.
the carrier board has GPIO, but yeah if size isn't a constraint, you can get cards that expose boatloads of GPIO that plug into a PCIe socket for peanuts in the right places.
Generic minipcs and used Dells have always been an option if you want a cheap pc, but sometimes people actually do want a SBC or a compute module to build into a robot or handheld machine or something and for x86 LattePanda is one of the few doing this
@@SussyBaka-nx4ge Yeah, but for those sorts of uses, who cares whether it's x86 or ARM anyway? I mean, sure, the N100 is cool, and it does offer pretty good price/performance/power ratios for certain types of applications, but the fact that it's x86 is pretty much completely irrelevant in this application, IMHO... (Really, the only place nowadays where x86 potentially matters at all is if you're building a (Windows) desktop system for running arbitrary applications, in which case other mini-PC options are probably going to give you better bang for your buck anyway.)
@@foogod4237 Very few ARM boards work with mainline Linux and very few distros ship images for anything other than RasPi and maybe cloud as there's no real generic platform on ARM, so you're stuck with whatever ancient build of Debian or AOSP got shipped with the board. For x86, it's just a PC and Windows or any Linux distro will just work.
I feel like you nailed it in the begining on the price/support situation. To pay $149, even without considering a carrier board, I have to be very wedded to a SBC form factor because I can already slap an old PC on the network for that. I can see paying a premium for the form factor if it really matters.
This entire video describes my one biggest problem with most software today- it doesn't have quickly and eaisly accessible support information. If I want to make music with Ableton, I can't just make quick Google searches like "How do I use a sound font in Ableton", because it brings up one of a few different things every time: 1) People on forums saying not to do that, and what to do instead (doesn't answer my question) 2) People saying it literally can't be done, in direct contrast to a completely DIFFERENT answer where a person says to use a certain plugin, but trying to look up how to use that plugin with the software gives no neat and quick information, 3) You get questions that use some of the same KEYWORDS, but are asking entirely different things, or 4) You get 4+ hour long complete beginners' guide tutorials that I am not going to sit down through to get what should be the most basic answer ever. None of these searches EVER lead to actual documentation from the conpany, FAQ from the plugin developers, or fourms with answers marked as accepted. And no, Albeton is not the only issue, I have this lots with Unity, FLStudio, setting up web hosting services through AWS (this had SOME info but was a LOT of trial and error), learning to use the Win32 API for highly specific cases that aren't typical of a basic app, and more. You know what I don't have this issue with? GameMaker Studio 2, a lot of Adobe software, literally any programming language, setting up certain software on the Raspberry Pi such as for radio broadcasting or image recognition, using the Steamworks SDK, etc. All of these are extremely well-documented, have massive communities that enjoy asking AND answering questions (whereas I often just get told off when I complain about DAWs not being easy to search info for because I'm "lazy" for saying I wish it was as efficient to learn as other programs), Google searches often include official and relevant documentation pages near the top of the results, and anything that CAN be done with those tools has been done to some extent or another, and you can piece together larger answers out of smaller pieces. This cannot be done with all software, sometimes you are simply expected to sit down and watch a several hour video lecture on a topic and know how it works by the end. Support and knowledge being available is the single-best way to ensure that your topic is approachable and enjoyable to learn.
Agree! Even for firmware wizards its nice to have something working out of the box and not have to fiddle around. Unless fiddeling around is the project, usually you'd rather spend time one the actual project :)
I'm glad to see non-RPi videos. I've kinda been tired of RPi of late. The N100 and any other cheap x86 processors that might come out have been far more interesting to me anymore.
It's not just "that things will work" with a RaspberryPI, it's that your one Pi can be repurposed over time. I have Pi Zero-W's that were home cameras, but are now home internet radios, and other Pi's that have been repurposed. Other manufacturers drop support for their products when they realise that their product just isn't that big a success. They are desperate to take market share from the Raspberry Pi's, but don't want the expense or commitment of the long term support. The Pi's are a truly reusable components, and that makes them great value.
Good to see that you're making content on some more boards for my birthday this year my wife bought me a new SBC it happens to be a x86 board as well from Radxa. The X2l has proven to be an awesome addition to my workforce of tech. So much so I have begun to daily drive it as well. This SOM platform is definitely singing my song and would love to purchase one soon. Thanks for the awesome content as always.
I read "destroy Raspberry Pi" and envisioned seeing some magic smoke. Closest to this was at 3:22. Wasn't disappointed, still a very informative and entertaining video. :)
@@TylerDurden-pk5km There is a big difference between a private company under the umbrella of a non-profit organisation and the entire thing being a publicly traded stock. First they will tell you that nothing changes. Then the current leadership retires because they made a bunch of money from the IPO, then price increases and reduction in functionality because the stockholders want more revenue, then the inevitable personell cuts to "make the company more lean and efficient" and finally the company being a shell of its former self broken apart sold to the highest bidder so they can make trash under the RPi name.
@@bami2 That is not wrong - but that likely always was the plan. The foundation was used to generate goodwill / good looks at the early phases of the endeavor. Now it is payday for the effort - and investors.
Congratulations Jeff for the analysis. Recalling that the Raspbarry pi project was created to promote teaching in basic Computer Science in schools, allowing the democratization of knowledge. It turns out that several manufacturers began to fight a battle for performance and focused on other objectives.
@erikkarsies4851 The N5005 and N5010 are Jasper Lake parts. They're little 10nm dies. N4000 series is Gemini Lake Refresh, which are the rebadged versions of older Gemini Lake. N100 is of course better than any of these. We were not discussed which is the best, but which we see in the wild most often.
Hey Geerling, could you please make a video/video series on cameras? More specifically what to get for photography, videography, and both, as well as the basics of operating them for the above mentioned purposes? It would also be nice if you have your recommendations. Also, please include what you would recommend for filming/photographing eclipse.
It would be nice if the pinout for these edge connectors could be standardized. As it is, these carrier boards are useless without a specific make and model of compute module and I find that very wasteful and frustrating.
It seems like a lot of the Arm / RISC-V side went over to the Compute Module form factor with the dual Hirose connectors, so it's a bit of a de facto standard. But it is a very small board size and IO is limited by the pin count, for sure. I wish the industry would come up with a standard for board-to-board, and a standard for edge DIMM-style connectors.
@@JeffGeerling they did it was the PC/104 standard in industrial settings, carries PCI/PCIe over a standard stackable carrier, then you have all the smaller ITX form factors, of course that would mean that ARM manufacturers would need to get their proverbial brown stuff together.
@@shemleshat the moment of the goal is to try to become the standard. Although for the SODIMM type models, Nvidia's Jetson boards seem to be the dominant pin layout for today.
You nailed. Everything has a forum or an app specifically compiled for Pi. The only thing that comes close is beaglebone. Also, "the hardware is way ahead of the software" describes our modern world in so many ways.
The problem with x86 boards is that nobody uses them commercially so they just won't get the same levels of support as there's little money in it. There's also little Processor competition compared to arm.
That is a nice advantage for Arm-so many different chip variations exist, targeting low power, or integrated NPU, etc. With Intel, you have a couple Intel SKUs and almost nothing compelling from AMD under 6W.
No company has invested so much resources in supporting Linux and all it's variations as intel has. You will struggle to find stuff it's chips can't run not the other way around.
This is exactly what I've been telling people for years. If you are a maker, and you need a mini PC for a hobby project, pi is almost irreplaceable, because of the incredible software support and the huge community (I learned to program as a hobby with PI). If you only need a system for streaming movies, then the other options are just fine, but for almost everything else, PI is often the best solution.
The value of the rPI is so bad that it's cheaper to buy an old ITX business machine. Instead of a $170 starter kit. And this doesn't even get into the possible $100s of dollars you may need to buy to get it to do the job you want. Oh and it needs a heatsink and a fan now too. *it's a terrible value* Plus RasPis have got a run for their money durng the COVID shortages and their business decision to sell to commercial and industrial entities over "normal people". It opened up a massive market segment to other SBC makers and back filled the market gap where rPI was. When other SBCs get broad case support for them the poor value rPIs will become in danger of having it's market share crippled even more. heck some of those VESA mini computers will destroy a ras pi all day long and come with a power adapter in the box for not much more money. Edit: "Windows on ARM is not as mature" Not an entirely true statement. More then ~85% of windows apps run natively on ARM now.
"It's hard but it's not complicated": I'm in love with the thought and experience behind the statement here... Industry and academic experience on my part concurs.
The problem here is HP elitedesk pcs. They come around the same price point. And they are full systems including a case. Also the market is flooded even with AMD variants below 120 used. So if you are willing to give up GPIO on board for x86 and more performance I still just barely see a niche for these modules. But not for most people. Most people that applies to will be happier with the HP elitedesk mini pcs. And yes you heard me right AMD ryzen with their iGPUs baby!
Yeah, for a lot of uses those are miles ahead, even for 3d printers they could be very good since you can run webcam ai detection directly on them, I just wish there was something small, cheap with x86 and gpio
@@mitchell6you Oh yeah these are neat too. Easily below 20bucks EVERYTHING included. But often even less computing power then a Pi. But when you don't really need that computing power obviously the better choice at that price difference. Recently bought 3 Fujitsu 720s with 4gigs ram and 8GB Storage (and power supply) for less then 40€, yes about 13 per piece! (shipping included!)
It's incredibly important to understand that raw power and low price are not everything! With proper support you get tested and working devices out of the box without any additional tinkering needed. While this might not be always what you are looking for it's really easy to underestimate the impact of support when dealing with SBC class devices.
Although I own a pi 5, I have to agree on price. Also, only youtubers like yourself can actually buy the things at MSRP. The rest of us have to pay much more from resellers. I paid a lot more than 80 bucks for my pi5. I paid 200 bucks for the pi4 a few months after they came out. This year I also bought an orange pi for the same price as the pi 4 (200 bucks) and it's WAY faster than the pi 5, plus it's got many more features.
Anyone in the St. Louis area can walk into Micro Center and buy a Pi 5 at $60 for 4 GB or $80 for 8 GB. I know, because that's where all but the review sample I own comes from. Micro Center has a bunch of stores around the US that have tons of stock right now too. I buy these things at retail... I haven't paid more than MSRP for any of my 6 Pi 5s, though I did have to wait a month or so between buying my first and second because launch shortages are common with every Pi model.
The N100 (N200? N97?) have turned up as the brain in quite a few handheld, or Ultra Mobile PCs lately. They come so close to what I want, yet always manage to get something "not quite right". This SOM looks good, for example - until you have to mount it on another board. That puts a limit on your layout options, right out of the gate.
The support really is what got me to suck it up and just buy the Pi5. I knew there was more powerful boards out there, but no matter how painful it might have been to be an early adopter I knew it would smooth out relatively quickly. Some of the boards I was looking at had been out for quite a while and the first things I found when looking them up were people still trying to get past issues that had been there since the board's launch. I don't agree with some of the decisions the RPi Foundation have made lately (and are going to make) and I'm not likely to buy another Pi5 unless this one breaks, but you can't argue with massive amount of support you'll get from either the foundation or the community if you decide to buy one. I'd love to see a company wedge itself in that gap they've made though. Wedge themselves in and pry it open, it'd benefit everyone.
I think this review nailed it. Absolute performance is not primary, cost is meaningful (especially for home / school projects) but comprehensive and accessible support means that projects by the 'unskilled' and 'naiivly adventurous' just work. My night time nature cam powered by a Zero would be the perfect example.
very well said. I remember fighting a Banana Pi, trying to get it to boot off the SPI flash only to find out it only boots from bus 0 which is not exposed anywhere. It would have been nice to have documentation that said so.
Thanks for mentioning where other SBC can beat-out the Raspberry Pi. It's helpful to learn about the competition to RPi, sometimes it's not the best choice, especially when recommending to less techie friends. They know and use x86, so it eliminates needed to grasp a new architecture, and all that comes with that. I don't think I'd recommend this board to anybody, expect for my own experiments/entertainment.
The issue I had with the Pi 3, is that the cpu clock was used to derive spi bus clock. When the cpu clock is throttled due to heat, so is the spi. I didn't try, but I believe the i2c and uart are also throttled. I heard a lot of people had trouble trying to use the console uart due to this fact. I don't know if this is still an issue on newer versions.
5:30 Can you use SteamOS to get around the support issues? I heard you can install it on basically anything. Valve affirmed that SteamOS 3.0 will continue to be freely available, with the intention of allowing other hardware developers to take advantage of it and build similar handheld computing devices like the Deck.
I would posit this: All of these are exceptionally good deals. What I would challenge any of you to try is to make a simple PCB, no components, and send your gerber files out to a board house. You'd be hard pressed to get one board made under $100. That is without the cost of the components and manufacturing. Here is the REAL...REAL kicker. The cost of software development is HUGE. The fact that the pis are open source gives you opportunities you'd have NEVER had before. Support is underrated.
This triangle you're describing in this video also applies to Linux in MY PERSONAL opinion I think. There's tons of different distro's out there you can choose from without a clear one do it all since opinions seems to be devided. There distro's are free most of the time, and at least way better optimized than Windows in it's current state (so two out of three triangle points), however due to fragmentation I think there's lack of support besides the amount of choice that is overwhelming. What happened with Pi is that when you buy one, and you're a "noob", nearly any tutorial you check out recommends you to just download ONE Linux distro, which is Raspberri Pi OS itself. This automatically makes supporting the Pi easier, since so many people are using the exact same kind of distro which also means more drivers get written for it, and more fantastic package managers (al be it a different CPU architecture depending on the Pi generation). It's just like Windows in that regard, and I hope the Linux community gets less fragmented as a whole so Windows can finally be done for.
You absolutely nailed the support aspect. If I’m building some embedded system, I have zero interest in cutting my teeth on integrating the weird pitfalls from an unknown sbc provider. Raspberry pi dominates because someone else has already done that for you.
For device production you also want to be sure that you can get hold of said SoM / SoC in quantities without having to wait eons and then the line is discontinued. This is why our product based on the RPi 3B+ is still selling and is still cheap and easy to maintain. Even the nVidia Jetson SoM's are really expensive, not that available in bulk and the docs are not that great really. Good thing nVidia's forum has some great mods or I'd ditch them in a heartbeat!
Having a few N100-based exit points and servers lying around I can attest that they are both very power efficient and surprisingly strong. Especially the integrated graphics - it handles shinobi like a boss for small sized business needs (~15 hd streams) as long as you mix and match continuous recording and triggered recording there's absolutely zero issue. Can't wait to see if they are going to iterate on it next launch. And back on topic: runs circles around a pi, they aren't even in the same class despite sharing very similar price points and power consumption
I absolutely agree with you, but I think we need to be careful when we consider power efficiency. You're absolutely right in your video, efficiency is computational power over energy consumption, but we also have to consider those values in relation to each specific user scenario, because each scenario have different needs. I'll give you an example, if you need a home server for hosting services, make backups and so on, all the power an N100 can give you is completely useless, an RPi4 is more than enough, for someone RPi5 may also be a little overpowered; on the other hand that's a user case where uptime is usually 24/7 and absolute power consumption does really matter (in some places more than others, think about EU vs US) and there's a significant difference in power consumption between RPi4/5 and N100.
I'm a big fan of the Latte Panda stuff. I used the V1 to run a LABView interface with the on board Leonardo performing the real time functions in a prototype fuel cell project I worked on with a former employer. Excellent value and an incredibly fast way to get up and running.
It seems you can only purchase the thing as a $190 kit -- at least, when you click the 'buy' link on the Latte Panda site, that's what you get with no obvious way to purchase just the compute module -- that's still a fair comparison to the PI5 as the latter includes gpio, hdmi, usb etc.. I would tend to use this as a small project/appliance machine similar to the Intel NUC or the old ASUS eepc compact machines.
They offer it for sale separately, too (just the module for $139), but you have to search on the store pages to get it. I'm guessing they push everyone to the kit since very few people would have any other way of using the Mu without the official carrierboard.
Jeff, how much of the SUPPORT advantage the Raspberry PI Foundation in conjunction with Broadcom currently enjoy do you think is due to time to market/dominance/etc. and how much do you think is due to resource allocation as a relationship to revenue/etc.? I ask this because it seems to me that because RBP was so early to market, they have the preexisting development advantages such a market position entails. Take for example x86 vs ARM vs other chip architectures-because x86 so successfully dominated the microcomputer market throughout the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, the architecture through economies of scale eventually pushed out even the monolithic custom fab graphics players like Sun and SGI [even Big Blue, IBM, barely holds on in some ways; were it not for their Mainframe business that still uses COBOL, even they might have been pushed out]. This dominance enabled x86 to rule supreme. Had these economies of scale and market dominance not occurred, the market today might look drastically different. I point this out because manufacturers that come late in the game to markets [see Intel in the GPU marketplace, or even AMD for quite some time] have marked disadvantage when compared with their monopolist predecessors [not necessarily by practice, but by market share]. Even *_if_* a new manufacturer [like those listed] *_wanted_* to unseat the RBP, they'd be at a monumental disadvantage compared with the established makers. This widespread adoption means that the RBP Foundation and Broadcom have huge debugging advantages through economies of scale. It costs them less to debug and program for these devices when compared with the number of extant devices. The Foundation also has the advantage of (presumably) receiving massive tax subsidies or tax exemption status, which further advantages Broadcom's products [Broadcom/RBPF]. Add to this the massive user base with people constantly saturating their well established teams with debugging information means that these firms can more readily patch or fix problems as soon as they emerge. Widespread adoption typically enables faster recognition and implementation of repairs [assuming such repairs/updates are implemented in the pipeline to begin with] when compared with small startups. It's a lot easier to find solutions to a well established architecture than it is for a less implemented architecture. What I'd like to know is-how you think this market saturation and time to market [when in the history of this development] impacted and continues to impact the popularity and adoption of alternative architectures in the super modular computing space? Do you think that these issues can be overcome? What would a firm have to do, in your mind, to overcome such barriers to market entry? For instance, when people think about a "super/hyper modular computing device in a palmsize form factor", the vast majority of people [best guess, shooting from hip here; ideally, you'd get independent market saturation/surveys to determine these numbers as opposed to some rando on the net pulling shit out of his ass] think of a "Raspberry Pi". I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number of people didn't even know that alternatives existed (and even if they did, why would they bother when a Pi is mostly affordable?). This is a longstanding problem in economics. In trademark law, when a product becomes synonymous with a type of item [like "Kleenex", "Band-Aid", "Adrenaline", "Popsicle", "Tylenol", etc., in the US], we say that the item has become a "generic trademark". Words like "cyberpunk" are in fact trademarks [as nutty as that may sound]. It's like "Googling". If it wasn't for Google toasting their own reputation in recent years, the act of "looking shit up on the net" would likely still be done almost universally by/through Google. The very act of "looking said shit up on the net via crawlers" in common American parlance is known as "Googling". How can other products or manufacturers [outside of maybe giant Chinese fab makers/manufacturers who have state sponsored aid/market protections] supposed to compete? Particularly, when a product's manufacturer [in this case, Broadcom] has the advantage of having the vast majority of the R&D costs be operated through a tax-exempt institution [in this case, the Raspberry Pi Foundation]. Irrespective of your feelings for or against such an institution, or general feelings about it, we must acknowledge the significant advantage such institutions possess, as well as how that advantage plays out in terms of market adoption. It's one thing to create a better product [in principle], but another entirely when one is at significant economic disadvantage. Even Intel stopped producing its small form factor modular PCs [alongside motherboards] even though for decades, Intel boards were considered the best for x86 Intel based processors [this is based upon inside market knowledge from back in the day], which announced last summer it was ending its production of mini NUC PCs. I fell like this issue has a lot more meat to it that would make for excellent video fodder. The market isn't going to improve unless major changes occur. One method might be the implementation of open-hardware with open-software models [like what IBM has done in the workstation market] such that a prospective x86, ARM, or PowerPC based architecture could benefit. I don't know how many of these firms actually implement fully open-architecture solutions, but it would seem to me that if anyone is going to even have an ice cube's chance in Hell of even moderate adoption, it will require some kind of open-architecture to counterbalance the mass market monopoly powers of outfits like RBP/Broadcom. You might consider doing like Gamers Nexus and creating a website with detailed, updated listings of the available products you know of. That way, buyers have resources to look this stuff up. If such a site/resource exists, then I would recommend integrating it into your reviews, as it gives us the ability to more readily compare. Nothing will change unless people band together to share resources.
PI support is a major plus in my book too. However I2S input is a hardware feature that has no support in current versions of the official OS, I would guess there are other unfixed issues that can be fixed with older versions, but I kind of like to work with the latest version.
Thanks, Jeff, another entertaining and educational video. You have said what we have all thought for the last few years; when we buy any computer (or anything), there is an assumption that it just works. Raspberry Pi seems to be the only player in the market that makes that a priority. And who really has time to fix a product that you just purchased? Simple, yet profound thinking.
The Radxa X2L seems like more of a Pi killer. At $49 it’s the cheaper than a Pi 5 except x86 so compatible with so much more, actually takes USB PD for power instead of nonstandard 5V5A, and has built in M.2 support without needing some extra hat.
On ExplainingComputers' video on the Radxa X2L in April, either the video itself or a comment said that supposedly the Intel Celeron line used by that particular Radxa model is no longer in production so the X2L almost certainly has a hard upper limit on quantity unless they switch to a different compatible Celeron. I'm wondering if this LattePanda Mu has a similar situation for its Intel processor that we should be concerned about.
i've been looking at the N305 cpu to replace my low-power opteron x3216 NAS/server with. Intel's E-cores are fine for general compute so all they need to do is put a whole bunch of them on a chip and engineer them to work efficiently together, and that's exactly what the N100, N300, and N305 are.
I have been thinking the same here. I built the little pi Nas in previous videos. I accidentally order the wrong top for the Rock 3c and not the Pi. So I ordered a Rock 3c and a Pi Hat. Good thing these are pretty inexpensive. The Pi build was simple. The Rock 3C I have struggled with it and the documentation or forums are just not the volume that the pi has. I like the Radax Product line; I just hope more get involved or linux just gets better with these SBC's.
The Pi is low power and does not need a fan. So many people review a "Raspberry PI killer" that is similar price and faster, however it requires a fan and/or sucks up more wattage which makes it non-comparable for me.
As they were laying there side by side, it seemed to me that the pin layout is the same as the Turing RK1, so am I right to assume that it at least physically fits into the Turing Pi2 cluster board? The next question then becomes: what is needed to make it actually work?
I've had to deal with so many software issues... Tried to get an Ubuntu image from the board maker, only to see that it was just never updated and some age old Ubuntu version. Okay, went over to armbian. Only a community supported version... Got ahead and built that only to then find out that not all the features where working and I had to fumble around and understand dt overlays. And only then after countless hours did it work and I still have to compile my own Kernel updates. Like I don't even care about PI OS, I replaced that with an Ubuntu Server image every time anyway, as PI OS has some... Issues for production use, but hell I just want to get an up-to-date Ubuntu image with updates... With the latte panda you can at least just take any generic x86_64 image and it will just work. That's just missing for the arm market...
Back then, I bough the original Latte panda x86 and after hitting my head to the wall to make it work for what I wanted I stopped and bought a Rasberry Pi 3. Sure it is way less performance but the big main issue Latte Panda is software/os/drivers/support indeed. I tried the forumns, ocntacting the support etc.... what's good is performance if you cannot do what you want with it.
The problem with the Mu is price and size. 🕵 LattePanda Mu Micro x86 Compute Module Evaluation Kit = LattePanda Mu Compute Module (8GB RAM and 64GB eMMC 👀) + Lite Carrier Board (smallest possible carrier board) + Active Cooler = $190, 146mm×102mm. There is a quite smaller and much cheaper N100 mini PC. For example Firebat T8 Pro Plus (16GB RAM and 512GB SSD 👀) = $130, 89.4mm x 89.4mm x 43.5mm.
I recently got a Pi Zero. One of the only issues I have with it is with support. If you are running linux or Pi OS, everything is good. When I try to find resources to do project with windows, it quickly becomes difficult.
My thing with this is, if you're getting a PC about the size of a thin client, why not just buy a thin client. for the price of decomm thin clients you get a case and a PSU for free while only giving a slight efficiency drop, but they're leagues faster.
Interesting; I've said the same about old laptops when the RPI was younger, but what about IO? Years ago, you could still get basestations for laptops with serial and, more importantly for easy hardware hacking, parallel ports. What do you get on a thin client? Though I suppose you can always attach Arduinos...
@@eekee6034they would need drivers, software to control it and a program actually running on it that listens for any gpio requests and if you want to reprogram it it will not be instant while gpio's can be used in a second
the value of a given SBC depends solely on your usecase, obviously having more is nice in case your needs change, but sometimes you only need the power, sometimes you only need the GPIO, and sometimes you may need something else
This was one of the hardware products I immediately ordered when I got the announcement email. Having an Intel x64 SOM is just too cool of a prospect for DIY projects.
IMHO the biggest reason to use a RPi is the community & developer support. For any given task an RPI is probably not the cheapest option, but there's a very high chance that someone else has done the same task and documented how to do it. Personally I have 3 Pis (so far) - a 0W which has served as a MythTV client and a micro retro console, a 3A+ for a vertical barcade (the 0W couldn't quite cut it), and a Pico which monitors the water temperature in my computer to control the fan speed.
I don't know... at $110 and need for more accessories to any serious use always forces my money at a complete mini-pc. The need for stuff like PCI-E at this price point just never comes up. Right now I'm itching to buy the Minisforum S100, which directly competes the LattePanda Mu on price with exactly the same core hardware. The cool part is the included PoE!
The easy road for the support corner is to make your thing fully compatible with existing Pi accessories like carrier boards and etc, just like any successful Arduino clones all have the same "hat" connectors so you can just about slap on anyone else's "hat" and move along.
My most recently purchased Raspberry Pi is a desktop mini X86 for less money than the Pi cost during the tail end of the shortage. The line may have been permanently blurred when a complete mini is at or a few dollars within the $100 line.
1:43 plus the other key part: software; from Canonical with Ubuntu desktop (yes the RPi4 runs the full desktop, although a bit sluggish), raspbian OS, debian and a couple of dozens Linux variants for ARM without issue to distros with niche uses like media servers, routers, audiophile-grade music players, adware remover, arcade machines and hundreds of video and I/O real-world applications, the Pi got you covered.
The perfect thing for me would be an adapter for the Turing-Pi, then the Latte-Panda would be an insta-buy. Because I lack of a Windows Server to test Things and when I could use the same board, I already head I don't need to free some other Rack-Spaces for a new Case...
Moore's law isn't dead, it just has a new definition: The number of Pis you accumulate doubles roughly every 2 years
Is that including or excluding the ones in your desk drawer?
My last Pi was a 4GB Pi 4. I looked at a Pi 5, but with HDMI adapters, USB extensions (too close together), M.2 HAT, clock battery, fan and case, I decided to buy a N5105 system. It cost more, but I now run pfSense, Windows 11, Ubuntu all in one box, with plenty of storage and RAM.
is that with or without accounting for the price for a new Pi?
Not really... there seem to be less in stock every year
@@lumeronswiftless is Moore’s 🤓
"Or put it in your drawer and hope to someday" That felt like a personal attack, Jeff.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it
Mine finally left that drawer and is running full duty as an AdGuard proxy, wireguard VPN and full-time stats visualiser. Nothing glamorous, but I can run a few ssh windows and keep tcpdump scrolling by and, bmon and htop doing their thing.
I feel called out
he woke up and chose violence
Great video -- which I watched on an N100 system running Linux. :)
😂
Haha, wonderful!
I have considered making my N100 mini PC my home workbench computer, mostly because the one I've been using there has a fan and is annoying after a few years!
I think we need a closer look at that system :)
So did I watch this on. The n100 with debian is my daily driver. I love the silence. No fan ❤
We would expect nothing less Mr Computers!
"Until next time I'm Jeff Geerling". Drops the next video, still Jeff Geerling. False advertising.
I've always wondered why he doesn't say it the other way around 😂
@@mcbot6291 Until Jeff Geeling, I'm next time? 🤔
Can you legally punish your own children by forcing them to build your kernels without pay on underpowered SBCs?
Yes
Why else would you have children? lol
It's not punishment, it's education
“C’mere kiddo, I’ve got an Ethernet driver problem for you to figure out. It’ll be educational!” 😂 I’ve got a whole pile of “educational opportunities” in my basement but I want my kid to LIKE computers and not despise them-which is why her projects get Raspberry Pi’s.
The Geneva Convention would say no
I never understand why reviewers of SBC's keep saying statements X-times faster than RPi. The litmus test is always "How many products from this vendor still get support 6 months down the line?" In most cases a lot of the SBC's are built around SOC's meant for a specific Android version, and good luck getting long term Linux support. To be honest, I don't care how fast SBC's are. They are not about speed. I couldn't have agreed more with you during this video!
"I don't care how fast SBC's are"
lol then why get anything other then the original raspberry pi? As someone that emulates retro I 100% care about processing power.
"good luck getting long term support."
so... it's like everything else in the IT industry?
@@jspringer86 long term support matters for a lot of people though, and whether this is the case or not in rest of the IT industry is irrelevant to that. Even the current Raspberry Pi OS supports the original Raspberry Pi, while you simply don't have this kind of support anywhere else.
@@jspringer86 because it's much more than an emulation station. And while I don't care might be an exagerated statement, I know that if I'm building something based on Linux, going from Rpi 3 -> 4 -> 5 was just a package and firmware update away. And I never had to deal with the worry of sticking with ancient modules, because otherwise I would end up driver less.
@@jspringer86 You don't always get the on-paper performance with the less-supported boards, it's practically a lie. I try to stick to RockChip stuff as it tends to get mainlined and get good community support for drivers, making it age like wine instead of becoming e-waste.
Intel development is miles in ahead of Raspberry Pi development. So even the support argument is bonkers.
Intel based SBCs' main advantage for me is the video encoder which makes it perfect for a media server
There are plenty of arm chips with good video encoders (basically every network security camera has to have one), but as mentioned in the video, the problem is software support.
@@nezu_cc good luck getting plex to do 4k HDR full blast transcoding with an arm chip
@@nezu_cc In some cases, I wouldn't necessarily blame the software, because in some cases, even the Pi, they use proprietary firmware blobs that may only work with some versions of Linux. The actual encoding and decoding support has gotten much better in Linux, but if you can't use the company's drivers, then that suddenly makes it a whole lot harder to use the hardware.
why you buy SBC for that, there are so many mini-pcs that can do that
Couldn't agree more. Intel's video decoders have been great so far.
I used a rpi4 as my primary computer for two or so years, and from my experience, it's software support that matters most for medium-high end SBCs. I saw significant improvement in usability on the pi4 over the two or so years, and I'd hate to have to go through that rough starting phase again.
At $185 for the LattePanda MU, forget it. I bought 3 GMKtec NucBox G3 Mini PC's with the N100, 8GB of RAM each, 256GB M.2 NVMe, 2.5GB Ethernet/Wifi 6E.. for $120 each. And the RAM/SSD is upgradable. And there is an extra M.2 slot to run another SSD or external GPU. And you get a Windows 11 Pro license. And you can get that price all day on Amazon and have them the next day.
well the MU is not a home pc, is more like a maker unit, the idea is for you to have all sorts of I/O to make custom devices on your own. If you just want a box with a browser, IDE, and some low-end games, then don't look at the Latte, or any sbc tbh
@@ezforsaken I'm not using them as HomePC's. I'm using them as server nodes in a cluster. They have functionality beyond being used as low end desktop PC's. Outside of a few slim use cases for things like embedded engineering that would require a powerful but efficent processor like the n100 in a tiny package, I'm not seeing a lot of advantages to paying $185 bare minimum for a LattePanda. Most projects are going to be fine with the much cheaper Compute Module 4 anyways as far as embedded goes.
@@ezforsaken I agree, this is technically the original point of the SBC. Which is what makes me wonder why this one has barelly any I/O. I mean, just like Op mentioned, for just that might as well get cheap laptops instead.
And for just I2C and UART in this one carrier board, it ain't worth it. Might as well make my own IO expansion card with USB through a micro or through PCIe and it'd still be cheaper.
these are SOMs and are meant for easy embedded device integration. If all you need is a mini PC, just buy a mini PC
@@leozetalol the Intel cpu they are using does not have GPIO since it's a laptop part.
It's not even about "destroying" Raspberry Pi (Jeff needs to stop outsourcing the writing to Redshirt). There is clearly room for a number 2 in the market (an Avis to Rasberry's Hertz, in rental car terms, or, if you like a Lyft to Rasberry's Uber), and it's been very clear what that takes - dedicated support. And a strong number 2 in the market would only make Raspberry better - it would make them work that much harder.
With apologies to Jeff, this has been obvious for years. What's crazy is that as obvious as it is, no manufacturer has taken up the challenge.
I think it's worth thinking deeper about what that would mean - maybe challenge Jeff to do that, because his knowledge on this far outclasses mine, for sure. Would that mean picking the top five or six Linux distros and ensuring they run on new SBCs out of the box? Guarantee five years of support?
What's the kind of minimum viable level of support that would start to separate the sheep from the goats in the non-Pi SBC market?
Another thing I've wondered - is it possible to have a Raspberry clone? Or a near clone? Is that a viable path for a second player to emerge?
Honestly any of these manufacturers could start by waiting to ship a product until (a) it's available more globally, not just through one or two Asia-based resellers who take 1-2 months to ship, and (b) the firmware/main Linux OS is actually somewhat stable, meaning all the top advertised features and interfaces work as advertised.
Just doing that would be beyond any of the current offerings, and once you offend a new customer, good luck getting them to consider you again!
Libre Computer might be the best at that, right now (based on my limited use of their products), but they are a smaller team, and don't have the most compelling hardware (unlike some of the rockchip board vendors).
tbh you can probably just buy an e waste pc in ebay and it'd beat the pi
@@clementpoon120 not in all aspects, mainly efficiency. If you run it in your house as a server it may be important for you, but indeed, this route (e waste PC) is what a lot of people is doing.
@@clementpoon120 An e-waste PC probably doesn't have GPIO headers or fit in an embedded application. Old, second hand PCs are great if you just want a cheap desktop or server, but if you want to do almost anything else that you can do with a Pi, they're completely useless.
Back in 2013 I built displays for a interactive exhibition. We had 12 32" TVs and a 42" touchscreen built into a tabletop. The TVs where close to the exhibits showing how they where put together and what they do and point the "very special handheld terminals" - i.E. cheap chinese phones -- to the internal website with even more information. While the Raspberry Pi B was good enough to play the videos and function as an iBeacon, the Touchscreen Tabletop needed a little more oomph for the CSI effect I had in mind. So I bought a Cubietruck and a Radxa Rock and startet setting them up in Kiosk Mode ...
....
....
and ended up buying an Intel NUC with i3.
Since then I hate the A20 SoC in the Cubietruck and the Mali GPU in both with a passion! I won't use anything without Raspberry Pi levels of Linux support ever again, my life is to short to bother with the others.
"Temperatures matter to a degree" Oh you rapscallion you
It’s a heated debate😂
The only limitation for the N100 is the 16G of RAM limit. I have one of those cheap microITX N100 mainboards ($129(ish)), in a NAS case running on M.2 drives, Proxmox hosting pfSense, PiHole, a few more smaller VM's and a bunch of containers, and a NAS (passthrough for 4 x 2T SSD's)... power draw hovers at only 27w ! The N100 may be a real contender, a lot of punch for smaller power reqs. I'd like to see what the N100 SoM can do.
I really hope Intel doubles down on the next N100-class chip, too-like, the pressure from Arm (and eventually maybe RISC-V) on the low end could make Intel's low power chips that much better.
I've seen many people report that the N100 can handle at least 32GB of RAM on a single stick.
I have 2 n100 miniPC, both run fine with 32gb ram.
One is ddr5 sodimm 5200, other is ddr4 sodimm 2666
@@nich98 I'll have to pick one up to try... the spec sheet said max 16G sodimm, but I'll be MUCH happier if it can use 32...
I think the fact that it is only single channeled is bigger issue.
$155 - $180 is the cost of a 4GB Pi 5. A latte panda is cheaper in Australia, at least.
Woah! Is there no official reseller in Australia?
@@JeffGeerling Australia is the land of the expensive. It's why my friend, RUclipsr Tech YES City, does so well selling gaming PCs there I reckon.
@@JeffGeerling There is a retailer called LittleBird, who also run a secondary Pi-centric retailer called PiAustralia, but I presume since our dollar is weak against the USD, it's just plain expensive to get decently-priced Pi's over here.
Core electronics in Sydney. Pi5 8gb $134.50. Aussie dollars. Always in stock. Bruh, how doesn’t everyone know core electronics…
That is my point. The Pi5 came to late and with bad specs and there is no Pi500 nor a Pi6. The mini PCs with server spec grade hardware (64GB, 48 Cores, GPU option) running as full feature blown homeserver - doing all that stuff we did 10+ years ago with our 2-3 Pis - that is the new reality. The ESP32 that recently came alive - that can even boot a mini linux - will also chew on the Pi-Universe. For me - no Pi5 - (I would consider getting a Pi500).
I wrote mobile software in the early 00's for Qualcomm and later Kyocera Wireless (who bought out Qualcomm's handset division). Back in those days getting ahold of an ARM compiler was a PITA. They were SUPER expensive and single seat licensed - they were basically node locked. So once you installed it somewhere, it was a PITA to get it installed somewhere else. Say you got a new machine or whatever - yeah, you can't run the ARM compiler you payed over $1k of year 2000 dollars for. There were some enterprising groups working GCC ports, but they weren't quite there yet and didn't produce the same optimized code as the ARM compiler (back in those days on those handsets saving even 100 bytes of RAM or NAND storage space was paramount). The landscape is way different now - the ARM port for GCC is very mature and I don't even know if they still sell an ARM compiler since GCC produces pretty well optimized code now (plus we don't have the same resource constraints we did 20 years ago).
In the Acorn world, the reliance on the Norcroft compiler probably contributed to the demise of the company. As C++ became more widely adopted, all Acorn was able to offer was a version of Cfront, and so they failed to deliver competitive libraries and frameworks for their platform. Then again, the company seemed to accumulate and attract people with this mindset that BASIC and assembly language was all anyone ever needed. I think that the compiler on Acorn's Unix was just the Norcroft compiler, rather than something with Unix heritage.
There was also a C compiler from a third party for RISC OS that was reasonable, but probably not great, and this was updated to provide C++ support that, as far as I remember, was ambitious but flawed. Its developer took a job in the States for a well-known corporation and never got round to finishing the product. It does surprise me that support in GCC took a while to mature, but I think that people forget that ARM wasn't this "dead cert" architecture worth spending colossal amounts of time and money on until a while later. That will have left that lucrative, exploitative niche you mention.
@@paul_boddie Very interesting insider information. All I know is we had to write firmware for BREW handsets, and the only commercial compiler I recall being available at the time was actually from ARM. I still have the box in storage somewhere ;). We were trying to cut costs, and I did some research for open source alternatives which led me down the GCC path. They did have a cross compiler for GCC at the time, but the elf size was way larger than what the commercial compiler was spitting out. In some cases it was just too big and it wouldn't fit on the handsets at the time. Other times the code was just so under optimized that it ran like crap compared to the code generated from the commercial compiler. It was definitely a hobbyists toolset at the time. I'm really happy to see it matured. I truly wonder how much Raspberry Pi had to do with that? Plus the resurgence and wide acceptance of *nix OS. It was a great way for a neophyte to get their feet wet without too much worry about ruining things. Oh, you just did rm / -rf? Re-flash and you are good to go ;)
Acorn offered a site licence for its Norcroft compiler, from 1989, rather than £199 per perpetual commercial licence, £99 per educational. Not forgetting GCC added ARM support in 1993, if not that optimised, a native GCC compile and static link of a C++ Hello World came out at twice the size of a Norcroft effort. The whole GNU tool chain had been ported to RISC OS by 1994, with ARMLinux appearing in 1995. That's ignoring the AT&T RISCiX BSD distribution that cost a few thousand per seat, from 1988.
I used GCC on OrangePi 3 (another SBC). The Linux distro is Armbian and also built using GCC.
Well said Jeff. You can pretty much build anything with a RPi w/o building boards because there is so much 3rd party support and product availability. That lets you focus on what you’re building. I am doing that right now with a project. It will be a bit more expensive than I want and complete in
I was all ready to make a comment about "conjoined triangles of success" but Geerling beat me to it. Foiled again!
Related: Triangle of Sadness. Great movie.
As a casual hobbyist, support matters. I have a 2 Pi 0's and 2 Pi 4's performing different functions (pump monitor, web server, file server, dashboard), and all of them have been running for years (still regret getting rid of 2 Pi 3's for next to nothing). Hardware is reliable, cheap, and the broad support base keeps me attached to these.
“HOW DO YOU DESTROY A RASPBERRY PI??”
“You forgot to cherish it”
"Suite Life of Zach and Cody"
Good quote Mr. Mosbey
Oh, I misread the title. I thought it was “This is how you destroy A Raspberry Pi”. I was thinking, “What’s so hard about that?”.
Heh, not quite *that* episode!
*_RedShirtJeff has been summoned_*
Lattepanda is great and all but question is if it does not have GPIO why not use generic N100 miniPC. I think it is same as running homelab on RPI. It is great, but offers no advantage compared to any small miniPC with good power consumption. Most of the time those miniPCs are cheaper and have same power consumption.
That's actually quite legit point.
the carrier board has GPIO, but yeah if size isn't a constraint, you can get cards that expose boatloads of GPIO that plug into a PCIe socket for peanuts in the right places.
Generic minipcs and used Dells have always been an option if you want a cheap pc, but sometimes people actually do want a SBC or a compute module to build into a robot or handheld machine or something and for x86 LattePanda is one of the few doing this
@@SussyBaka-nx4ge Yeah, but for those sorts of uses, who cares whether it's x86 or ARM anyway? I mean, sure, the N100 is cool, and it does offer pretty good price/performance/power ratios for certain types of applications, but the fact that it's x86 is pretty much completely irrelevant in this application, IMHO...
(Really, the only place nowadays where x86 potentially matters at all is if you're building a (Windows) desktop system for running arbitrary applications, in which case other mini-PC options are probably going to give you better bang for your buck anyway.)
@@foogod4237 Very few ARM boards work with mainline Linux and very few distros ship images for anything other than RasPi and maybe cloud as there's no real generic platform on ARM, so you're stuck with whatever ancient build of Debian or AOSP got shipped with the board.
For x86, it's just a PC and Windows or any Linux distro will just work.
That subtle Silicon Valley joke. Well played🎉
Jeff, you are absolutely killing it. Your delivery in this is 2nd to none. You’re a true pro.
I feel like you nailed it in the begining on the price/support situation. To pay $149, even without considering a carrier board, I have to be very wedded to a SBC form factor because I can already slap an old PC on the network for that. I can see paying a premium for the form factor if it really matters.
This entire video describes my one biggest problem with most software today- it doesn't have quickly and eaisly accessible support information. If I want to make music with Ableton, I can't just make quick Google searches like "How do I use a sound font in Ableton", because it brings up one of a few different things every time:
1) People on forums saying not to do that, and what to do instead (doesn't answer my question)
2) People saying it literally can't be done, in direct contrast to a completely DIFFERENT answer where a person says to use a certain plugin, but trying to look up how to use that plugin with the software gives no neat and quick information,
3) You get questions that use some of the same KEYWORDS, but are asking entirely different things, or
4) You get 4+ hour long complete beginners' guide tutorials that I am not going to sit down through to get what should be the most basic answer ever.
None of these searches EVER lead to actual documentation from the conpany, FAQ from the plugin developers, or fourms with answers marked as accepted. And no, Albeton is not the only issue, I have this lots with Unity, FLStudio, setting up web hosting services through AWS (this had SOME info but was a LOT of trial and error), learning to use the Win32 API for highly specific cases that aren't typical of a basic app, and more.
You know what I don't have this issue with? GameMaker Studio 2, a lot of Adobe software, literally any programming language, setting up certain software on the Raspberry Pi such as for radio broadcasting or image recognition, using the Steamworks SDK, etc. All of these are extremely well-documented, have massive communities that enjoy asking AND answering questions (whereas I often just get told off when I complain about DAWs not being easy to search info for because I'm "lazy" for saying I wish it was as efficient to learn as other programs), Google searches often include official and relevant documentation pages near the top of the results, and anything that CAN be done with those tools has been done to some extent or another, and you can piece together larger answers out of smaller pieces.
This cannot be done with all software, sometimes you are simply expected to sit down and watch a several hour video lecture on a topic and know how it works by the end. Support and knowledge being available is the single-best way to ensure that your topic is approachable and enjoyable to learn.
Agree! Even for firmware wizards its nice to have something working out of the box and not have to fiddle around.
Unless fiddeling around is the project, usually you'd rather spend time one the actual project :)
I'm glad to see non-RPi videos. I've kinda been tired of RPi of late.
The N100 and any other cheap x86 processors that might come out have been far more interesting to me anymore.
It's not just "that things will work" with a RaspberryPI, it's that your one Pi can be repurposed over time. I have Pi Zero-W's that were home cameras, but are now home internet radios, and other Pi's that have been repurposed. Other manufacturers drop support for their products when they realise that their product just isn't that big a success. They are desperate to take market share from the Raspberry Pi's, but don't want the expense or commitment of the long term support.
The Pi's are a truly reusable components, and that makes them great value.
Good to see that you're making content on some more boards for my birthday this year my wife bought me a new SBC it happens to be a x86 board as well from Radxa. The X2l has proven to be an awesome addition to my workforce of tech. So much so I have begun to daily drive it as well. This SOM platform is definitely singing my song and would love to purchase one soon. Thanks for the awesome content as always.
0:51 so does it eat RPi for lunch or does it mop it up with its gpu? i don't even want to imagine how it does both X:
Eew! lol
I read "destroy Raspberry Pi" and envisioned seeing some magic smoke. Closest to this was at 3:22.
Wasn't disappointed, still a very informative and entertaining video. :)
Taking the company public and getting that free market hand involved is probably how you destroy Raspberry Pi
yeah the raspberry is for the people (soviet union music in the background)
It is a for profit company currently (Raspberry Pi Ltd) - the hand of the free market is what build the company up to today.
@@TylerDurden-pk5km There is a big difference between a private company under the umbrella of a non-profit organisation and the entire thing being a publicly traded stock.
First they will tell you that nothing changes.
Then the current leadership retires because they made a bunch of money from the IPO, then price increases and reduction in functionality because the stockholders want more revenue, then the inevitable personell cuts to "make the company more lean and efficient" and finally the company being a shell of its former self broken apart sold to the highest bidder so they can make trash under the RPi name.
@@bami2 That is not wrong - but that likely always was the plan. The foundation was used to generate goodwill / good looks at the early phases of the endeavor. Now it is payday for the effort - and investors.
But if the Raspberry PI Foundation has a 51% stake then that’s not so likely to happen
Very slick intro, I read the title and it was like you were talking to me personally!
i got called out with the "put it in a drawer and hope to use it someday"
Congratulations Jeff for the analysis. Recalling that the Raspbarry pi project was created to promote teaching in basic Computer Science in schools, allowing the democratization of knowledge.
It turns out that several manufacturers began to fight a battle for performance and focused on other objectives.
If I remember right, a lot of Chromebooks run on the n100
there are a bunch of cheapo NUC-alikes that are pretty cheap too.
In some cases it's even older than it. There are still many new chromebooks using N4020, a 5 year old celeron chip
@@sihamhamda47 The N5005 and 5010 seem to be taking over, at least in my local market. I saw one a while ago with an i3 1305U as well, a 5-core CPU!
@@DigitalJedi Aren't those rebrands of inferior older CPU's? N100 with DDR5 seems the best Minipc under 200 dollar
@erikkarsies4851 The N5005 and N5010 are Jasper Lake parts. They're little 10nm dies. N4000 series is Gemini Lake Refresh, which are the rebadged versions of older Gemini Lake.
N100 is of course better than any of these. We were not discussed which is the best, but which we see in the wild most often.
Hey Geerling, could you please make a video/video series on cameras? More specifically what to get for photography, videography, and both, as well as the basics of operating them for the above mentioned purposes? It would also be nice if you have your recommendations. Also, please include what you would recommend for filming/photographing eclipse.
It would be nice if the pinout for these edge connectors could be standardized. As it is, these carrier boards are useless without a specific make and model of compute module and I find that very wasteful and frustrating.
It seems like a lot of the Arm / RISC-V side went over to the Compute Module form factor with the dual Hirose connectors, so it's a bit of a de facto standard. But it is a very small board size and IO is limited by the pin count, for sure.
I wish the industry would come up with a standard for board-to-board, and a standard for edge DIMM-style connectors.
@@JeffGeerling they did it was the PC/104 standard in industrial settings, carries PCI/PCIe over a standard stackable carrier, then you have all the smaller ITX form factors, of course that would mean that ARM manufacturers would need to get their proverbial brown stuff together.
@@shemleshat the moment of the goal is to try to become the standard. Although for the SODIMM type models, Nvidia's Jetson boards seem to be the dominant pin layout for today.
You nailed. Everything has a forum or an app specifically compiled for Pi. The only thing that comes close is beaglebone.
Also, "the hardware is way ahead of the software" describes our modern world in so many ways.
The problem with x86 boards is that nobody uses them commercially so they just won't get the same levels of support as there's little money in it. There's also little Processor competition compared to arm.
That is a nice advantage for Arm-so many different chip variations exist, targeting low power, or integrated NPU, etc. With Intel, you have a couple Intel SKUs and almost nothing compelling from AMD under 6W.
It's an Intel laptp SoC and uses a normal UEFI firmware, what "levels of support" are missing? This is just a PC
No company has invested so much resources in supporting Linux and all it's variations as intel has. You will struggle to find stuff it's chips can't run not the other way around.
I'm subbin'! This guy is credible and has great cadence and communications skills for this subject matter. Thanks man!
I think I hear rumblings of Red Shirt Jeff!
This is exactly what I've been telling people for years. If you are a maker, and you need a mini PC for a hobby project, pi is almost irreplaceable, because of the incredible software support and the huge community (I learned to program as a hobby with PI). If you only need a system for streaming movies, then the other options are just fine, but for almost everything else, PI is often the best solution.
The value of the rPI is so bad that it's cheaper to buy an old ITX business machine. Instead of a $170 starter kit. And this doesn't even get into the possible $100s of dollars you may need to buy to get it to do the job you want. Oh and it needs a heatsink and a fan now too. *it's a terrible value*
Plus RasPis have got a run for their money durng the COVID shortages and their business decision to sell to commercial and industrial entities over "normal people". It opened up a massive market segment to other SBC makers and back filled the market gap where rPI was.
When other SBCs get broad case support for them the poor value rPIs will become in danger of having it's market share crippled even more.
heck some of those VESA mini computers will destroy a ras pi all day long and come with a power adapter in the box for not much more money.
Edit: "Windows on ARM is not as mature" Not an entirely true statement. More then ~85% of windows apps run natively on ARM now.
"It's hard but it's not complicated": I'm in love with the thought and experience behind the statement here... Industry and academic experience on my part concurs.
The problem here is HP elitedesk pcs.
They come around the same price point. And they are full systems including a case.
Also the market is flooded even with AMD variants below 120 used.
So if you are willing to give up GPIO on board for x86 and more performance I still just barely see a niche for these modules.
But not for most people. Most people that applies to will be happier with the HP elitedesk mini pcs.
And yes you heard me right AMD ryzen with their iGPUs baby!
Yeah, for a lot of uses those are miles ahead, even for 3d printers they could be very good since you can run webcam ai detection directly on them, I just wish there was something small, cheap with x86 and gpio
I agree.. second hand thin clients are cheap and there are forums dedicated to tweaking them (low watt/ performance )
@@mitchell6you Oh yeah these are neat too. Easily below 20bucks EVERYTHING included. But often even less computing power then a Pi.
But when you don't really need that computing power obviously the better choice at that price difference.
Recently bought 3 Fujitsu 720s with 4gigs ram and 8GB Storage (and power supply) for less then 40€, yes about 13 per piece! (shipping included!)
It's incredibly important to understand that raw power and low price are not everything! With proper support you get tested and working devices out of the box without any additional tinkering needed. While this might not be always what you are looking for it's really easy to underestimate the impact of support when dealing with SBC class devices.
Although I own a pi 5, I have to agree on price. Also, only youtubers like yourself can actually buy the things at MSRP. The rest of us have to pay much more from resellers. I paid a lot more than 80 bucks for my pi5. I paid 200 bucks for the pi4 a few months after they came out. This year I also bought an orange pi for the same price as the pi 4 (200 bucks) and it's WAY faster than the pi 5, plus it's got many more features.
Anyone in the St. Louis area can walk into Micro Center and buy a Pi 5 at $60 for 4 GB or $80 for 8 GB. I know, because that's where all but the review sample I own comes from. Micro Center has a bunch of stores around the US that have tons of stock right now too.
I buy these things at retail... I haven't paid more than MSRP for any of my 6 Pi 5s, though I did have to wait a month or so between buying my first and second because launch shortages are common with every Pi model.
I don't think MicroCenter counts for anything with less than 30 locations.
@NigelMelanisticSmith true, they don't even have one in Austin which is a big tech center
@@ironfist7789yep, I'd have to drive 4 hours to get to my closest one in GA. 8 hours of driving adds up to more money in gas than a Pi is worth.
@@NigelMelanisticSmithMicroCenter does mail-order too.
The N100 (N200? N97?) have turned up as the brain in quite a few handheld, or Ultra Mobile PCs lately. They come so close to what I want, yet always manage to get something "not quite right".
This SOM looks good, for example - until you have to mount it on another board. That puts a limit on your layout options, right out of the gate.
LattePanda Mu is $190 in the US. Byeeee!
The full kit is $190, the Mu by itself is $140 (just to be technical about it ;)
Link or It didn't happen
The support really is what got me to suck it up and just buy the Pi5. I knew there was more powerful boards out there, but no matter how painful it might have been to be an early adopter I knew it would smooth out relatively quickly. Some of the boards I was looking at had been out for quite a while and the first things I found when looking them up were people still trying to get past issues that had been there since the board's launch.
I don't agree with some of the decisions the RPi Foundation have made lately (and are going to make) and I'm not likely to buy another Pi5 unless this one breaks, but you can't argue with massive amount of support you'll get from either the foundation or the community if you decide to buy one. I'd love to see a company wedge itself in that gap they've made though. Wedge themselves in and pry it open, it'd benefit everyone.
Then AMD will, maybe?
I think this review nailed it. Absolute performance is not primary, cost is meaningful (especially for home / school projects) but comprehensive and accessible support means that projects by the 'unskilled' and 'naiivly adventurous' just work. My night time nature cam powered by a Zero would be the perfect example.
very well said. I remember fighting a Banana Pi, trying to get it to boot off the SPI flash only to find out it only boots from bus 0 which is not exposed anywhere. It would have been nice to have documentation that said so.
Thanks for mentioning where other SBC can beat-out the Raspberry Pi. It's helpful to learn about the competition to RPi, sometimes it's not the best choice, especially when recommending to less techie friends. They know and use x86, so it eliminates needed to grasp a new architecture, and all that comes with that. I don't think I'd recommend this board to anybody, expect for my own experiments/entertainment.
Is that a PCMCIA USB adapter I see in the drawer at 6:19?
Your value assessment is spot-on
The issue I had with the Pi 3, is that the cpu clock was used to derive spi bus clock.
When the cpu clock is throttled due to heat, so is the spi. I didn't try, but I believe the i2c and uart are also throttled.
I heard a lot of people had trouble trying to use the console uart due to this fact.
I don't know if this is still an issue on newer versions.
5:30 Can you use SteamOS to get around the support issues? I heard you can install it on basically anything.
Valve affirmed that SteamOS 3.0 will continue to be freely available, with the intention of allowing other hardware developers to take advantage of it and build similar handheld computing devices like the Deck.
I would posit this: All of these are exceptionally good deals. What I would challenge any of you to try is to make a simple PCB, no components, and send your gerber files out to a board house. You'd be hard pressed to get one board made under $100. That is without the cost of the components and manufacturing. Here is the REAL...REAL kicker. The cost of software development is HUGE. The fact that the pis are open source gives you opportunities you'd have NEVER had before. Support is underrated.
This triangle you're describing in this video also applies to Linux in MY PERSONAL opinion I think. There's tons of different distro's out there you can choose from without a clear one do it all since opinions seems to be devided. There distro's are free most of the time, and at least way better optimized than Windows in it's current state (so two out of three triangle points), however due to fragmentation I think there's lack of support besides the amount of choice that is overwhelming. What happened with Pi is that when you buy one, and you're a "noob", nearly any tutorial you check out recommends you to just download ONE Linux distro, which is Raspberri Pi OS itself. This automatically makes supporting the Pi easier, since so many people are using the exact same kind of distro which also means more drivers get written for it, and more fantastic package managers (al be it a different CPU architecture depending on the Pi generation). It's just like Windows in that regard, and I hope the Linux community gets less fragmented as a whole so Windows can finally be done for.
You absolutely nailed the support aspect. If I’m building some embedded system, I have zero interest in cutting my teeth on integrating the weird pitfalls from an unknown sbc provider. Raspberry pi dominates because someone else has already done that for you.
For device production you also want to be sure that you can get hold of said SoM / SoC in quantities without having to wait eons and then the line is discontinued. This is why our product based on the RPi 3B+ is still selling and is still cheap and easy to maintain. Even the nVidia Jetson SoM's are really expensive, not that available in bulk and the docs are not that great really. Good thing nVidia's forum has some great mods or I'd ditch them in a heartbeat!
Having a few N100-based exit points and servers lying around I can attest that they are both very power efficient and surprisingly strong.
Especially the integrated graphics - it handles shinobi like a boss for small sized business needs (~15 hd streams) as long as you mix and match continuous recording and triggered recording there's absolutely zero issue.
Can't wait to see if they are going to iterate on it next launch.
And back on topic: runs circles around a pi, they aren't even in the same class despite sharing very similar price points and power consumption
I absolutely agree with you, but I think we need to be careful when we consider power efficiency.
You're absolutely right in your video, efficiency is computational power over energy consumption, but we also have to consider those values in relation to each specific user scenario, because each scenario have different needs.
I'll give you an example, if you need a home server for hosting services, make backups and so on, all the power an N100 can give you is completely useless, an RPi4 is more than enough, for someone RPi5 may also be a little overpowered; on the other hand that's a user case where uptime is usually 24/7 and absolute power consumption does really matter (in some places more than others, think about EU vs US) and there's a significant difference in power consumption between RPi4/5 and N100.
I'm a big fan of the Latte Panda stuff. I used the V1 to run a LABView interface with the on board Leonardo performing the real time functions in a prototype fuel cell project I worked on with a former employer. Excellent value and an incredibly fast way to get up and running.
Some Great observations, Jeff. Thanks for sharing!
It seems you can only purchase the thing as a $190 kit -- at least, when you click the 'buy' link on the Latte Panda site, that's what you get with no obvious way to purchase just the compute module -- that's still a fair comparison to the PI5 as the latter includes gpio, hdmi, usb etc.. I would tend to use this as a small project/appliance machine similar to the Intel NUC or the old ASUS eepc compact machines.
They offer it for sale separately, too (just the module for $139), but you have to search on the store pages to get it. I'm guessing they push everyone to the kit since very few people would have any other way of using the Mu without the official carrierboard.
You are completely right. People buy the Pi because it just works. None of these other SBCs work as incredibly well as the Pi does.
Jeff, how much of the SUPPORT advantage the Raspberry PI Foundation in conjunction with Broadcom currently enjoy do you think is due to time to market/dominance/etc. and how much do you think is due to resource allocation as a relationship to revenue/etc.? I ask this because it seems to me that because RBP was so early to market, they have the preexisting development advantages such a market position entails.
Take for example x86 vs ARM vs other chip architectures-because x86 so successfully dominated the microcomputer market throughout the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, the architecture through economies of scale eventually pushed out even the monolithic custom fab graphics players like Sun and SGI [even Big Blue, IBM, barely holds on in some ways; were it not for their Mainframe business that still uses COBOL, even they might have been pushed out]. This dominance enabled x86 to rule supreme. Had these economies of scale and market dominance not occurred, the market today might look drastically different.
I point this out because manufacturers that come late in the game to markets [see Intel in the GPU marketplace, or even AMD for quite some time] have marked disadvantage when compared with their monopolist predecessors [not necessarily by practice, but by market share]. Even *_if_* a new manufacturer [like those listed] *_wanted_* to unseat the RBP, they'd be at a monumental disadvantage compared with the established makers. This widespread adoption means that the RBP Foundation and Broadcom have huge debugging advantages through economies of scale. It costs them less to debug and program for these devices when compared with the number of extant devices. The Foundation also has the advantage of (presumably) receiving massive tax subsidies or tax exemption status, which further advantages Broadcom's products [Broadcom/RBPF]. Add to this the massive user base with people constantly saturating their well established teams with debugging information means that these firms can more readily patch or fix problems as soon as they emerge. Widespread adoption typically enables faster recognition and implementation of repairs [assuming such repairs/updates are implemented in the pipeline to begin with] when compared with small startups. It's a lot easier to find solutions to a well established architecture than it is for a less implemented architecture.
What I'd like to know is-how you think this market saturation and time to market [when in the history of this development] impacted and continues to impact the popularity and adoption of alternative architectures in the super modular computing space? Do you think that these issues can be overcome? What would a firm have to do, in your mind, to overcome such barriers to market entry?
For instance, when people think about a "super/hyper modular computing device in a palmsize form factor", the vast majority of people [best guess, shooting from hip here; ideally, you'd get independent market saturation/surveys to determine these numbers as opposed to some rando on the net pulling shit out of his ass] think of a "Raspberry Pi". I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number of people didn't even know that alternatives existed (and even if they did, why would they bother when a Pi is mostly affordable?).
This is a longstanding problem in economics. In trademark law, when a product becomes synonymous with a type of item [like "Kleenex", "Band-Aid", "Adrenaline", "Popsicle", "Tylenol", etc., in the US], we say that the item has become a "generic trademark". Words like "cyberpunk" are in fact trademarks [as nutty as that may sound]. It's like "Googling". If it wasn't for Google toasting their own reputation in recent years, the act of "looking shit up on the net" would likely still be done almost universally by/through Google. The very act of "looking said shit up on the net via crawlers" in common American parlance is known as "Googling". How can other products or manufacturers [outside of maybe giant Chinese fab makers/manufacturers who have state sponsored aid/market protections] supposed to compete? Particularly, when a product's manufacturer [in this case, Broadcom] has the advantage of having the vast majority of the R&D costs be operated through a tax-exempt institution [in this case, the Raspberry Pi Foundation]. Irrespective of your feelings for or against such an institution, or general feelings about it, we must acknowledge the significant advantage such institutions possess, as well as how that advantage plays out in terms of market adoption.
It's one thing to create a better product [in principle], but another entirely when one is at significant economic disadvantage.
Even Intel stopped producing its small form factor modular PCs [alongside motherboards] even though for decades, Intel boards were considered the best for x86 Intel based processors [this is based upon inside market knowledge from back in the day], which announced last summer it was ending its production of mini NUC PCs.
I fell like this issue has a lot more meat to it that would make for excellent video fodder. The market isn't going to improve unless major changes occur. One method might be the implementation of open-hardware with open-software models [like what IBM has done in the workstation market] such that a prospective x86, ARM, or PowerPC based architecture could benefit. I don't know how many of these firms actually implement fully open-architecture solutions, but it would seem to me that if anyone is going to even have an ice cube's chance in Hell of even moderate adoption, it will require some kind of open-architecture to counterbalance the mass market monopoly powers of outfits like RBP/Broadcom.
You might consider doing like Gamers Nexus and creating a website with detailed, updated listings of the available products you know of. That way, buyers have resources to look this stuff up. If such a site/resource exists, then I would recommend integrating it into your reviews, as it gives us the ability to more readily compare.
Nothing will change unless people band together to share resources.
I have my SBC-reviews GitHub repo, which is linked in the description, and I do plan on making that into a small database-style website at some point.
@@JeffGeerling Awesome! I look forward to that!
PI support is a major plus in my book too. However I2S input is a hardware feature that has no support in current versions of the official OS, I would guess there are other unfixed issues that can be fixed with older versions, but I kind of like to work with the latest version.
I've bought many non-Pi SBCs and, as you say, their support levels don't remotely come close to that of the Pi.
Excellent video! Interesting comparison and this video very well articulates a lot of the concerns I've had about non-Pi SBCs
Thanks, Jeff, another entertaining and educational video. You have said what we have all thought for the last few years; when we buy any computer (or anything), there is an assumption that it just works. Raspberry Pi seems to be the only player in the market that makes that a priority. And who really has time to fix a product that you just purchased? Simple, yet profound thinking.
The Radxa X2L seems like more of a Pi killer. At $49 it’s the cheaper than a Pi 5 except x86 so compatible with so much more, actually takes USB PD for power instead of nonstandard 5V5A, and has built in M.2 support without needing some extra hat.
Jeff, you saw the Radxa X4? N100 at RPI5 prices? It was a paper launch i belive, kinda. Lets see if they can actually sustain the price.
Yeah, I've ordered one... hasn't arrived yet but we'll see!
On ExplainingComputers' video on the Radxa X2L in April, either the video itself or a comment said that supposedly the Intel Celeron line used by that particular Radxa model is no longer in production so the X2L almost certainly has a hard upper limit on quantity unless they switch to a different compatible Celeron. I'm wondering if this LattePanda Mu has a similar situation for its Intel processor that we should be concerned about.
The N100 is so widely used I think it'll be a lot longer before Intel abandons it.
i've been looking at the N305 cpu to replace my low-power opteron x3216 NAS/server with. Intel's E-cores are fine for general compute so all they need to do is put a whole bunch of them on a chip and engineer them to work efficiently together, and that's exactly what the N100, N300, and N305 are.
I have been thinking the same here. I built the little pi Nas in previous videos. I accidentally order the wrong top for the Rock 3c and not the Pi. So I ordered a Rock 3c and a Pi Hat. Good thing these are pretty inexpensive. The Pi build was simple. The Rock 3C I have struggled with it and the documentation or forums are just not the volume that the pi has. I like the Radax Product line; I just hope more get involved or linux just gets better with these SBC's.
You and me both! Radxa has some great hardware, I just think they spread the software side too thin with so many new products
I'd use my Radxa Rock 5B more if dual monitor would work. It is a known issue but there is no software update and the fix listed did not work.
The Pi is low power and does not need a fan.
So many people review a "Raspberry PI killer" that is similar price and faster, however it requires a fan and/or sucks up more wattage which makes it non-comparable for me.
Jeff, have you tried or covered the VMWare ESXi ARM Fling on Raspberry Pi? I'm testing it out this weekend on my Pi 4 to boot Windows 10.
This reminds me of those SBCs that connected to backplanes on a much larger scale back in the day. Pretty cool, overall.
Excellent video ! 🎉 bravo ! More like this please ❤
As they were laying there side by side, it seemed to me that the pin layout is the same as the Turing RK1, so am I right to assume that it at least physically fits into the Turing Pi2 cluster board? The next question then becomes: what is needed to make it actually work?
I've had to deal with so many software issues... Tried to get an Ubuntu image from the board maker, only to see that it was just never updated and some age old Ubuntu version. Okay, went over to armbian. Only a community supported version... Got ahead and built that only to then find out that not all the features where working and I had to fumble around and understand dt overlays. And only then after countless hours did it work and I still have to compile my own Kernel updates.
Like I don't even care about PI OS, I replaced that with an Ubuntu Server image every time anyway, as PI OS has some... Issues for production use, but hell I just want to get an up-to-date Ubuntu image with updates...
With the latte panda you can at least just take any generic x86_64 image and it will just work. That's just missing for the arm market...
Back then, I bough the original Latte panda x86 and after hitting my head to the wall to make it work for what I wanted I stopped and bought a Rasberry Pi 3. Sure it is way less performance but the big main issue Latte Panda is software/os/drivers/support indeed. I tried the forumns, ocntacting the support etc.... what's good is performance if you cannot do what you want with it.
The problem with the Mu is price and size. 🕵 LattePanda Mu Micro x86 Compute Module Evaluation Kit = LattePanda Mu Compute Module (8GB RAM and 64GB eMMC 👀) + Lite Carrier Board (smallest possible carrier board) + Active Cooler = $190, 146mm×102mm. There is a quite smaller and much cheaper N100 mini PC. For example Firebat T8 Pro Plus (16GB RAM and 512GB SSD 👀) = $130, 89.4mm x 89.4mm x 43.5mm.
I recently got a Pi Zero. One of the only issues I have with it is with support. If you are running linux or Pi OS, everything is good. When I try to find resources to do project with windows, it quickly becomes difficult.
My thing with this is, if you're getting a PC about the size of a thin client, why not just buy a thin client. for the price of decomm thin clients you get a case and a PSU for free while only giving a slight efficiency drop, but they're leagues faster.
Interesting; I've said the same about old laptops when the RPI was younger, but what about IO? Years ago, you could still get basestations for laptops with serial and, more importantly for easy hardware hacking, parallel ports. What do you get on a thin client? Though I suppose you can always attach Arduinos...
@@eekee6034they would need drivers, software to control it and a program actually running on it that listens for any gpio requests and if you want to reprogram it it will not be instant while gpio's can be used in a second
the value of a given SBC depends solely on your usecase, obviously having more is nice in case your needs change, but sometimes you only need the power, sometimes you only need the GPIO, and sometimes you may need something else
I would LOVE to see how this cluster will perform.
This was one of the hardware products I immediately ordered when I got the announcement email. Having an Intel x64 SOM is just too cool of a prospect for DIY projects.
conjoined triangle of sbc value HAHAHAHAHAHA
love the SV ref!
IMHO the biggest reason to use a RPi is the community & developer support. For any given task an RPI is probably not the cheapest option, but there's a very high chance that someone else has done the same task and documented how to do it.
Personally I have 3 Pis (so far) - a 0W which has served as a MythTV client and a micro retro console, a 3A+ for a vertical barcade (the 0W couldn't quite cut it), and a Pico which monitors the water temperature in my computer to control the fan speed.
The hard part with x86 soc is the short hop to micro atx or itx. Depends on the project, ofc, but decision making gets muddy.
I don't know... at $110 and need for more accessories to any serious use always forces my money at a complete mini-pc. The need for stuff like PCI-E at this price point just never comes up.
Right now I'm itching to buy the Minisforum S100, which directly competes the LattePanda Mu on price with exactly the same core hardware. The cool part is the included PoE!
The easy road for the support corner is to make your thing fully compatible with existing Pi accessories like carrier boards and etc, just like any successful Arduino clones all have the same "hat" connectors so you can just about slap on anyone else's "hat" and move along.
My most recently purchased Raspberry Pi is a desktop mini X86 for less money than the Pi cost during the tail end of the shortage. The line may have been permanently blurred when a complete mini is at or a few dollars within the $100 line.
Although when you need gpio you need to add drivers, arduino/mcu, software to drive it and just not gpio in an instant
1:43 plus the other key part: software; from Canonical with Ubuntu desktop (yes the RPi4 runs the full desktop, although a bit sluggish), raspbian OS, debian and a couple of dozens Linux variants for ARM without issue to distros with niche uses like media servers, routers, audiophile-grade music players, adware remover, arcade machines and hundreds of video and I/O real-world applications, the Pi got you covered.
The perfect thing for me would be an adapter for the Turing-Pi, then the Latte-Panda would be an insta-buy.
Because I lack of a Windows Server to test Things and when I could use the same board, I already head I don't need to free some other Rack-Spaces for a new Case...