12 PCI Express M.2 Slots on a Raspberry Pi!?
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- I take Alftel Systems' 12-slot PCI Express M.2 carrier board for a spin on my Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and mention their soon-to-be-announced 'Seaberry' Mini ITX board for the Compute Module!
Check out all the neat stuff Alftel makes: www.alftel.com
Follow all the PCI Express cards I'm testing with the Compute Module 4: pipci.jeffgeer...
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#RaspberryPi #Seaberry #ComputeModule4
Question was regarding how do we connect so many PCIe devices to a single lane PCIe interface on CM4, and answer is very simple - through PCIe switch silicon. CM4 features x1 lane PCIe rev 2 at root complex with a standard bandwidth 5.0 GT/s or 500 MB/s or 4.19 Gbps bi-directional, in other words bandwidth that roughly equates to having x4 gigabit network interfaces at full blast. Whatever you do with this bandwidth one will saturate x4 CM4 CPU cores way before reaching this figure. Idea behind is to have a simultaneous access to multiple devices that do share this bandwidth and not necessarily consume all of it. Think about is as of USB hub but in PCIe domain. When it comes to Google Coral TPUs they are fundamentally different because they are PCIe masters, not slaves, and x1 lane bandwidth will be A LOT in terms of running multiple inference models simultaneously or one big in parallel. Idea behind developing Kickstater board is to expose CM4 PCIe to the max and allow developers and integrators to be flexible in terms of peripherals choice.
Explained well, thanks! (And in case anyone was wondering - Alexander is the one who sent me this board :)
so things like TPU should be okay, but multiple nvme storage with high utilization in each drive wouldn't be ideal right? seeing the board came with E key
@@haziqsembilanlima People slow down the PCIe link to something like gen 2 because NVMe is too fast for CPUs, and the performance is worse that hard drives when NVMe "acts up."
"If you give mouse a cookie..." - all we are trying to do is to give community a chance to explore PCIe with RPi (CM4) and not an attempt to build a CM4 based power house capable to move gigabytes of data around. With this respect x1 PCIe rev 2 is more then enough. As an example to compare - during one of our DEFCON presentations we monitored WiFi traffic on conference floor with 32 radios and thousands of attendees around and were able to achieve ~25K frames/sec rates and all this was done over a single USB 2.0 connection. Now, comparing to PCIe rev 2 5 GTransfers/second bidirectional I can guarantee that you will kill your CPU well before reaching even half of this bandwidth unless you will use specialized zero copy network device drivers or N2DISK/DISK2N specialized storage device drivers.
1 gigabit network interfaces are just so 1999. cheap retail 2.5 gigabit and covid scalping! 5gigabit chips is it now. preferably separate dual and quad ports so you can 'bridge' them all until the scalping retail unmanaged switch vendor's lower prices per port we will pay.
Well... it looks like twelve sharing one lane.... that party seems a bit crowded.
All aboard for the Pi party on the 1x 🚌!
You bring the juice, i'll bring the switches
It's a bit more complex, as PCIe is point-to-point and such PCIe boards (for non-split-lane motherboards) have their own PCIe switch.
So among them, the various PCIe cards could have whatever the switch provides them. But yes when talking to the Raspberry Pi, all peripheral need to make do with the bandwith of a single lane.
Alexander Zakharov has done a nice pinned comment, and you'll find multiple other examples, usually as answers to questions "how do I a connect multiple M.2 NVMe SSDs on an old motherboard that doesn't split its PCIe 16x and 8x slots ?"
Did I miss the party? I got caught in a bottleneck.
Same as any daily commute...
Hard to imagine a 40 Watt, 24TB NAS Server.
They can always get extra power like any modern graphics card
If you will dig dipper in PCIe standard (best overview believe it or not can be found at wikipedia) you will see that standard prescribes certain limitations in power delivery vs card width (x1 vs x8 vs x16 lanes), and main power is sourced from 12V rail. Some manufacturers do obey this rule, but majority do not. If you will look at CM4 IO board schematic you will see that PCIe 12V rail is delivered directly from main 12V power supply, and these 12V rail pins do belong to x1 interface pins, which in turn will deliver all required power to the card in question. Of course one should be careful not to create smoke and flames due to certain current limitations that pins can handle. So, if you are short in power budget with CM4 IO card that just use more powerful power supply (you been warned about sanitized power ratings)
Harder to imagine what you'd use for backing it up.
Well, it's only 6.5TB at the moment but my current build is at 20W including the vdsl router. 3x2tb nvme on a 4 lane expander plus another USB->SATA 0.5TB. I'm using a Wyse Dx0Q thin client, not a PI. I needed the low power to ride over 8 hour + power cuts without a room full of batteries.
@@LesNewell I would suggest to look at TalentCell 12V battery at Amazon, just search for PB240B1 or PB120B2 model - these are 12V/5V 142W batteries - the best you can probably find on a market from any perspective (price vs capacity vs quality of cells inside). We used them for mobile enclosures in a field with great success.
We need special episode with Red Shirt Jeff as a host!
Every time I see a Jeff video I know he’s up to something new and crazy. I click
The one guy that is sniffing WiFi traffic is going to have a hard time with this setup 😅
Current Kismet implementation fully supports multi-radio concept and this particular board was used with great success being populated with x12 Intel AX200 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax radios combined with a) internal antenna array, and/or b) active RX antenna splitter similar to what we have on Tindie.
This thing looks so weird. Good job!
1 Raspberry Pi, 12 Graphics cards, that’s what I want to see! xD
If until next time you’re Jeff Geerling, who are you during the videos?
That's... a good question.
Red shirt Jeff
One PCI Express lane feeding twelve M.2 modules?
It sound rough (it is), but realistically you'll hit a CPU bottleneck before a pcie, even on an overclocked Pi4 with the revised SoC. Ideally it could be used for many low-bandwidth devices or a handful of devices that are only occasionally loaded up, which is probably why they aren't advertising M-key slots that would be used for fast SSDs
Why do these cards always remind me of ZX81 (Timex 1000) ram pack wobble. One wrong move and all your data is somewhere...
I can already see it: Crypto mining on a pi in 2021. Hahahahaha.
2:19 Hold up there bucko, you're not just going to walk past that. A 4 TOP TPU in M.2 format, and a way to connect multiple ones to a Pi 4?
@ZackFreedman
Having problems with the driver, unfortunately :( github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/issues/44
@@JeffGeerling :(
We successfully tested this particular board with x12 Coral TPUs being plugged in legit platform PCIe slot (x86) and ran Google parallel testing under Ubuntu. The problem right now is to gently "force" Google folks along with RPi folks to take a deeper look at this issue. Since our proposed Kickstarter board will have a standard provision for x2 PCIe lanes per M.2 slot, one will be able to utilize their new offering that is dual Coral TPU in M.2 form factor. Simply put - x4 M.2 slots with dual PCIe lanes populated per slot equates to 32 TOPS performance for TensorFlow Lite inference job. $39 per M.2 card at mouser.com - we as interested and motivated community should really lobby both Google and RPi guys to make it happen with 64-bit RPi OS or Ubuntu. Fingers crossed they will move.
@@alexanderzakharov4249 Maybe this board could power the next Mars rover, with advanced AI/ML capabilities ;)
@@alexanderzakharov4249 Oh wow, I just asked above about release timeframes. KICKSTARTER? Yeah, that's a no-go for me. Kickstarter is a garbage tier card game peddling site these days. Might I suggest crowdsuppy.com? It's a MUCH more reputable site for tinker/hobby electronics. I think it is much more targeted to the audience you are looking for. I would imagine you'd get far greater interest and participation there than on Kickstarter. People like me got tired of their lack of interest in backers.
Tell RS-Jeff that you appreciate his energy and enthusiasm, and that you think he would be a contributing member on the next Away Mission... We all know how long Red Shirts last on unknown planets.
Red shirts on away missions last as long as they are needed.
If the Pi foundation announced the planned future for the reserved pins on the Compute Module connection (specifically which pins will function as future PCI-E lanes for the Pi5 and beyond) then a board like this could be made forwards-compatible with future boards, too.
You always bring the coolest rpi4 experiments 🧪 🔬 🧫
Nice work testing all those boards man! your videos motivated me to buy my first pi ever, can't wait to start messing around with it!
You get a like for the bloopers ... and hitting your desk
I want to see this board populated with 12 Google Coral tpu's and running an LLM.
Jeff this is NUTS
I am seeing this board to be scalped by cryptominers...
Can we add m.2 Google coral to raspberry pi 4 with m.2 adaptor?
CAPS MAKES EVERYRHING MORE LEGIBLE!
Here at 8 views and 3 comments
M.2 graphics card? Going to have to look this up, might help my laptop with Davinci Resolve.
LTT did a video on it recently. It's definitely not going to help with Davinci Resolve. It basically exists to give a server a VGA output if it doesn't have one (either physically or because of some damage).
@@LewisUpperton ok, thanks. I've seem other hacks to extend what it ultimately a PCIe out to external box, but those are hacky.
A thunderbolt dock is a much better solubltion but connecting a GPU via M.2 might be worthwhile if you are okay with a ribbon cable coming (assuming there's space in the chassis for you to route one) out of your laptop. You'll also have to partially disassemble/assemble your laptop every time you want to transport it but the performance will still be better.
I've done a similar thing with a mini PCIe (gen1 x1) slot for fun and it wasn't exactly great due to the bottleneck. M.2 on the other hand gives you 4 gen3 lanes so you won't be bottlenecked, the only thing you need is an adapter if you already have a PSU and a GPU so why not give it a try?
It sounds that the weakest link on this board is the raspberry pi itself? ... What is the purpose of the raspberry pi again?
Fun, education, low cost.
it's pretty hard to use Any bare bones PCB without a cpu and some *unoptimized code today, other than as a table leg wedge of course.
* David May uk transputer computer scientist..
May's Law states, in reference to Moore's Law:
Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law.
Can you make a video about Windows on Raspberry (WoR) project, please? You can install the real Windows 10 ARM version on Raspberry Pi, thanks to this project. It's not officially supported by M$, but these guys did a great job. Even x86 apps now working with the latest x86 emulation layer, and 64-bit x86 apps run almost at a native speed. We are just waiting for the proper wireless and gpu acceleration drivers.
By far the best jokes of any Tech channel!
second
The rockpi offers 4 pcie2.0 lanes, as well as the rockpro64, the Odysee and the Odroid H2+. Hopefully an SBC comes out with Ryzen2 embedded and 4x PCIe3.0 lanes and that board should make a hell of a NAS
It was not about a number of PCIe lane or PCIe rev - it was about giving to RPi community possibility to test and develop for PCie domain, and make it as easy as possible. Coming back to the point made earlier - main bottleneck in all these ventures is not PCIe bandwidth, but rather application layer that saturates CPU cycles faster then data saturates communication link.
All this and no one has made a simple Pi footprint carrier board with a Mini PCI Express or M.2, yet.
Key word is yet-I know a couple people working on it.
Jeff can you make a video talking about the differences between M.2 slots and adapters between them? I couldn't find a trustable resource about this information when I was researching if the M.2 slot of my motherboard which only accepts B M key SSD could work with an adapter to control a wifi module with A E key interface
I am considering it. To be honest, I've been sorting through my own confusion on the topic for months now. I'm only beginning to grasp why there are like 20 different key combos (still not sure why, just I know there *are* :P).
@@JeffGeerling Jeff - contact me for material. It was a very good point.
More importantly, when is Red Shirt Jeff going to launch his RUclips Channel?
Hi Jeff, I just e-mailed pineberrypi about a hat/bottom for rpi5 to have support for multiple ( 2?) m.2 slots. Connected to the pcie connector Of the rpi5. Michał Gapińsk already answered and they are already experimenting with it. No promises though :-) greetings from the netherlands!
LOVE THE KISMET SHOUTOUT! I wardrive as often as I can!
Also the wifi pineapple you have shown on the video (the mk vii) isn't the one used in Silicon Valley (Tetra)
Not hating, just nerding out because I appreciate the mentions of both! Love Kali!
Haha I just *knew* someone would point that out. And you did. Have my like.
@@JeffGeerling I have both sitting literally next to me! As well as a nano, don't judge me.
Proposed Kickstarter board will certainly be more "potent" vs tetra and Pineapple in terms of radio cards choice capability and completely open architectural concept. It is too early to say, but how about cognitive sniffer when one would combine Kismet or aircrack-ng monitoring ability with TPU based inference?
@@alexanderzakharov4249 sounds worth testing, unfortunately that's beyond my knowledge but at least I now have a goal :)
@@DaPanda19 just try it out with your laptop (hopefully it does have supported WiFi card) - visit kismetwireless org web site and take it for a spin.
Stop please, this card is looking too much too great, I have "rigor mortis" looking at my pee-pee (Cf tv series Resident Alien S01E04).
Mate what about putting 12 m.2 to 4 or 5 or I don't now how many sata connecter that would just be crazy
I have seen them on aliexpres yesterday and now this video so I thought about it
You can run your target search on Amazon i n order to figure out M.2 form factor SATA SSD vs M.2 PCIe NVME SSD and quickly discover that current NVME prices are a par or lower comparing to M.2 sata drives. Of course it is possible to utilize the same design concept and build similar board with, let's say, x8 2280 NVME drives placeholders.The question is if there is any demand for such a gadgets, and if it does make sense to connect x8 NVME devices to a single x1 PCIe rev 2 lane.
Alftel - What a cool company!
I can't wait to see some of the really cool gear that comes out of this company! Excellent!!
Just bought your cluster book :) Am checking if there are cheaper competitors to Rpi 4.. Dont need wifi, bluetooth, csi, display ports etc. CM4's and carrier board combo - too expensive. I wonder if Armbian supports some type of octacore arm64 sbc (if one actually exists).
'96Boards' you're not going to like the prices and their Not turnkey/appliance options
@@paulmaydaynight9925 Ta for that.. I'll also be checking Jay at LearnLinuxTV channel for forthcoming vid on having cheap old laptops as servers in a cluster environment. Old HP G1 8GB Chromebooks are selling for about 125 euro at the mo on Ebay.
Are you going to make a video on running all 4 coral units at once?
Thank You
no⅄ ʞuɐɥꓕ
🇯🇪🇫🇫
🇬🇪🇪🇷🇱🇮🇳🇬
Awesome the Work You do is outstanding. "closely following...."
Those redshifts... always living dangerously.
You're a naughty boy, Jeff : there isn't any link on your web site front page pointing to the pipci subdomain you cite in this video :/)
i followed the link to the card on your site could not find it, its just got a heap of RF stuff which is cool but looking at the 12 m.2 card.
ok and what? more than half of the year later and nothing, great idea like matrix voice and other similar projects, but again - silent.
That thing would make a MEGA pwnagotchi!!!
@jeff is there a provision to cold reset the M. 2 drive without removing the board power supply
i would create a pi based nas
you can do that already, And it's optimised for omv already see 'ExplainingComputers Raspberry Pi OMV 5 NAS 2020' , add a cheap powered usb3 hub and a bunch of usb3 hd's ,done. add a £30 usb3 2.5Gbit/s dongle (at both ends) if your drives can read/write quicker than antiquated gigabit ethernet, and make sure the 'folder to ram' plugin is installed and active.
Sounds like the master wifi hacker device!! Amazing!!!
BOOOOORING! DO MORE GPU STUFF PLEASE!
Oh I did not realize that M.2 is for WiFi as well, I was thinking that it is only for SSD kind of storage.
Depends on the key... you have A, E, A+E, M, B+M, B, heh... so many different keys. They can all be adapted... mostly. But the ITX carrier board would have pretty much every standard covered :D
M.2 is just a form factor.
God forbid 'em to work with risers and... You know... :(
"M.2 graphics card"
Wait *WHAT?*
ALF-Tel? So alien tech from planet Melmac?
Is there any way to get this PCI Express Carrier Board now?
0:43 but less is more
so if more is always better
that means less is always better
so i choose 1
Wait so for crypto mining purposes you can (technically) have 1 rpi4 and many gpus through this compute board??? Lol....
So far I haven't found anyone who's gotten a GPU to successfully work over PCIe with the Pi, and many of us have been trying pretty hard :P
@@JeffGeerling BUT I THOUGHT YOU DID!!! I mean i would never try, I use the pi 4 with argon m.2 case (after watching your videos) for server purposes but I'm pretty sure I watched a video of you managing to run 1 GPU over the PCI express lane? Also a here is a crazy wild idea (probably only you would know if this would work so here we go:)). I know you like building multi pi kubernetes clusters but, if you hooked up a raspberry pi, a usb 3 hub and a few intel neural compute sticks, would it be possible to make a neural network super computer using raspberry pi? Im not even sure if you can stack neural compute sticks to be honest but could be a fun project for you :)
Now...why is it that I foresaw the EdgeTPUs...? Oh, that's right...before I watched this, I commented in passing that you could plow in 48 trillion INT8 inferrence ops into a Pi4 via that path
Wicked!
I'll never get these five minutes back.
I understand 25% of this.......LOL. (EVERYONE CAN LAUGH AT ME)
...THATS FINE...REALLY). I WANT JUST ONE SETUP WITH THIS OR SIMILAR. I WANT 1 BEAST. LOL. 1) FIRST DREAM IS GOOD GRAPHICS AND BOOT FROM NVME. 2) I WANT TO SET UP BEST NETWORK SECURITY. 3) I WANT A GOOD SERVER FOR ALL DEVICES TO SEND DATA TO FOR STORAGE. 4)I WANT A GOOD HOME ASSISTANT CONTROL SERVER.
I KNOW I SAID ONE... THATS EHAT I CAN SAVE MONEY FOR/AFFORD - MAYBE. LOL
I DEARLY LOVE THIS CHANNEL AS YOU HAVE THE COOLEST ITEMS / VIDEOS THAT ALWAYS SURPRISE.!
I ASK, IF YOU MAKE SOMETHING PLEASE GIVE VERY CLOSE UP SHOTS OF YOUR SCREEN WHILE TYPING SO I CAN FREEZE VIDEO AS NEEDED. IF YOU ATTACH OR SOLDER ITEMS PLEASE SHOW EACH SLOWLY AND CLOSE UP. BEING NEWBIE, I CAN ACTUALLY COPY ALL MOVES AND BE SUCCESSFUL.
GODBLESS! MOST HUMBLE APPRECIATION!
25% understanding is perfect - with my 30+ years in high tech I am still learning one-two new things on a daily basis. This is why Jeff's channel is so useful and informative, not to mention his brilliant manner to present things.
So the question is, will this work? Can you put an Nvidia GTX 1070 for example, and start trying to game with the Rasberry Pi? If you're going to get one of these in the future, can you do a video where you game with this?
Finally! We have our Seaberry Pi carrier board at CrowdSupply pre-launch directory - go to CrowdSupply, Browse, Pre-launch and check it out! It will be our chance to see how many people are interested and will support us in this venture.
Finding m.2's in high capacity is going to be the issue because at this stage for a ssd m.2 you would max out at 12TB, with access 8TB m.2's 96TB wouldn't be nothing to sneeze at
Wait... do they still sell MAPP gas??
Hmm... Nice. What I want to see is that they can include a 10GbE network card in PCIe Gen4 x1 AIC. Or maybe a networking suite like WiFi, Bluetooth and 10GbE network all in PCIe Gen4 x1 card.
Red shirt Jeff stole the snow!
As a data scientist I don't understand most of what being said in this video, man but one day I hope I can fully understand all of that is being said. That way I can appreciate the content more
Jeff i Haven't started the video but I feel like it won't work. Jeff I am telling you.
how should we add a m.2 ssd into our cluster? Currently I am using an expansion board which keeps it a clean cluster
Were you able to run corals? Or still having MSIX 32 bit compatibility issues?
MSI-X issue seems fixed... at least sorta. Right now the driver just locks up when I try using it on 64-bit Pi OS.
See this issue for details: github.com/google-coral/edgetpu/issues/280
@@JeffGeerling yea, I saw your reply on the git. Google team is slow to respond, Modberry has a product planned for cm4 with coral but you take my hopes up. Is there any resource explaining how does this pcie switch work exactly?
@@kdsbored The switch is part of the PCI spec, kind of like a 'USB hub' where you only have one bus, but can route traffic on that bus to different devices. Broadcom sells a number of switches: www.broadcom.com/products/pcie-switches-bridges/pcie-switches
First
no one cares
@@mldalex I care.
@@andrewakrause me three
1 giga (Jeff's you tube dream)....😀
👍
I need this in my life
its like board is ad like wireless thingy. if not it would be "you can add 12 ssd drives"
Too bad Alftel won't sell it unless you want to place a high volume order. So why are you getting our hopes up?
Correction - this is not true, check out our Tindie store where we have these cards on sale.
well you don't say "go ahead" in every sentence.....my pet peeve.
There are plenty of pci-e compatible expansions that could be plugged into a PCI-e gen2 slot of x8 length (or even x16). It is a waste how they don't generally exist (and for cheap) considering how so many people have a empty graphics card slot they'd never use (and on a reasonable PC for daily usage, such as a quadcore of 2GHz or 3GHz). It's odd that niche is not filled considering plenty old chips (xeon especially) have new mboards made (especially in China) running ddr3 just fine (includiin dual or quad channel). Also many people will run, say, an i5 CPU and upgrade the 4460 graphics up to an rx570 (or a bit less). A PCI-e gen3 card running at x16 could have eight m.2 slots of nvme (at speeds of x4 gen2 PCI-e) and would run fine even in x8 mode on a Gen2 PCI-e slot. Or even such a card for nvme m.2 storage but also with a few 10Gbps rj45 i350 ethernet ports on it would be good (and maybe an SFP). Plonking a load of IO on such a card would be cool to bring up an old PC to more modern capabilities would make sense and could include some usb 3.1 on there too. If the bandwidth saturates, just use only what you need.
Canadian company Amfeltec makes cards exactly as you described - check them out.
@@alexanderzakharov4249 Thanks for the heads up. I've seen somewhat smilar ASUS ROG cards. It all seems a tad pricey tbh. Although it is nice it exists (so I'm not knocking it). Eventually a standard _"decent enough and won't break"_ chipset needs to become a common-denominator and so people will white-label it and make a chip based on that. It can be a pity not to do that because eventually somebody will figure out that plonking an FPGA on a custom PCB (PCI-e) will allow for a multiplier tree to (half life style) divide down a x16 slot into 3 of x4 slots. At which point, nobody will bother with such premade boards.
I hope this means that we will see some x16 GPUs in that slot. Maybe someday the drivers will even work! I'm surprised that Ubuntu didn't work with the whole PCIe GPU thing.
Red shirt Jeff reminds me of this guy muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Crazy_Harry
When are we going to get a pi with gigabit, sfp+ and decent wireless, so I can build a pi router 🤣
The best is when router and WiFi AP are separate devices. Regarding sfp+ you can get rb4011. It can be found used under $100. That is already an overkill for home but why not.
I have that blue shirt. ChefConf
Ha! Nice! It rarely makes it to the top of the ol' pile of shirts, but it did yesterday.
when your hand clicks linke before even being able to say f**** yeah...
Sweet, but not $600 sweet. Ouch
Where did you get $600 figure from?
@@alexanderzakharov4249 from their site. I chose the pci-e and price tag was $600.
You are looking at wrong card - this particular one that was shown by Jeff is not on alftel web site, but is available from our Tindie store.
@@alexanderzakharov4249 i guess... please link the correct m.2 carrier board then.
Did he just say graphics card and raspberry pi in the same sentence?
Hak5
FOURTH!!!
rebol
I'm Canadian, I severely distrust things made in Canada.
Gadget is gadget and has nothing to do with where it was made or designed. Good designs as well as bad ones generally speaking do not have "country of origin", but rather people behind it, regardless of their geographical location. In a current state of technology and modern distributed approach tech teams are usually spread all around the world, so "made in" is somewhat last century "flavored" terminology. This particular concept was inspired by Defcon Wireless Village folks and this bunch of good people is from all over the world, and btw I am the only Canadian among them as far as I know.
12 PCI Express M.2 Slots = 12 PCI E slots at x4 (or x1 pcie2 speeds in this slots case) in a far smaller space, and a few passive ribbon's. that's a good future proof thing as long as they dont over charge and over value this active carrier, and so instantly kill it in the retail diy markets here... ohh a covid scalping! $300 for an active pcb DOA then, have fun playing with it, cha Ching No Sale.
i noticed that's x4 slot so near full speed allowing for the internal? switch speed.
if someone ever bother's to actually make something we actually want to pay for and put's a 'few' real DMA PCI E x4 synthesised block's on an arm retail core we can buy and use 'for cheap' along with the required upstream code, that's cool.
We do work hard as we speak with the bill of materials in attempt to make this planned kickstarter offering as affordable as we can. Overall design rotates around PCIe switching silicon that was used in our previous designs that are used by a number of customers wordwide. Of course, as with any high-tech project, there are things that may go wrong but we are confident in our design approach and ability to bring to community a solid and affordable design.
Once you need PCI-E it is better to use X86 anyway
From ease of "drop-in" software stand point yes, but from purely power and cost effective perspective not. At some point Intel tried aggressively approach embedded market with Atom family by introducing silicons like E8000, but .... as it always happen with big corp somebody made executive decision to sunset this activity and all we have left is a very few offerings aimed for embedded market and very few small form factor boards/modules supporting them. We really did enjoy E8000 Braswel module fro solid-run company, but they also decided to drop it in favor to ARM. ARM on the other hand made significant advances and we have plethora of quality silicons with PCIe interface. Agree, RPi CM4 is probably not the best vehicle to handle PCIe business, but since they do have it and exposed in CM4 product, why not to take it for a spin and see what we can "squeeze" out of it? Another point to make is hundreds of affordable HAT offerings to implement variety of interesting projects starting from home automation and all a way to AI - adding PCIe to the pile will certainly add capability and functionality.
Do you ever sell those little gadgets you don't use anymore?
Did you really just compare the $3200 Airbud -X9 with a Tetra at $200. Even the new enterprise version is $350. I like what you do but have go a comparing similar priced items and capabilities. It’s a raspberry pi compute module not an AMD THREADRIPPER Pc.
Airbud-X9 was purely PCIe Mini based model in a custom case with Intel mobo inside and other stuff. Coming soon kickstarter board (based on design that was presented by Jeff in this video) is just a carrier that supports a) RPi CM4 module with up-to 8G ram depending on model, b) any RPi HAT module, c) any commercially available PCIe Mini or M.2 radio (x4 of each), and c) complete freedom of Ubuntu/RPi OS software offering. In other words, build whatever you want and whatever suits your needs, including WiFi6e AX210 or whatever will be next. Hopefully Google and RPi folks will figure out Coral TPU stuff, which will bring AI aspect to variety of applications. It's a development platform ready to be customized as a product. You have to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges. Multi-radio gadget for pentesters and other wireless stuff is just one of the applications. What Jeff was showing is PCIe switch based design as add-on card, and kickstarter carrier board will utilize the same concept. When it comes to wireless sensor or sniffer, this board will be much more flexible to my taste. Of course nothing is black and white, and as with any development platform it will require certain knowledge and skill, BUT, board will allow to minimize add-on hardware adaptation headache and go straight to desirable application with PCie components of your choice. Once board will be ready for the drive we will test it with multi-radio arrangement and Kismet and will share results with community. It will be interesting to see how RPi ARM silicon will handle heavy wireless capture as Kismet sensor.
@@alexanderzakharov4249 I like the sound of the new board and the plug. I will probably back it. However, my point is fair and valid. I have signed up to your site so that get the Kickstarter details. While I am at it. I have a kit already built with Hackrf , a couple of Tetras and a couple of yard sticks. All of these work together in terms of Rf data, information exploration and community research. Processing as you say is another matter. All the best
@@zen1752 We are about to launch this project with CrowdSupply which seems a better vehicle vs Kickstarter to run this activity. I will ask Jeff to update this post once campaign will roll out.
I’d never wear tshirt with chef logo :)
Maybe I am not in the know..... but does anyone want a 8GB CM4 with 12 TPU's?
Answer (possible) - cloud edge device - check coral.ai web site to get a sense. BlueTooth/WiFi gateway? WiFi monitoring station? LTE modem station? Data mining gadget? Cognitive Software Defined Radio? With industry moving towards minimization M.2 became de-facto a standard for all modern add-on card development.
One more point to make - Coral as PCIe device concept goes is PCIe master, so yes, you do want memory at your disposal because it will be used by TPUs.
Id love to load one up with Epiq Sidekiq SDRs
12 transmits, 12 receives between 7MHz to 6GHz
Last time I checked their MOQ (Minimum Ordering Number) was something like 1K. But it will certainly be nice to have as a super SDR. The only (probable) issue is to have them synchronized - not sure if they do have a separate sync clock input, unless PCIe clock reference is good enough, but in this case one will more likely implement a high precision local clock source on-board rather that use one that provided by CM4 PCIe interface. From design and functionality stand point system will not care where clock came from - from PCIe root complex interface or it is local to the board.
So since they can link, does that mean Cluster ready?
Can a Cluster/kubernetes run an OS?
X16 slot as in you can put a full size gpu on that thing ??? What the hell lol hahah
Remember that even though it is x16 lane slot, only x1 lane is electrically connected - rationale is to be able to plug in ANY card and have it to use x1 lane - this way one will not need any riser cards or cables to evaluate any PCIe card with CM4
Mapp gas isn't made in the US anymore. Red shirt Jeff was using Mapp substitutes. Don't tell em.
ICan'tBelieveIt'sNotMappGas
Kinda makes me sad that Seeed Studio isn't making that dual ethernet port RPI compute mode board.....
I hadn't heard they cancelled it. I thought they were still planning on making it. Hardware often hits production delays, it's really hard to get a new device into production.
Interesting hardware 👍