It costs more than 15x the price of a pi here so as a pi comparison it's pretty useless because price was its defining point. As a powerful SBC, it'd work in some niches where cost isn't as much as an issue.
It's about 8x the Price of a Pi 4 8GB. For that you get 2 NVME Slots, 2 additional M2 slots, lot of performance. And the GPIO you may need as a Edge Server. This is a Raspberry Pi turned serious for Commercial use. And for that the price is okey, especially as there is a 32GB Version out there with the inline ECC Feature it is a perfect board for Running in a Commercial Manufacturing Machine, or the Homelab Server. Personally i can say that the Performance of a Pi 4 8GB is okey, but in lot scenarios you run into Performance Problems at some point and one Slot is taken by the USB to SSD Card, as SD Cards tend to die and so on. I have several Pi but the big one i used had to be replaced by an old AMD ITX Board with an A10-7850k on it, as the Desktop Performance was lacking. Now i got a USB to GPIO and can use the old RS232 of the board.
It's a realistic point of comparison because the Pi is both hard to obtain, and really struggles to produce a performant environment for modern computing. Don't get me wrong, it's cool and low power, but, the guys running entire homelabs on them are masochists.
@@jttech44 How is it a trash title? He didn't say it was a Pi alternative, the fact he said its faster than Mac Mini should make it obvious its not remotely in the same price bracket and the comparison is based on it not being much bigger than a Pi, not the price. If you need a fast PC that includes GPIO, its a very compelling device. Its quite clear the title is comparing how much power you get in the physical size, not the cost. Your car comparison would only make sense if the cars physically were a similar size.
You can get a Latte Panda. That's doing way better than looking for Raspberry Pis where I am. I've been on rpilocator a few times a week for the past month and none of the vendors where I am have them. Especially not the 8 GB models. Obtainable vs unobtanium (or scalper prices)... I'll go with the panda
$579 USD for the base model of 16gig and no SSD, it's not cheap. Interesting for niche applications I guess, personally I'd prefer an AMD chip were I going this route.
@@0xKruzr it is a niche product but you are going to see near peer hardware that can match a fair bit of it and arguably many implementations are unnecessarily obsessed with that SFF or SBC configuration. I can see perhaps some implementations that may benefit but the cooling is going to be something that is of concern in hostile environments potentially. I am all for these solutions but they do face a fair bit of competition if the architecture options are a bit open.
I'm right there with you I recently got a Beelink mini pc with a 5800h and 16GB of ram and a 500gb drive for $300 if you want a small computer for performance not features.
@@davocc2405 tbh I'm not really all about the form-factor -- my needs are "10GbE+ networking and plenty of room for NVMe/SSD," pretty much anything that fits that bill I'll be interested in, but the form-factor is nice because I'm pretty limited on space at home
For me the pricing is making this a niche product. If we were talking $200 or less this would change the landscape completely. When you can get a more powerful mini PC for less and be able to upgrade the memory. I already own a arduino. That was the attraction with the first couple of SBC. Compact, cheap and powerful. I'm not sure it's any of these
This is actually quite cheap for what it is. People tend to ignore the overall tech price increases in high end devices and the fact that inflation is a thing
200$ is an insane price to ask for and comparable mini PCs cost at least several hundred dollar more than the sigma. The cost of the individual parts alone would exceed 200$. Building a device with a mini PC and an Arduino would also increase weight and size by several hundred percent. And why would the market about you personally already owning an Arduino? Just because you don't know the possible use cases doesn't make this a niche product.
The more look at the Sigma, the more I like it but i dont need it :) Its positioning is not clear. It could be a great desktop computer with enough horse power.... but for it does not have a case (unless you do 3D printing...). For a router / industrial computer we could have less power but would prefer something passive-cooled and more sturdy. Integrated Arduino -- this is an outdated chip -- moreover I miss the value of having it integrated...this is not how we develop microcontroller projects. All still could be fine if the price is adequate --- unfortunately it is not. Additional note - the barebone version comes without the Wifi card, which also means no Bluetooth.
Finally! Someone using the pcie lanes. So tired of 1 m.2 and no TB4 single board computers. Lots of other connections you can do with m.2 too like to 5 sata ssd's to make a tiny and fast storage server.
Problem is that ALL of these m.2 to sata are very unstable and just very bad reliability in general. People loose data with them under Truenas, Linux etc
Funny! I actually replaced all my raspberry pi's with 1 single small pc.. I think its powered by a AMD 8 core CPU. It's running proxmox and the best part is that it use less power than the 3 RPI's i had. Also love you can passthrough the usb ports to the VM and LXC.
@@Airbag888 @Airbag888 Can't post pictures here.. but use about 10-15 watts idle(10-20% cpu usage). It use about 45 watts with full load(never really reach this with normal usage) . It's important to say you have to enable the cpu freq scaling, otherwise it will just run at full power. You can also do a few things in the bios to make it even better.
The ATmega32U4 is a tiny chip. 32 KB self-programming Flash program memory, 2.5 KB SRAM, 1 KB EEPROM. Putting an RP2040 on there would make a massive difference. I'd really like to see one of the IO pins tied to the Reboot and Power button on the computer so the chip could control the computer meaning that while the board has power, it always runs the "Co-processor" chip of the RP2040.
At that price it had better be faster than a raspberry pi. But most uses for an SBC are not looking for speed; size and power consumption is what’s important.
Indeed. For a lot of people who just use the net for light surfing and buying a few things or watching a few videos's the rasp pis are good enough and consume next to no power. I am contemplating switching mine on more often because i spend a lot of time on my main just using lower power apps which the pi could do. RUclips does not need a 400 watt RTX 3060 and a ryzen 5 5500@3.5
My biggest issue with it is the integrated memory... I was considering it as a massive upgrade from a 3B+, but will probably go with a recent tiny/mini/micro instead, at about 2/3 the cost of this.
You'll love the tinyminimicros. I wound up using one of the more recent models as my (this) desktop workstation--it's massive overkill for most server tasks.
I have one of these. For me, I wanted a SBC that could drive 4 monitors, was very low power, and have a modern processor. In terms of computation, I needed it to be able to smoothly stream video (which a Pi just couldn't really do well - that was the upper limit for what a Pi4 could do, really). I should caution - when I ordered mine, it shipped from China, so it took a little while to get here.
A 2012 Mac Mini is 4x the speed of a 2023 Raspberry Pi 4, but uses just 2x the power (and has better power management). Those unsupported minis can be patched for newer macOS, or run ubuntu. While a mini isn’t fanless, they are over engineered for quiet especially if you swap in an SSD.
I don't think comparing it against either a Mac Mini or a Raspberry Pi is a good comparison. The former is a complete system and the later is significantly cheaper and smaller. I'm sure that it has its niche market, but I don't think it is the same one as either of the aforementioned.
Such a strange claim to superiority, too. They're using Cinebench scores, which for their multi-core tests are heavily weighted on OpenGL graphics tests. Any real performance test would throw that on a GPU using Vulkan or Metal with way higher performance. ServeTheHome's website Geekbench scores have the Sigma 25% SLOWER in single-core performance and only 6% faster multi-core performance than a Mac Mini M2. 12 Intel cores can barely beat 8 Apple cores? x86 is showing it's age, and servers are the place where its shining the least.
DIY Arcade cabinet makers dream right there! Built in arduino for running lights, actuators, scoreboards, coin-ops, interactive peripherals, the possibilities are endless!
I absolutely love this SBC! Just made little project with my son. We got Lattepanda Sigma+ Rtx 3060Ti + few extras and put everything in a vintage radio case. Boom !!! It's so cool that I have strat recieving ordes for such a custom little PC's or fancy looking mid range gaming platform. Works flowlesly. Great video by the way.
I like the idea, not 100% sold on it still but it's not bad by any means and I still remember when the first Raspberry Pi came out, crazy how far we've come in that short time!
i kinda disagree. the raspi was meant to be a cheap learning device. this is basically just an intel nuc not made by intel. the raspi was 60 euros when it came out, this is over 600 and not even ARM, but an offtheshelf intel chip. it does have some fun features like GPIO, but shouldnt that just be an expansion card? hell i see GPIO just be over a usb dongle
Would like AMD 7840U or HS model there. Look at the scores that CPU has. EDIT: Just followed the link on AliExpress. Its 709£ for version with 16Gb ram and 500Gb of SSD. A miniPC with AMD Ryzen 7940HS (that tops those graphs for most of the part) with 16Gb ram and 1Tb SSD is 555£. Dimensions (mm): 120*110 vs 102x146 for Sigma. If you do not need specifically board that has PIO connector, but just small computer, I think its very easy choice.
The onboard Arduino could possibly be reprogrammed to act as a custom keyboard on the gpio which could make this extremely useful for niche simulation communities such as train simulation. Having dedicated buttons for things is much better a normal keyboard
Same processor as the latest Framework laptops. Would be an interesting comparison given you can buy their main boards and run them as an SBC. Though I think they are limited to DDR4 unless you get the upcoming Ryzen version.
Yeah Framework sells the compute unit with a similar use case to this.. but the cost of that is significantly higher... im not sure if the compute unit price is including SSD or not..
@@HimanshuGhadigaonkar "significantly higher"? I don't know if I would say that... $668.00 for this on Amazon vs $549 on sale from framework for 12th Gen (plus RAM and storage, yes).... they are also blowing out their older mainboards right now, starting at $199....?
I absolutely would not feel comfortable using the GPIO on this device with a breadboard. With an RPi, if I make a mistake and short something and it blows up, I'm out $35, no big deal. For $700 though? I would probably put kapton tape over that GPIO just to avert tragedy.
Really wish it had at least a 4x pcie slot. I've been hunting for one to see if I can hack together a dead nas I have that has a very servicable chassis. Something like this would be ideal. OS agnostic, plenty of NVME capability, and a 4x slot would mean plenty of capability for a modest mini truenas box
Unlikely if Thunderbolt is a feature you're after. Even these second hand minipc workstations ramp up in price when TB4 is involved since it wasn't implemented until last few generations of hardware which is still pricey. It's not a bad SBC but yea, you do pay premium for size and features.
@@tyaty Little better graphics little better power efficiency but not much else. The NUC 13 also didn't come with thunderbolt 4. The 2 use cases i can think of that this will be the best choice for is if you need Thunderbolt 4 and/or USB4 but not much else the other is if you want a Arduino devlopment board to speed up devlopment time time. Having the physical chip on the PCB will help solve hardware problems not in the Arduino emulated environment. Outside of those 2 use cases any of the other mini PCs STH has reviewed would be better than this. You just might need to also have a NAS for storage with them as limited storage is an issue with most mini PCs.
@@yumri4 Every NUC 13 has TB4, it is just not always highlighted in their spec sheet. Value wise the Sigma on par with a NUC kit for general use. It is pretty versatile compact development board, which has the performance of typical mid-range laptop.
I'd love to see that used with some of those Coral accelerators in the wifi slot or even multiple in the nvme slots. It seems like the perfect form factor for that kind of thing.
Beats a Mac Mini M2? No. Comparable sure. Beats? No. Not as fast AND more expensive. Wow, what a deal. More expensive than Apple. That's a statement...
My rasp pi sits there and waits for the day my main computer dies. That is its function. It does not sit there and do tasks. Well, i guess waiting is a task in itself.
Thanks!Single board computers are really great! By the way even with fan cooling vertical positions are much better! Please have a look to understand why!
Instead of one or two TB4 port, I'd love to see PCIe. This looks like a damn cool NAS PC if it had the additional expandability. Sure, one could probably get M.2 adapters but... yeah. On the other hand this could very well be used as a media center and small home server. Especially the size makes it really good as a clusterable PC running redundant apps. The SIM slot is also a feature, I love. Due to some power outtages, I encounter in my flat, it'd be cool to be notified. This can very well be achieved by just powering this maschine for long enough to send a messaage over cellular and notify me. Currently, the price is a bit high for my liking. Especially with the ZimaBoard existing. But I'll keep it in my head and maybe I'll buy one.
Orange Pi 5 is significantly faster than a Raspberry Pi 4, is a lot less expensive than this monster (though admittedly slower), and (more importantly, at least for me) pulls only a little more power than the RPi4, which means you can hang several off a fairly cheap PoE setup for remote power.
As you say, for most people low power and inexpensive are the primary concerns with SBCs, this thing is like someone getting a laptop motherboard and adding on a DC power jack. Insanely expensive too for what it is. There are plenty of PicoATX boards way cheaper than this with more comparable features.
Great review. This thing isn't cheap, and so while the price makes sense for the performance on offer compared with the (very difficult these days) RPi, it puts it in a very different place buyer wise. P.S. You're the only person I've encountered who pronounces arduino as a four syllable word (for me, it's just three syllables).
Awesome hardware! I would love to see more affordable options with the same form factor! any plans on doing a video on one of the N5105/N6005 boards that have sprung up in popularity recently? I'm trying to find something with that form factor but with a little more power. Thank you for your reviews they are always super detailed and a massive contribution to the community!
I think we have done a lot of N5105/ N6005 reviews over the past year. We are now working on the N100/N200 and the N305. We should have a N305 fanless 4x 2.5GbE video in a week or two as it is just being edited now.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo thank you for your reply! I’ll be looking forward to those new reviews :) Sorry I was being unclear, I’m talking more about motherboards that would fit into an itx case to be used with multiple HDDs as a NAS/Proxmox home server not an aio mini computer. Something like the Topton itx motherboard but with a little more processing headroom.
as a student who do a lot of Arduino projects , I think it's a good PC with in-built ARDUINO , but the only concerning thing is that we can't upgrade the onboard memory.....!!!☹
1:42 surely no one thinks you're being edited/approved by the vendor, but thankyou for advising anyway. But the click bait thumbnail and breathless praise raises suspicion anyway,and the clincher is you didn't buy it! You're not invested in it. It's not the same cost/benefit decision most your viewers are facing. THAT is what takes away at least some credibility with even your best intentions.
I picked one up and have been trying all day to get the bios updated, but can neither find documentation on how to do this nor figure out how to do it myself.
The BIOS flash was a standard EFI workflow with a .bin BIOS file. We just used a USB stick with the BIOS.nsh, BIN, and the EFI startup files as we normally do with motherboards and it worked.
Looking to move from Mac Mini to Linux. Could this be a good replacement? It all comes down to how fast it can transcode 4K video in kdenlive… and 64GB RAM would make sense.
It's got everything but the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink being a 16x PCIe slot. lol. I think it's closer to a mini-ITX board than a standard miniPC or Pi, but I love it - except the cost. Truly innovative design, and a great find, though. Just not for me for my use cases - yet.
This seems cool and the video is great but... What would you actually use it for? Demos are nice but if you could use it as a platform for something cool then users could more easily see the usecases.
ive looked over a lot of the reviews on this, and everyone that mentions the Arduino misses one really obvious use case for it.... you turn around and Flash Adalight to it, and then you have an SBC that can control your Ambilight set up with no extra hardware... supposing you are putting this thing behind a monitor already, its the perfect addon for that task
I wish you include encoding performance with your reviews of minipcs. I really would like to know how these tiny machines handle some OBS encoding and if the newest ones are viable as a second pc OBS encoder.
this costs 6 times more than RPi and consumes 4 times more power. Why the hell are you comparing them? just because both are SBCs? that's ignorance. their sizes are from different classes, their scope of release is almost completely different. they are just 2 different things built on a single board...
Hi, I'm far from being convinced because for the same price (~$625 for the 16 GB RAM version) you can buy 3 NanoPC-T6 16 GB RAM using a RK3588 processor, which will suck 3 times less Watts when pushed to 100% that you can unite in a Beowulf cluster - of course, this would make a different beast but the processing power would be close to equivalent (3×4 hi-perf cores + 3×4 budget-perf).
Usually RK3588 is about 25-30% the performance of an i5-1340P and uses around 1/3-1/4 the power of these. I think the last board we looked at was 13-13.5W. So you can get three RK3588 but then you also need a switch so they end up using more power and you have to manage three machines and clustering software instead of one larger node.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Well, usually the switch is already there, so we can say it is out of the power equation, this leave us with 3 machines eating around 7.5 W @ 100% and if I had to build that, I'd boot them on the network to minimize the management. This is a comparison that could be interesting. Yep, I'm falling for RISC, because the power consumption is out of reach of the x86 world. May be because of the ARM "new policy" we'll also see interesting things coming from RISC-V in the years to come, who knows :)
They can still keep upgradeablity in the exact same size especially when you are taking about the ram.. use chip sockets (not ram slots for sodim) like the old intel 286 cpu socket ised to be. That way you can upgrade ram by pressing the chips into the sockets and sure in will cost a few mm of hight but would not change anything really (maybe a notch in the heatsink to fit the extra few mm) same goes for the CPU use the old laptop socket that had the real slim socket and a screw that slides it to lock into place. Again it will add a few mm in the hight but it's a 3.5in SBC a few mm isn't going to matter a single bit.. so really they could make it upgradeable in the same form factor and would not add much more complexability as the traces and PCB are exactly the same its just the cost of some plastic press fit chip sockets essentially
I love it, but Im kind of torn on the price. Im sure some will think its "too" expensive, but I think its price is probably pretty reflective of what is actually there and sits well in the market. BUT! When Im faced with actually going and making a purchase, and faced with the actual choices.. Im not so sure I would go with the LattePanda Sigma. I would probably end up going with a used enterprise MiniPC with something like a 10700T or some rPis for less money. I love what they did though, all the same.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Yeah, I think the price is pretty decent. Id go even further and say its a good deal for what is there, when considering the GPIO, PCIe, etc. However, if it came to actually making a purchase, Im not sure I would ever end up with one. It doesnt have a place in my projects or deployments that would justify the cost. That said, depending on how the ECC side of things work, I could see this really taking off for something like TrueNAS. Where the market for hardware is just.. not great. Thats an area where I definitely could see myself making a purchase, depending on how well it actually works in that application.
The fact that it's Intel killed it for me. If anything, go support projected like the Rock5 model B. It's got an RK3588 chip which is a much more fair comparison price wise but it absolutely blows the performance out of the water. With prism client, you can play Minecraft at 60+ fps (granted GPU is a bit weak) but the CPU is where it shines. Using the community version of Ubuntu desktop, its got full 3d acceleration and you won't notice that there is an arm CPU powering it. It's that fast.
You can Velcro mount it. A RPi 4 or RPi 5 will use less power, but the ~15 RPi 4 or 4-6 RPi 5 to get a similar amount of performance will use significantly more power
I wish SBC manufacturers would integrate snap-in RAM chip sockets like the 70s-90s. They had it right the 1st time and I get jealous watching retro channels switch out components in seconds instead of needing tweezers, heat-gun, flux, etc etc
Nice. As cool as ARM chips are you still can't beat the horse power of an x86 chip and those 11th gen mobile (Tiger Lake) chips are indeed very impressive. Shame about Rocket Lake.
@3:15 in your video you it shows 32GB for $629. that seems a great value. Today 7/27 ( just one day later ) amazon list the only 16gb for $829. aliexpress list the 32gb for $860. How do we get the computer with 32gb for $629. is there some kind of code we have to enter?
But how long will it last ( as long as MAC products ??) Also is it upgradeable ? There are many other PCs around the wortld which are more upgradable and easy to maintain
To me it sounds like they took 2 computers of 1 IoT board and 1 small PC and put them onto the same PCB. Sounds like an reads like a good way to do devlopment for anything using or compatible with the ATmega32U4 Arduino layout and chip. Outside of a board that is both for the devlopment of the IoT Arduino board and a full desktop it sounds like a standard miniPC that most consumers would get and not notice anything different from a prebuilt but the price and the missing case. As 4 USB type-A ports is enough for most and the 2 Type-C ports for when the hardware requires type-c not type-a it is a very good little machine. Just i wish there was a case for it. Over time dust will collect no matter what you do so having a case would be a good thing. Also to prevent accidental touches from other objects that might have a static discharge that might kill a competent or the entire board. All put together the 32GB RAM with a the Wifi AX module is 630USD at cheapest then you will need the M.2 drive and OS so effectively 800USD to 900 USD for the 32GB RAM version. As the 16GB with AX module and 500GB M.2 drive is only 648USD but without an OS installed. Windows basically adds 100USD for a retail copy and 1TB is basically needed unless you also have a NAS and/or another computer to store files onto. Project files can get pretty big. More so if you save versions of the same project file so to be able to back track while in the devlopment of what you are doing process.
I mean, in the server realm, we just did a video on the AMD EPYC Bergamo that is 3x the performance (in the WORST case for x86 v. Arm) but is like 50% more power than the Ampere Altra Max 128 core Arm part. "Obsolete" when it is much higher performance per core and performance per watt, and offering way more features in the server space feels strange.
Looks like a neat offering! Motherboards, and especially x86 motherboards can be relatively high failure rate even from known good manufacturers - so my question is: What's the support and RMA process like?
Pretty easy being faster than a Raspberry Pi board. The original goal for the Raspberry Pi board is being an educational tool. Not being a daily driver. However, the foundation has changed to being very commercial minded and is trying to make the Raspberry Pi board faster.....
Four things: 1) The cost of entry for this is somewhat prohibitive given that I can get a more performant mini PC, often times, for less. (But of course, those mini PCs doesn't have the GPIO connector, which I guess, defeats the purpose of getting said mini PC over this.) 2) It would have been interesting to see some application benchmarks, if you were to say, run the Puget System's Adobe benchmark and compare the results from this SBC to your Mac Mini M2. 3) I wished that there was an AMD version of this (because the AMD processors are faster and/or more power efficient). 4) When the price comes down, I can envision Smart TVs ditching the lame Snapdragon or whatever ARM processor that they're using, and putting one of these things in said Smart TV instead. It will drive the cost of said smart TV up, but it will also make said smart TV SIGNIFICANTLY more capable then the crappy "computer" that's in smart TVs today. (Our Samsung QN90A TV can't play 2160p movies with DTS:X audio WITHOUT having my Plex Media Server transcode said audio down to PCM or something like that, just so that said TV would be able to then play said video. And the problem that I run into with that is that AUDIO ONLY transcoding is VERY slow. There's GPU acceleration for the VIDEO (AND audio) transcoding, but there's NO audio transcoding acceleration available. As a result, I'm using a mini PC to run/drive the TV (which defeats the whole point and purpose of having a smart TV in the first place, but you can't get new, big, "dumb" TVs nowadays), and the mini PC is able to play said 2160p movie with DTS:X audio.) But if a smart TV uses this LattePanda Sigma (or something VERY similar), then said smart TV won't have this problem anymore.
Can you run this system just on the microchip and have it wake up the CPU when needed? that would be interesting - but also has a bunch of redundant systems like for networking
Can you get PCIE 4.0 eGPU to work on it? I only saw 1 review that claimed that the only eGPU support was from the pcie 3.0 m.2 slot rather than the pcie 4.0.
Simply adding an Arduino micro-controller to an Intel MB is not compelling. Would have been nice to know more about the ATMEGA integration with main system. Can I use the Arduino processor to wake the main system? is there an SPI, I2C or other method to communicate between processors? is the GPIO only usable on the Arduino side of things? who controls the magic RS232-RS485 port?
Faster than MacMini in multicore score by 2% but slower in the same benchmark in single core by 15%? By definition, that means its a slower.
And with bigger consumption and fan noise so this review is totally unfair
It costs more than 15x the price of a pi here so as a pi comparison it's pretty useless because price was its defining point. As a powerful SBC, it'd work in some niches where cost isn't as much as an issue.
Definitely not a realistic raspberry pi alternative because of this. The initial draw of the pi for most people is the price point. Full stop.
It's about 8x the Price of a Pi 4 8GB. For that you get 2 NVME Slots, 2 additional M2 slots, lot of performance. And the GPIO you may need as a Edge Server. This is a Raspberry Pi turned serious for Commercial use. And for that the price is okey, especially as there is a 32GB Version out there with the inline ECC Feature it is a perfect board for Running in a Commercial Manufacturing Machine, or the Homelab Server. Personally i can say that the Performance of a Pi 4 8GB is okey, but in lot scenarios you run into Performance Problems at some point and one Slot is taken by the USB to SSD Card, as SD Cards tend to die and so on. I have several Pi but the big one i used had to be replaced by an old AMD ITX Board with an A10-7850k on it, as the Desktop Performance was lacking. Now i got a USB to GPIO and can use the old RS232 of the board.
It's a realistic point of comparison because the Pi is both hard to obtain, and really struggles to produce a performant environment for modern computing. Don't get me wrong, it's cool and low power, but, the guys running entire homelabs on them are masochists.
@@jttech44 How is it a trash title? He didn't say it was a Pi alternative, the fact he said its faster than Mac Mini should make it obvious its not remotely in the same price bracket and the comparison is based on it not being much bigger than a Pi, not the price. If you need a fast PC that includes GPIO, its a very compelling device.
Its quite clear the title is comparing how much power you get in the physical size, not the cost. Your car comparison would only make sense if the cars physically were a similar size.
You can get a Latte Panda. That's doing way better than looking for Raspberry Pis where I am. I've been on rpilocator a few times a week for the past month and none of the vendors where I am have them. Especially not the 8 GB models.
Obtainable vs unobtanium (or scalper prices)... I'll go with the panda
$579 USD for the base model of 16gig and no SSD, it's not cheap. Interesting for niche applications I guess, personally I'd prefer an AMD chip were I going this route.
I can't think of anything else with this feature set and form-factor that's cheaper though. that is a TON of I/O with a new CPU on that board.
@@0xKruzr it is a niche product but you are going to see near peer hardware that can match a fair bit of it and arguably many implementations are unnecessarily obsessed with that SFF or SBC configuration. I can see perhaps some implementations that may benefit but the cooling is going to be something that is of concern in hostile environments potentially. I am all for these solutions but they do face a fair bit of competition if the architecture options are a bit open.
I'm right there with you I recently got a Beelink mini pc with a 5800h and 16GB of ram and a 500gb drive for $300 if you want a small computer for performance not features.
@@davocc2405 tbh I'm not really all about the form-factor -- my needs are "10GbE+ networking and plenty of room for NVMe/SSD," pretty much anything that fits that bill I'll be interested in, but the form-factor is nice because I'm pretty limited on space at home
He means for the use cases and having ecc memory and it being a small form factor
For me the pricing is making this a niche product. If we were talking $200 or less this would change the landscape completely. When you can get a more powerful mini PC for less and be able to upgrade the memory. I already own a arduino.
That was the attraction with the first couple of SBC. Compact, cheap and powerful. I'm not sure it's any of these
This is actually quite cheap for what it is. People tend to ignore the overall tech price increases in high end devices and the fact that inflation is a thing
200$ is an insane price to ask for and comparable mini PCs cost at least several hundred dollar more than the sigma. The cost of the individual parts alone would exceed 200$. Building a device with a mini PC and an Arduino would also increase weight and size by several hundred percent. And why would the market about you personally already owning an Arduino? Just because you don't know the possible use cases doesn't make this a niche product.
The more look at the Sigma, the more I like it but i dont need it :) Its positioning is not clear. It could be a great desktop computer with enough horse power.... but for it does not have a case (unless you do 3D printing...). For a router / industrial computer we could have less power but would prefer something passive-cooled and more sturdy. Integrated Arduino -- this is an outdated chip -- moreover I miss the value of having it integrated...this is not how we develop microcontroller projects.
All still could be fine if the price is adequate --- unfortunately it is not. Additional note - the barebone version comes without the Wifi card, which also means no Bluetooth.
@Solista670 I completely agree. You could get a ryzen 5 mini pc for this money. If you want a low wattage, you could go for an even cheaper n95.
@@AlpineTheHusky It is being sold for $1500.00 in Australia. Its absurdly priced. (Exchange puts it at around $800-$900) So yeah - shove it.
Finally! Someone using the pcie lanes. So tired of 1 m.2 and no TB4 single board computers. Lots of other connections you can do with m.2 too like to 5 sata ssd's to make a tiny and fast storage server.
Problem is that ALL of these m.2 to sata are very unstable and just very bad reliability in general. People loose data with them under Truenas, Linux etc
Funny! I actually replaced all my raspberry pi's with 1 single small pc.. I think its powered by a AMD 8 core CPU. It's running proxmox and the best part is that it use less power than the 3 RPI's i had. Also love you can passthrough the usb ports to the VM and LXC.
Give us some specs and actual power measurement idle and load?
Vfio is a massive rabbithole. Goodluck friend, you're in for a treat :D
hahah @@joshxwho I know right!! On the good side... USB passthrough works without that :D
@@Airbag888 @Airbag888 Can't post pictures here.. but use about 10-15 watts idle(10-20% cpu usage). It use about 45 watts with full load(never really reach this with normal usage) . It's important to say you have to enable the cpu freq scaling, otherwise it will just run at full power.
You can also do a few things in the bios to make it even better.
@@clausdk6299 but what cpu, motherboard etc?
The ATmega32U4 is a tiny chip. 32 KB self-programming Flash program memory, 2.5 KB SRAM, 1 KB EEPROM. Putting an RP2040 on there would make a massive difference. I'd really like to see one of the IO pins tied to the Reboot and Power button on the computer so the chip could control the computer meaning that while the board has power, it always runs the "Co-processor" chip of the RP2040.
At that price it had better be faster than a raspberry pi. But most uses for an SBC are not looking for speed; size and power consumption is what’s important.
Indeed. For a lot of people who just use the net for light surfing and buying a few things or watching a few videos's the rasp pis are good enough and consume next to no power. I am contemplating switching mine on more often because i spend a lot of time on my main just using lower power apps which the pi could do. RUclips does not need a 400 watt RTX 3060 and a ryzen 5 5500@3.5
My biggest issue with it is the integrated memory... I was considering it as a massive upgrade from a 3B+, but will probably go with a recent tiny/mini/micro instead, at about 2/3 the cost of this.
Very fair.
You'll love the tinyminimicros. I wound up using one of the more recent models as my (this) desktop workstation--it's massive overkill for most server tasks.
Mobile processers winding up on desktop or rack boards has been one of the best things ever.
I have one of these. For me, I wanted a SBC that could drive 4 monitors, was very low power, and have a modern processor. In terms of computation, I needed it to be able to smoothly stream video (which a Pi just couldn't really do well - that was the upper limit for what a Pi4 could do, really).
I should caution - when I ordered mine, it shipped from China, so it took a little while to get here.
A 2012 Mac Mini is 4x the speed of a 2023 Raspberry Pi 4, but uses just 2x the power (and has better power management). Those unsupported minis can be patched for newer macOS, or run ubuntu. While a mini isn’t fanless, they are over engineered for quiet especially if you swap in an SSD.
This is a fantastic point.
I don't think comparing it against either a Mac Mini or a Raspberry Pi is a good comparison. The former is a complete system and the later is significantly cheaper and smaller. I'm sure that it has its niche market, but I don't think it is the same one as either of the aforementioned.
Such a strange claim to superiority, too. They're using Cinebench scores, which for their multi-core tests are heavily weighted on OpenGL graphics tests. Any real performance test would throw that on a GPU using Vulkan or Metal with way higher performance. ServeTheHome's website Geekbench scores have the Sigma 25% SLOWER in single-core performance and only 6% faster multi-core performance than a Mac Mini M2. 12 Intel cores can barely beat 8 Apple cores? x86 is showing it's age, and servers are the place where its shining the least.
DIY Arcade cabinet makers dream right there! Built in arduino for running lights, actuators, scoreboards, coin-ops, interactive peripherals, the possibilities are endless!
I absolutely love this SBC! Just made little project with my son. We got Lattepanda Sigma+ Rtx 3060Ti + few extras and put everything in a vintage radio case. Boom !!! It's so cool that I have strat recieving ordes for such a custom little PC's or fancy looking mid range gaming platform. Works flowlesly. Great video by the way.
Wow! So cool!
You always seem so cheerful playing with new toys!
Interesting! Looking forward for more introductions of application scenes！
I like the idea, not 100% sold on it still but it's not bad by any means and I still remember when the first Raspberry Pi came out, crazy how far we've come in that short time!
i kinda disagree. the raspi was meant to be a cheap learning device. this is basically just an intel nuc not made by intel. the raspi was 60 euros when it came out, this is over 600 and not even ARM, but an offtheshelf intel chip. it does have some fun features like GPIO, but shouldnt that just be an expansion card? hell i see GPIO just be over a usb dongle
Would like AMD 7840U or HS model there. Look at the scores that CPU has.
EDIT: Just followed the link on AliExpress. Its 709£ for version with 16Gb ram and 500Gb of SSD.
A miniPC with AMD Ryzen 7940HS (that tops those graphs for most of the part) with 16Gb ram and 1Tb SSD is 555£. Dimensions (mm): 120*110 vs 102x146 for Sigma.
If you do not need specifically board that has PIO connector, but just small computer, I think its very easy choice.
The onboard Arduino could possibly be reprogrammed to act as a custom keyboard on the gpio which could make this extremely useful for niche simulation communities such as train simulation. Having dedicated buttons for things is much better a normal keyboard
I was thinking more "ultimate barcade king"
Just get a separate microcontroller board and make a custom USB device. That way you can use your custom controller with any computer.
Same processor as the latest Framework laptops. Would be an interesting comparison given you can buy their main boards and run them as an SBC. Though I think they are limited to DDR4 unless you get the upcoming Ryzen version.
Yeah Framework sells the compute unit with a similar use case to this.. but the cost of that is significantly higher... im not sure if the compute unit price is including SSD or not..
@@HimanshuGhadigaonkar "significantly higher"? I don't know if I would say that... $668.00 for this on Amazon vs $549 on sale from framework for 12th Gen (plus RAM and storage, yes).... they are also blowing out their older mainboards right now, starting at $199....?
Whatever else can be said, they got it right with all the IO options.
I absolutely would not feel comfortable using the GPIO on this device with a breadboard. With an RPi, if I make a mistake and short something and it blows up, I'm out $35, no big deal. For $700 though? I would probably put kapton tape over that GPIO just to avert tragedy.
@@silverywingsagain Yeah, I would be more comfortable using a USB -> parallel IO or if I did use the GPIO I would optically isolate everything.
Really wish it had at least a 4x pcie slot. I've been hunting for one to see if I can hack together a dead nas I have that has a very servicable chassis. Something like this would be ideal. OS agnostic, plenty of NVME capability, and a 4x slot would mean plenty of capability for a modest mini truenas box
for those edge devices that need a boatload of computing power. It's a neat little device. definitely fills a radically different niche than the pi.
Interesting concept, but more expensive than a good used computer + arduino.
Unlikely if Thunderbolt is a feature you're after. Even these second hand minipc workstations ramp up in price when TB4 is involved since it wasn't implemented until last few generations of hardware which is still pricey. It's not a bad SBC but yea, you do pay premium for size and features.
@@Micromation
It is a sidegarde of a NUC 13 Pro kit.
@@tyaty Little better graphics little better power efficiency but not much else. The NUC 13 also didn't come with thunderbolt 4. The 2 use cases i can think of that this will be the best choice for is if you need Thunderbolt 4 and/or USB4 but not much else the other is if you want a Arduino devlopment board to speed up devlopment time time. Having the physical chip on the PCB will help solve hardware problems not in the Arduino emulated environment.
Outside of those 2 use cases any of the other mini PCs STH has reviewed would be better than this. You just might need to also have a NAS for storage with them as limited storage is an issue with most mini PCs.
@@yumri4
Every NUC 13 has TB4, it is just not always highlighted in their spec sheet. Value wise the Sigma on par with a NUC kit for general use.
It is pretty versatile compact development board, which has the performance of typical mid-range laptop.
I think some are missing the point when they think that a small x86 board is some kind alternative to a Arduino or RPi.
At the end, you are running some form of Linux, only this time, you have the bigger x86 ecosystem to play with
Love the bit where he holds it up so everyone can listen to "how quiet it is", but the background music continues to play!!
I'd love to see that used with some of those Coral accelerators in the wifi slot or even multiple in the nvme slots. It seems like the perfect form factor for that kind of thing.
I think that is exactly the idea
This will be like the ML Renaissance
Very Nice. Thanks for the review.
Nice video, well done,thanks for sharing it with us :)
Beats a Mac Mini M2? No. Comparable sure. Beats? No. Not as fast AND more expensive. Wow, what a deal. More expensive than Apple. That's a statement...
My rasp pi sits there and waits for the day my main computer dies. That is its function. It does not sit there and do tasks. Well, i guess waiting is a task in itself.
Thanks!Single board computers are really great! By the way even with fan cooling vertical positions are much better! Please have a look to understand why!
Interesting your M2 Mac Mini performance figures seem to be lower than I have seen by quite amount.
The M2 Pro is faster. These systems are all sitting on camera now
Instead of one or two TB4 port, I'd love to see PCIe. This looks like a damn cool NAS PC if it had the additional expandability. Sure, one could probably get M.2 adapters but... yeah.
On the other hand this could very well be used as a media center and small home server. Especially the size makes it really good as a clusterable PC running redundant apps. The SIM slot is also a feature, I love. Due to some power outtages, I encounter in my flat, it'd be cool to be notified. This can very well be achieved by just powering this maschine for long enough to send a messaage over cellular and notify me.
Currently, the price is a bit high for my liking. Especially with the ZimaBoard existing. But I'll keep it in my head and maybe I'll buy one.
Orange Pi 5 is significantly faster than a Raspberry Pi 4, is a lot less expensive than this monster (though admittedly slower), and (more importantly, at least for me) pulls only a little more power than the RPi4, which means you can hang several off a fairly cheap PoE setup for remote power.
As you say, for most people low power and inexpensive are the primary concerns with SBCs, this thing is like someone getting a laptop motherboard and adding on a DC power jack. Insanely expensive too for what it is. There are plenty of PicoATX boards way cheaper than this with more comparable features.
Great review. This thing isn't cheap, and so while the price makes sense for the performance on offer compared with the (very difficult these days) RPi, it puts it in a very different place buyer wise.
P.S. You're the only person I've encountered who pronounces arduino as a four syllable word (for me, it's just three syllables).
So competitive with the fanless systems, if you don't mind having a fan?
Awesome hardware! I would love to see more affordable options with the same form factor! any plans on doing a video on one of the N5105/N6005 boards that have sprung up in popularity recently? I'm trying to find something with that form factor but with a little more power. Thank you for your reviews they are always super detailed and a massive contribution to the community!
I think we have done a lot of N5105/ N6005 reviews over the past year. We are now working on the N100/N200 and the N305. We should have a N305 fanless 4x 2.5GbE video in a week or two as it is just being edited now.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo thank you for your reply! I’ll be looking forward to those new reviews :) Sorry I was being unclear, I’m talking more about motherboards that would fit into an itx case to be used with multiple HDDs as a NAS/Proxmox home server not an aio mini computer. Something like the Topton itx motherboard but with a little more processing headroom.
Just found this channel. insta subbed after watching 4 hours of this kinda content
Ha! Wow! I do not think my wife could watch me that long
Price????
as a student who do a lot of Arduino projects , I think it's a good PC with in-built ARDUINO , but the only concerning thing is that we can't upgrade the onboard memory.....!!!☹
1:42 surely no one thinks you're being edited/approved by the vendor, but thankyou for advising anyway. But the click bait thumbnail and breathless praise raises suspicion anyway,and the clincher is you didn't buy it! You're not invested in it. It's not the same cost/benefit decision most your viewers are facing. THAT is what takes away at least some credibility with even your best intentions.
I picked one up and have been trying all day to get the bios updated, but can neither find documentation on how to do this nor figure out how to do it myself.
The BIOS flash was a standard EFI workflow with a .bin BIOS file. We just used a USB stick with the BIOS.nsh, BIN, and the EFI startup files as we normally do with motherboards and it worked.
Looking to move from Mac Mini to Linux. Could this be a good replacement? It all comes down to how fast it can transcode 4K video in kdenlive… and 64GB RAM would make sense.
Look at the Khadas Mind, I have one and it is awesome.
Awsome. This would be my perfect car computer.
It's got everything but the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink being a 16x PCIe slot. lol.
I think it's closer to a mini-ITX board than a standard miniPC or Pi, but I love it - except the cost. Truly innovative design, and a great find, though. Just not for me for my use cases - yet.
Hey. STH should check out some of the embedded Ryzen boards
I have been lobbying for a new EPYC 3000 update :-/
The price is expected and this thing is very impressive, although this is an entirely different class of Single board computers.
This seems cool and the video is great but... What would you actually use it for?
Demos are nice but if you could use it as a platform for something cool then users could more easily see the usecases.
Is there a 3.5" drive bay to latte panda adapter......
The ports would be in the wrong orientation
ive looked over a lot of the reviews on this, and everyone that mentions the Arduino misses one really obvious use case for it.... you turn around and Flash Adalight to it, and then you have an SBC that can control your Ambilight set up with no extra hardware... supposing you are putting this thing behind a monitor already, its the perfect addon for that task
I wish you include encoding performance with your reviews of minipcs. I really would like to know how these tiny machines handle some OBS encoding and if the newest ones are viable as a second pc OBS encoder.
I would have liked to see what is available in the BIOS. The original Lattepanda BIOS was useless to the end-user.
are there 3.5 drive mount points on that chassis?
this costs 6 times more than RPi and consumes 4 times more power. Why the hell are you comparing them? just because both are SBCs? that's ignorance.
their sizes are from different classes, their scope of release is almost completely different. they are just 2 different things built on a single board...
This almost sounds like it's directed at the 'edge computing' space ?
U could use this for a pfsense router also?
Yes, or more likely a virtualized pfSense router.
Great show STH
Thanks
Hi, I'm far from being convinced because for the same price (~$625 for the 16 GB RAM version) you can buy 3 NanoPC-T6 16 GB RAM using a RK3588 processor, which will suck 3 times less Watts when pushed to 100% that you can unite in a Beowulf cluster - of course, this would make a different beast but the processing power would be close to equivalent (3×4 hi-perf cores + 3×4 budget-perf).
Usually RK3588 is about 25-30% the performance of an i5-1340P and uses around 1/3-1/4 the power of these. I think the last board we looked at was 13-13.5W. So you can get three RK3588 but then you also need a switch so they end up using more power and you have to manage three machines and clustering software instead of one larger node.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Well, usually the switch is already there, so we can say it is out of the power equation, this leave us with 3 machines eating around 7.5 W @ 100% and if I had to build that, I'd boot them on the network to minimize the management.
This is a comparison that could be interesting.
Yep, I'm falling for RISC, because the power consumption is out of reach of the x86 world. May be because of the ARM "new policy" we'll also see interesting things coming from RISC-V in the years to come, who knows :)
This is a great product, the amount of IO looks perfect for a Ceph user. three of these with a few Optanes + 2.5gig switch? awesome.
was just thinking exactly this. what a perfect all-NVMe Proxmox node. hell, you can bump the Ethernet to 10G for $125.
@@0xKruzrWhat do you use for 10Gb at this price ?
They can still keep upgradeablity in the exact same size especially when you are taking about the ram.. use chip sockets (not ram slots for sodim) like the old intel 286 cpu socket ised to be. That way you can upgrade ram by pressing the chips into the sockets and sure in will cost a few mm of hight but would not change anything really (maybe a notch in the heatsink to fit the extra few mm) same goes for the CPU use the old laptop socket that had the real slim socket and a screw that slides it to lock into place. Again it will add a few mm in the hight but it's a 3.5in SBC a few mm isn't going to matter a single bit.. so really they could make it upgradeable in the same form factor and would not add much more complexability as the traces and PCB are exactly the same its just the cost of some plastic press fit chip sockets essentially
For the price, it'll need to not only do Windows, but the dishes.
Video cards have become mini-PCs, this is expected😅
I love it, but Im kind of torn on the price. Im sure some will think its "too" expensive, but I think its price is probably pretty reflective of what is actually there and sits well in the market. BUT! When Im faced with actually going and making a purchase, and faced with the actual choices.. Im not so sure I would go with the LattePanda Sigma. I would probably end up going with a used enterprise MiniPC with something like a 10700T or some rPis for less money. I love what they did though, all the same.
A big part of it is the Core i5-1340p costs well over $300 alone. Add RAM and all of the motherboard bits and the pricing is pretty much in line
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Yeah, I think the price is pretty decent. Id go even further and say its a good deal for what is there, when considering the GPIO, PCIe, etc. However, if it came to actually making a purchase, Im not sure I would ever end up with one. It doesnt have a place in my projects or deployments that would justify the cost.
That said, depending on how the ECC side of things work, I could see this really taking off for something like TrueNAS. Where the market for hardware is just.. not great. Thats an area where I definitely could see myself making a purchase, depending on how well it actually works in that application.
The fact that it's Intel killed it for me. If anything, go support projected like the Rock5 model B. It's got an RK3588 chip which is a much more fair comparison price wise but it absolutely blows the performance out of the water. With prism client, you can play Minecraft at 60+ fps (granted GPU is a bit weak) but the CPU is where it shines. Using the community version of Ubuntu desktop, its got full 3d acceleration and you won't notice that there is an arm CPU powering it. It's that fast.
Can it stick to a velcro tape on a wall and eat the same power or less than r-pi?
You can Velcro mount it. A RPi 4 or RPi 5 will use less power, but the ~15 RPi 4 or 4-6 RPi 5 to get a similar amount of performance will use significantly more power
really cool board, though for this kind of money, you can probably just build an i5 desktop pc with a similar tdp main chip
Hmm can the Wi-Fi adapter be used in promiscuous mode? Used in pfsense?
You would probably want something other than an AX211 for this.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo with a hyper visor this thing can get a lot of work done
what us that old quantum-looking hdd doing in the foreground?
Used it to show the size. And it is an 18TB Seagate Exos
when you give us a brief listen to the unit’s fans, could ya maybe kill the background muzac?
I wish SBC manufacturers would integrate snap-in RAM chip sockets like the 70s-90s. They had it right the 1st time and I get jealous watching retro channels switch out components in seconds instead of needing tweezers, heat-gun, flux, etc etc
Nice. As cool as ARM chips are you still can't beat the horse power of an x86 chip and those 11th gen mobile (Tiger Lake) chips are indeed very impressive. Shame about Rocket Lake.
Nice SBC, super expensive but performace is really there
Price is ridiculous. Can buy 6 RPIs with this
@3:15 in your video you it shows 32GB for $629. that seems a great value. Today 7/27 ( just one day later ) amazon list the only 16gb for $829. aliexpress list the 32gb for $860. How do we get the computer with 32gb for $629. is there some kind of code we have to enter?
Amazon is a higher price. The more direct DFRobot site has the lower price.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo thank you. i tried your first two links. I guess I should have clicked on the 3rd link :-)
Listening at .75 speed to avoid hyperbollicking delivery
But how long will it last ( as long as MAC products ??) Also is it upgradeable ? There are many other PCs around the wortld which are more upgradable and easy to maintain
Is the memory running in dual channel
To me it sounds like they took 2 computers of 1 IoT board and 1 small PC and put them onto the same PCB. Sounds like an reads like a good way to do devlopment for anything using or compatible with the ATmega32U4 Arduino layout and chip. Outside of a board that is both for the devlopment of the IoT Arduino board and a full desktop it sounds like a standard miniPC that most consumers would get and not notice anything different from a prebuilt but the price and the missing case. As 4 USB type-A ports is enough for most and the 2 Type-C ports for when the hardware requires type-c not type-a it is a very good little machine.
Just i wish there was a case for it. Over time dust will collect no matter what you do so having a case would be a good thing. Also to prevent accidental touches from other objects that might have a static discharge that might kill a competent or the entire board. All put together the 32GB RAM with a the Wifi AX module is 630USD at cheapest then you will need the M.2 drive and OS so effectively 800USD to 900 USD for the 32GB RAM version. As the 16GB with AX module and 500GB M.2 drive is only 648USD but without an OS installed. Windows basically adds 100USD for a retail copy and 1TB is basically needed unless you also have a NAS and/or another computer to store files onto. Project files can get pretty big. More so if you save versions of the same project file so to be able to back track while in the devlopment of what you are doing process.
I agree on the case
I like the idea, but price is a bit high for what you get. I'd take a used 1L PC or a minisforum PC and save a few hundred dollars.
Ha ha ha this machine is faster than my PC. Sounds like it's almost Upgrade Time again!
I have some interesting ideas for an NVR built with one of these.
Am I the only one thinking the x86 architecture is obsolete in 2023? Especially at that price point?
I mean, in the server realm, we just did a video on the AMD EPYC Bergamo that is 3x the performance (in the WORST case for x86 v. Arm) but is like 50% more power than the Ampere Altra Max 128 core Arm part. "Obsolete" when it is much higher performance per core and performance per watt, and offering way more features in the server space feels strange.
@ServeTheHomeVideo sorry, I misinterpreted the point of the video. I thought you were discussing SBCs not $12,000 server cpus.
Looks like a neat offering!
Motherboards, and especially x86 motherboards can be relatively high failure rate even from known good manufacturers - so my question is: What's the support and RMA process like?
I am suspect of this claim. There are some very bad RISC makers out there
Is there a nice case available?
Pretty easy being faster than a Raspberry Pi board. The original goal for the Raspberry Pi board is being an educational tool. Not being a daily driver. However, the foundation has changed to being very commercial minded and is trying to make the Raspberry Pi board faster.....
Oh! “… See STH content…”!
I just spend 3 minutes trying to find out what CSTH was! Hahaha
can it be powered with a power bank?
What does it weigh?
Who else came here from the half hour ad?
wonder, why just one sata. put 4, and the perfect thing for DIY NAS
An Intel NUC 13 with the same processor is less expensive and makes a lot more sense. Also clickbait title, you should know better.
Four things:
1) The cost of entry for this is somewhat prohibitive given that I can get a more performant mini PC, often times, for less. (But of course, those mini PCs doesn't have the GPIO connector, which I guess, defeats the purpose of getting said mini PC over this.)
2) It would have been interesting to see some application benchmarks, if you were to say, run the Puget System's Adobe benchmark and compare the results from this SBC to your Mac Mini M2.
3) I wished that there was an AMD version of this (because the AMD processors are faster and/or more power efficient).
4) When the price comes down, I can envision Smart TVs ditching the lame Snapdragon or whatever ARM processor that they're using, and putting one of these things in said Smart TV instead.
It will drive the cost of said smart TV up, but it will also make said smart TV SIGNIFICANTLY more capable then the crappy "computer" that's in smart TVs today.
(Our Samsung QN90A TV can't play 2160p movies with DTS:X audio WITHOUT having my Plex Media Server transcode said audio down to PCM or something like that, just so that said TV would be able to then play said video. And the problem that I run into with that is that AUDIO ONLY transcoding is VERY slow. There's GPU acceleration for the VIDEO (AND audio) transcoding, but there's NO audio transcoding acceleration available. As a result, I'm using a mini PC to run/drive the TV (which defeats the whole point and purpose of having a smart TV in the first place, but you can't get new, big, "dumb" TVs nowadays), and the mini PC is able to play said 2160p movie with DTS:X audio.)
But if a smart TV uses this LattePanda Sigma (or something VERY similar), then said smart TV won't have this problem anymore.
What are the base clocks?
Can you run this system just on the microchip and have it wake up the CPU when needed? that would be interesting - but also has a bunch of redundant systems like for networking
This looks ideal for a project I've been thinking about, thanks for the great overview!!
How many cameras can be attached? Does it have MIPI interfaces?
Can you get PCIE 4.0 eGPU to work on it? I only saw 1 review that claimed that the only eGPU support was from the pcie 3.0 m.2 slot rather than the pcie 4.0.
I would just Thunderbolt eGPU
Simply adding an Arduino micro-controller to an Intel MB is not compelling.
Would have been nice to know more about the ATMEGA integration with main system. Can I use the Arduino processor to wake the main system? is there an SPI, I2C or other method to communicate between processors? is the GPIO only usable on the Arduino side of things? who controls the magic RS232-RS485 port?
interesting.....wonder if in-band ECC option is something with Raptor Lake and if other motherboard manufacturers will enable it in their BIOSes 🤔
Some do like ASRock Industrial on some of their new NUCs