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Is there a good site for reviews/news/comparisons of SBC's? I've got a couple projects I'd like to do on the horizon and I don't really know what's out there beyond Raspberry Pi, but I'm open to anything. The first thing I wanna tackle is consolidating/containerizing a few little devices and services I run and want on separate hardware from my main server/its VMs. My OS of choice has been Fedora IoT, which seems to support a wide enough range of hardware. I just don't know what's all out there or how they compare. Don't need a ton of CPU/GPU but >= 4GB ram would be nice. eMMC or ideally m.2 storage - I am extremely over these things eating Micro SD cards. And PoE powered since I have the setup and enough clutter already. The other use case I have in mind for further down the road was possibly a DIY alternative for my Nvidia Shield TV boxes, in case the updates for those keep going the way they're going. But that's understandably a dicier proposition w/r/t software and UX.
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Mar 10, 2022 21:49
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priznat posted:I would like to know how they do the interposer. Is it a separate process with 2 Max dies to attach them? Really wild. If they're using the word "interposer" the way it's been used in industry before, it'll be something similar to this: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/white_papers/wp380_Stacked_Silicon_Interconnect_Technology.pdf The interposer die has to be giant since it's as large as all the logic die put together, but that's relatively OK here. It doesn't need any active circuitry, or any of the expensive fine pitch metal layers - you can make it on old fully amortized process nodes, and yield should be high. The one exciting thing it needs is TSVs. The animations Apple made hinted at something a bit more like EMIB, where the interconnect die is a thin rectangle covering just the area used for the chip-to-chip bridge. But EMIB requires burying the interconnect die in the package organic substrate, which is a whole other thing, and I wouldn't think they'd use "interposer" to describe that kind of tech. An interposer is something which is completely interposed between the logic silicon and package substrate.
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Mar 10, 2022 21:50
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NewFatMike posted:Ian Cutress published a video I’m about to watch on it, I’m very excited: I couldn't make it through this, it's as disappointing as his writing for AnandTech always was
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Mar 10, 2022 21:52
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BobHoward posted:I couldn't make it through this, it's as disappointing as his writing for AnandTech always was Dude just read his tweets to me, what the hell is that about?
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Mar 11, 2022 00:48
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Chilled Milk posted:Is there a good site for reviews/news/comparisons of SBC's? I've got a couple projects I'd like to do on the horizon and I don't really know what's out there beyond Raspberry Pi, but I'm open to anything. The first thing I wanna tackle is consolidating/containerizing a few little devices and services I run and want on separate hardware from my main server/its VMs. https://www.explainingcomputers.com/ Guy also has a YouTube channel with reviews of various SBCs and various other interesting bits.
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Mar 11, 2022 03:40
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Buck Turgidson posted:https://www.explainingcomputers.com/ Oh this is exactly the type of website and guy I can trust
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Mar 11, 2022 06:50
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Update: it’s been nine months with no indication my Power9 bundle is fixing to ship, so I’ve requested a refund from Raptor Computing. That’ll teach me to order something that’s backordered without a firm date for expected restocks. I’m disappointed but don’t think it’s wrong to have second thoughts after the better part of a year, and it feels like they’re being increasingly evasive about the state of things on their social media. Here’s hoping they don’t fight me on it…
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Jul 4, 2022 16:33
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Raptor was reeeeeeeally slow on fulfilling orders back after the power9 launch and it didn’t sound like it got much better even before supply chain issues. Good luck I hope it works out! Bit of a small operation I would imagine, gotta be tough for them.
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Jul 4, 2022 16:56
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priznat posted:Raptor was reeeeeeeally slow on fulfilling orders back after the power9 launch and it didn’t sound like it got much better even before supply chain issues. Good luck I hope it works out! I'm sympathetic. But I don't feel comfortable having money hanging in the ether waiting on hardware that's showing no signs of appearing soon beyond vague assurances (most recently back in April on Twitter) that they are "very close at this point to having them back in stock in significant quantities." For the amount I spent I could literally get a baseline Mac Studio with education pricing and a Ryzen 5700x CPU plus motherboard, and have enough left over for groceries.
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Jul 4, 2022 17:23
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Oh yeah definitely not suggesting you should be subsidizing them, get your money back for sure. I hope it goes smoothly! They were a great option for testing with a power9 system that wasn’t in a real pain in the butt form factor.
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Jul 4, 2022 17:32
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Update: Raptor Computing apparently got in Blackbirds for the first time in forever late last week. My request for a refund is canceled, and I’m getting my Power9 kit next week. (They’d send it sooner, but I’m driving across state this weekend.) I am genuinely thrilled.
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Jul 5, 2022 17:44
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Sweet! They are pretty nifty machines. Curious what OS/distro are you planning on installing on it?
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Jul 5, 2022 17:56
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priznat posted:Sweet! They are pretty nifty machines. Currently planning to dual boot Void and Alma Linux - the former because I like its minimalism and default 4KB kernel page sizes, which plays better with the amdgpu driver for the Radeon Pro W5500 I’m installing, and the latter because I’ve put off learning RHEL forever, and I may as well learn it on IBM hardware.
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Jul 5, 2022 19:02
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The Blackbird is here and working, but I can’t get hwclock and date to sync with each other, so networking isn’t working. So far, it’s a computer running Void Linux without a network connection. I’m looking forward to getting system time sorted so I can start pulling in packages, getting video firmware and options sorted, and switching from the BMC 2D video to a proper Radeon with 4K support. Here’s hoping this doesn’t take too long… edit: I forgot to connect to the BMC after assembling it. With my MacBook Pro and a crossover Ethernet cable this hopefully won’t take long tomorrow… Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 23:31
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So a happy update. The Blackbird fired right up, but I wasn’t able to connect to the BMC to set the hardware clock because the wrong, bad network firmware was flashed on at the factory. About 24 hours after contacting Raptor they emailed me firmware and a flashing tool (as well as the source code repo for that tool if I preferred to compile it manually after reading the source), I flashed it, and after a power cycle networking was up and running. Since then I’ve gotten my Radeon Pro W5500 working without issue in Void Linux, and it’s been a very smooth, stable, and fast experience. I’ll start pushing it’s limits a bit more next week. And they’re taking orders again, and o track to ship out all previously ordered Blackbirds by the end of August. Cheers!
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Aug 6, 2022 01:45
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This is more of a business history question, but why did x86 win in the first place? Just Intel and IBM managed to secure the US corporate market against the variety of home PC competitors?
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Aug 13, 2022 09:34
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icantfindaname posted:This is more of a business history question, but why did x86 win in the first place? Just Intel and IBM managed to secure the US corporate market against the variety of home PC competitors? A combination of DOS and Windows, mostly. PC clones became a thing after Compaq did a clean room reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS and opened the market for competition, letting people buy PCs from any vendor, in comparison to the previous microcomputers, which were all proprietary. The Amiga held on for some time, but Apple is the only real survivor from the pre-clone days, and they've had to adapt a lot, including three complete architecture changes. Everyone else died out or adopted x86. It's a good lesson in why open standards are so important. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Aug 13, 2022 |
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Aug 13, 2022 09:48
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I often wonder what would have become of the Amiga were it not for Commodore being a somewhat dysfunctional company. My first real computer was an A500 and I just loved that machine. Just blew away pcs at the time too!
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Aug 13, 2022 09:54
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Why PC clones and not Amiga clones or Mac clones or whatever?
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Aug 13, 2022 10:00
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https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-computers-skirted-ibms-patents-and-gave-rise-to-eisa/
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Aug 13, 2022 10:25
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icantfindaname posted:Why PC clones and not Amiga clones or Mac clones or whatever? IBM built the PC from off-the-shelf chips anyone could buy, so it was easy to reverse engineer the motherboard and design highly compatible clone hardware. The BIOS was proprietary, but quite simple, making it relatively easy to do cleanroom reverse engineering designed to withstand potential legal challenges. Finally, the PC's MS-DOS operating system was supplied by Microsoft, and they were of course quite interested in selling their OS outside IBM's channel. Mac hardware was harder to clone - the original 128K Mac used a bunch of PAL/GAL gate array chips with custom logic inside, and later Macs moved to full custom chips. The Mac ROM was a big chunk of its OS, which was incredibly complex compared to BIOS and not easy to clone. And Apple had little interest (early on, anyways) in licensing the disk-loaded part of its Mac System software to clone companies. Amiga was much the same story as the Mac, except with a full custom chipset from the start. So, there were just a lot more technical and legal hurdles involved in cloning Macs and Amigas. The lack of barriers (especially legal ones) to cloning the PC probably happened by accident - the PC was a weird lightly funded maverick division which senior IBM management didn't take seriously at first. IBM had lots of experience fending off cloners in the mainframe world, so if they'd seen the PC as a real thing before it became an extremely real thing, I'm sure they would've taken steps to make it harder to clone.
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Aug 13, 2022 10:38
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icantfindaname posted:This is more of a business history question, but why did x86 win in the first place? Just Intel and IBM managed to secure the US corporate market against the variety of home PC competitors? IBM entering the market changed it from toy to Real Business Machine. It’s impossible to overstate how prominent IBM is as technology company in 1980. Once a critical mass of software was there you wanted to stay there. Once all the customers with money were there it became the primary development platform. Once knowing x86 office apps was a requirement schools had to buy them. Backwards compatibility: once you bought (or pirated) the software you didn’t want to buy it again. You couldn’t run Apple II visicalc on a mac (w/o buying a card that was as expensive as standalone Apple II). Amiga and Mac were much later. They never had the volume to justify large scale cloning. There were lots of Apple II clones and cp-m was effectively all-clones. Volume. Intel was able to ship x86 at scales that gave them performance and profitability leadership and use that revenue to build new cpus and processes by being very good with fab technology and leadership. But the real answer is Microsoft. Just an absolutely ruthless competitor who really understood the market, third party developers, iterative development, and network effects. The right company at the right time and right place.
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Aug 13, 2022 14:56
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I emulated a little 68000 VME board, the Xycom XVME-600 it was pretty straightforward since it’s a 68000 CPU, 68681 DUART, 68172 “transparent” VMEbus controller, 128KB SRAM, and 64KB EPROM one of the things I haven’t figured out is how to make MAME map ROM to 0x000000 for the first few bus cycles after reset like the hardware does so another thing that I’ve found is that I need to pretend it has a ton of RAM rather than treat everything between 0x020000 and 0xFBFFFF as VMEbus address space, I think it’s trying to probe a peripheral on startup somewhere in 0xF70000 and if I don't do this it causes a bus error loop some pics of the FORTH words available are in the imgur gallery
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Aug 15, 2022 04:30
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KozmoNaut posted:PC clones became a thing after Compaq did a clean room reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS and opened the market for competition, letting people buy PCs from any vendor, in comparison to the previous microcomputers, which were all proprietary. Early on in the microcomputer world CP/M on S-100 systems ruled, first 8080 then Z80, and were largely compatible. Microsoft was actually huge in this market with their languages and productivity applications, and even told IBM to talk to Digital Research about using CP/M-86 as their OS instead of licensing one from Microsoft. But Digital Research fumbled and Microsoft bought a CP/M clone for 8086 to take to IBM—without exclusivity. So in a way, the IBM PC and its open software architecture were a continuation of what was already happening with most microcomputer use in business; open hardware was in some ways just an almost inevitable side effect. There were MS-DOS compatible systems before Compaq; what made the “PC market” not the “MS-DOS market” was that IBM PC games really only ran on 100% hardware compatibles, providing an incentive to start from something that could run MS-DOS and end with something that could run Flight Simulator. The only reason that games even mattered was that the PC was getting into homes because it enabled people to take their work home, and then once home they were used for other things too (or mostly). Minicomputers were used extensively for office automation in the 1970s through the 1980s but there were very few games for those environments: Unless you had both a personal computer or terminal and a modem at home and your work had a modem, you were only using the office minicomputer when you were physically present in the office, and then only for work because that’s all it was set up to do. Of course people actually wrote plenty of games for minis, but outside those created in academia few were sufficient to make people want to access them from home—they were just office diversions. Whereas people were buying PC-compatibles to play games, with the excuse that they could do work at home…
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Aug 15, 2022 09:24
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The IBM PC was very much successful in its own right before PC clones appeared. The PC wasn't a great media machine, but they were built like tanks and favored by the business world. Intel made a lot of money off the x86 and the PC, and they used their warchest to crush any competing server/workstation architectures in the 90s. The only stuff that really survived that purge was embedded since x86 couldn't compete on low power, and from there grew ARM.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:59
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eschaton posted:Of course people actually wrote plenty of games for minis, but outside those created in academia few were sufficient to make people want to access them from home—they were just office diversions. With a few exceptions, such as Adventure/Zork
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Aug 15, 2022 16:10
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eschaton posted:I emulated a little 68000 VME board, the Xycom XVME-600 I can't believe someone was implrmenting FORTH, in hardware, on a board made of socketed ICs, incluiding a 68k, in 1989.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:22
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You’d be surprised what’s common in process control.
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Aug 15, 2022 20:36
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Ceramic 64-pin DIP is a chonker of a chip package. I just did a bit of google searching on "Palo Alto Shipping Company" and apparently that was a little Forth startup. Forth is such a fascinating bit of computing history; it (or maybe Chuck Moore's genius) convinced a small dedicated following that it could and should be the basis for everything, but realistically Forth had no chance of actually doing that.
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Aug 15, 2022 21:01
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BobHoward posted:Ceramic 64-pin DIP is a chonker of a chip package. On my A500 a common issue was the 68k dip would become unseated due to heat flexing and often just tapping the plastic case would seat it back if it had issues. It was a crazy long part, laff. I actually went in and used fishing line to cinch both ends down at one point then the problems went away!
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Aug 15, 2022 21:07
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Has anyone worked with the old MIPS RM5200-series Cobalt RaQ appliances? Those were neat little web and email servers in the late 90's to early 2000's. Sadly they seem to occupy the middle ground between being common enough to still be on eBay but rare enough to be expensive.
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Sep 29, 2022 04:00
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I worked on some of the Linux/MIPS stuff that it’s based on, but I think I recycled my Cobalt unit a decade ago…
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Sep 29, 2022 17:17
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BobHoward posted:I just did a bit of google searching on "Palo Alto Shipping Company" and apparently that was a little Forth startup. Forth is such a fascinating bit of computing history; it (or maybe Chuck Moore's genius) convinced a small dedicated following that it could and should be the basis for everything, but realistically Forth had no chance of actually doing that.
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Sep 29, 2022 18:46
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The basis of the JIT that Adobe and Mozilla collaborated on circa 2007, which briefly became the assembly layer of TraceMonkey before we tore it out, was a Forth interpreter. It was fun to play with! It might have shipped as part of Flash too, I can’t remember the chronology precisely. E: I think it did! https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/05/21/extending-tamarin-tracing-with-forth.html is of the era. Subjunctive fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Oct 1, 2022 |
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Oct 1, 2022 06:02
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Chilled Milk posted:Oh this is exactly the type of website and guy I can trust I love his content. He convinced me to buy an Odroid M1 with 8GB of RAM.
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Oct 2, 2022 19:02
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Intel made a lot of money off the x86 and the PC, and they used their warchest to crush any competing server/workstation architectures in the 90s. The only stuff that really survived that purge was embedded since x86 couldn't compete on low power, and from there grew ARM. Well - more accurately, Intel claimed Itanium was going to eat everyone else's lunch and a bunch of other people believed them and cancelled their own architectures (coupled with the ever rising price of developing new CPUs, of course). That said, RISC lasted in the server market longer than the 90s and is still around today in places. IBM is still popping out new POWER chips even. What really ate the workstation/low-end market was Linux (running on nice cheap Intel gear). Edit: 'This is more of a business history question, but why did x86 win in the first place?' well taking a wider view, they didn't, of course. There's a dozen ARM chips out there for every x86. Your PC/laptop is x86, but that's old fashioned now and I suspect a much smaller market than phones these days. Intel tried to get into phones, tablets and embedded and flopped face first. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Oct 3, 2022 |
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Oct 3, 2022 13:03
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BobHoward posted:IBM had lots of experience fending off cloners in the mainframe world, so if they'd seen the PC as a real thing before it became an extremely real thing, I'm sure they would've taken steps to make it harder to clone. Of course they did try this with P/S2 - in particular having a much fancier-technology system bus that was a proto-PCI. Which they thoroughly locked down with patents and licensed out at a premium. Trouble is though, having better technology (which it did) does not trump cheap and already-existing, so nobody bought it.
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Oct 3, 2022 13:15
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feedmegin posted:Well - more accurately, Intel claimed Itanium was going to eat everyone else's lunch and a bunch of other people believed them and cancelled their own architectures (coupled with the ever rising price of developing new CPUs, of course). But what if Intel hadn't announced Itanium and exclusively pushed along x86 designs? Would there have been any significant difference in the outcome? I don't know how much the DEC/Compaq sale was the result of Itanium's annoucnement--maybe DEC would've held on and try to compete against Intel in the server market? It just seems to me at the end of the day that other vendors couldn't afford to build fabs to outbuild Xeons, and by the early 00s the underlying architecture didn't really matter so much as process node and yields. feedmegin posted:IBM is still popping out new POWER chips even. feedmegin posted:Edit: 'This is more of a business history question, but why did x86 win in the first place?' well taking a wider view, they didn't, of course. There's a dozen ARM chips out there for every x86. Your PC/laptop is x86, but that's old fashioned now and I suspect a much smaller market than phones these days. Intel tried to get into phones, tablets and embedded and flopped face first. I think it's fair to say that by 2010, x86 had clearly won the consumer/business PC markets given Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel and the collapse of the RISC workstation market entirely. It's only been the release of the Apple M1 in 2020 that there's a competitive consumer alternative (and I say this as someone who primarily used an ARM Chromebook for years), and at this point that's an Apple thing and not indicative of a wider market trend.
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Oct 3, 2022 16:56
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IBM gave up on Power in HPC after being late on power9 and Glofo took their money and then didn’t deliver 7nm for Power10. Power is mostly legacy business/enterprise now (not mainframe.)
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Oct 3, 2022 17:02
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That said, Intel was pushing hard with X86 dating back to Pentium Pros and ASCI RED, if not before.
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Oct 3, 2022 17:08
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