To be fair, that could be said about any product. The RPI range covers a lot of bases, all well supported. Still good value IMO.

The cost and performance of a Beelink U59 out shines a Raspberry Pi 4B after adding in a case and power supply.

The pi was successful in it's goal. It created a huge market of low-priced SBCs. Maybe they are no longer made by them, but the foundation created the market, and manufacturers now create an endless selection of cheap SBCs

@@kelargo thanks for mentioning this. This 12v model is actually exactly what I was looking for for amateur radio use I think.

@@StepDub That is true and the Rasperry Pi has been put on the list.

Greetings Jeff. Loved your interview with Eben -- and I found it particulary interesting how his take on RISC-V seemed to have softened a bit. I'm looking forward to your factory tour!

Without arm chips you would still be using house heaters as computers. It forced all computer manufacturers to make more energy efficient computers. The running of a very large data centre with climate controls and air con to keep them cool was becoming exorbitant and if they can make servers run cooler then air con is not needed.

Tech UKpostsr crossover!

Yep. I use an 8GB Pi 4 as a server for a whole variety of tasks (SMTP/IMAP, Asterisk, Pi-Hole, backup server, IRC server, etc.) Even though the system as a whole was not very cheap, the fact that it uses so little power makes me feel better about leaving it on 24/7. The fact that it's completely silent is a bonus.

Thats why i always ask myself for what those ARM SBC with old or really slow SoCs are intended for, specially if i look at the sub $80 market, in the last 3 years of my life, both at home and at work, ive been using microcontrollers for anything i needed GPIO I/O or even a basic usb host (thanks Pico), for a home server ive been using a J4105 ITX board because it is really low power and have all the I/O and performance something like the RPI4 do not have. And for a more general use pc the RPI4 is just not enoght and all SBC below $80 are petty much at the same place or even worse. The RK3588/S is a good breaktrought in ARM SBC in performance and I/O but the price has been going up non-stop. These days i have more hope in the Intel N100 landing in a good price/power/performance area for SBC and minipcs, because even the RK3588 that is old ARM arch by today standarts keeps increasing in price.

Absolutely 👍👍

This is a TEST COMMENT, as I believe my comments are being SHADOW BANNED by UKposts! EDIT: Apparently, this comment WASN'T Shadow Banned!

I'm using my Raspberry Pi 400 as a low-cost Linux PC, and for ARM development reasons.

This is perfectly normal, in my opinion. Just experiencing the SBC world is fun. If you don't have an advanced task in mind or don't like messing with boards forever, you can just... move on.

Strangely it seems all the manufacturers keep putting out those SBC with GPUs with no drivers for them.

@@knerduno5942 I was so sad, when my H616 SBC didn't have any GPU drivers for it.

@@ZILtoid1991 I have a RPi400 also and really like it . I use it to play with GPIO experimentation, etc.

Thanks for watching. :)

@@ExplainingComputers Great video, thanks. The first thing I check is free RAM vs. SWAP file loading. As soon as OS starts to swapping onto the ultra-slow SD card the usability goes to zero (and SD lifetime too). So the slow performance is not from bloated SW directly but from swapping instead. Funny thing is that once OS swaps all unimportant data from RAM then it runs fine. So clearly there is a ton of libraries which are almost never used (but Linux wants them in RAM because that's reasonable thing for Linux servers with >100 GB RAM). I totally agree with you about SBC becoming full capable desktop machines. I bought the best ARM CPU SBC available today with 16GB RAM for non-stop home server (Orange Pi 5 with legendary RK3588). Surprisingly it runs fine on 4K LCD and UKposts fullHD videos are flawless. My old Rapsberry Pi 4 struggled on 4K LCD (FullHD was fine) and overall desktop user experience was very poor (usable but delays everywhere including mouse pointer). This RK3588 run multiple times faster, wow. And it draw 1.7 Watt only at idle (LCD turned off and running Armbian as file server via ETH), and about 8 Watt full loaded 8-cores by benchmark (less than my old RPi4). On the other hand I do not agree about x86 SBC. They will never run file server at 1.7 Watts as my RK3588. x86 is CISC ISA which is outdated and inefficient for modern computing by design. Even CISC x86 runs inside as RISC computer so all this unnecessary CISC-to-RISC translation comes at power and transistor cost (hence inefficient in many areas). The biggest issue for x86 is variable instruction length encoding (instruction can be 1 byte up to 15 byte long). Modern CPU execute 7-10 instructions per clock so CPU needs to load and decode 10 instructions in parallel. ARM and RISC-V as 32-bit encoded fixed length RISC (every instruction is 4 byte long so CPU know exactly where 10th instruction is) runs flawlessly. CISC x86 suffer from polynomial explosion (2nd instruction can start anywhere between 2nd byte and 16th byte, 3rd between 3rd and 31th, 4th ... 4th and 46th, and so on). x86 need sophisticated predictors with millions of transistors for task where RISC needs few thousands transistors and minimal power draw. Am I the only one who thinks it's ridiculous resources wasting on outdated closed ISA? Have you seen the new KING of CPU world? The most powerful CPU today is ...... ARM Cortex X4. Absolutely insane CPU monster and broke several world's records: - Cortex X4 .... is 1st CPU on the world with 3x branch units - Cortex X4 .... is 1st CPU on the world with 8x Integer execution units in scalar core (previous champ was Apple A11 from 2017) - interesting is the fast evolution of Cortex cores each year (X2 had 4xINT+2xBrach, then X3 came with 6xINT+2xBranch, and now X4 with 8xINT+3Branch). - Cortex X4 .... is 1st CPU on the world with decoder capable of 10 instruction per clock (last champ was Apple A14/M1 with 8 instructions/clock) - Cortex X4 .... 13% IPC increase - Cortex X4 .... 10% increase in area only (performance per transistor increase, this you never see in x86 world because all those old ISA workarounds) - Cortex X4 .... 40% less power consumption than X3 at same performance. - Cortex X4 .... is 3rd CPU which is 64-bit only (ARM32-bit decoder removed for the first time in X2, Apple removed 32-bit in 2017 on A11 Monsoon core) - Fun fact: .... AMD Zen 4 .............. has 4x INT + 1xBranch ..... decoder 4 instr/clock (plus huge mOp cache with expensively decoded instr to workaround, but it works only for loops). - Fun fact: .... Intel Raptor Lake .... has 5x INT (shared branch) ..... decoder 6 instr/clock (plus huge mOp cache with expensively decoded instr to workaround, but it works only for loops). Cortex X4 is absolutely state-of-art CPU. X4 server version (Neoverse V2 ) is used by Nvidia in Super Grace 144-core server CPU. I wonder how 60-core Intel Sapphire Rapids and 96-core AMD Epyc will fight X4/V2 core (which has higher IPC, more cores, much better efficiency). Also I hope Jim Keller's Tenstorrent RISC-V CPUs will enter SBC and server market soon.

I agree.

This chap is friendly too. One of the professors I had at university was a curmudgeon. He failed the whole class and curved the grades. My 17% became a 3.2.

That's perfectly understandable. "When they meet both of these criteria again" - that'd be a few weeks ago for the Pi Zero, over the next few weeks for the Pi 3, and a few weeks after that for the Pi 4.

@@senseisecurityschool9337 - You keep posting this. Upton has been saying this since the summer of 2022. It's now the summer of 2023. Tomorrow, tomorrow I love ya tomorrow You're always, a day away

@@originalbluebuddha Since December 2022, he's been saying EXACTLY this - Pi Zero at end of Q1, Pi 3 in Q2, Pi 4 in Q3. Which is exactly what's happened. If you go back & read his post from December 2022, you'll see it exactly matches what has happened.

PS end of Q3 you should see Pi3 & Pi4 stock sitting on the shelf for a while, rather than selling out quickly - that's what he said in 2022 and what he still said last week, because he KNOWS when his shipments from the foundry are due, how long Sony takes to SMD package them, how long it takes to put them in boards and put those boards in boxes ...

@@originalbluebuddha ukposts.info/have/v-deo/iGmnopdwoZegmn0.html That's 2022. That's what he said in 2022 - and it's exactly what's been happening, exactly when he said it would. So please kindly stop going around lying about people. It's not a good look.

I totally agree. And this is why I still run Word and Excel 97! :)

@@ExplainingComputers I wish I could get a version of WordPerfect from the early days. It had a feature that was really useful -- "reveal codes." With that feature, you could see what characters the program put into your document and change or remove them when you wanted to. Word has never had such a feature, and if it randomly formats your document to suit itself instead of to suit you (as happens all too often), you've got the choice of living with it or spending hours trying to figure out how to fix it. But no one ever said that Microsoft created GOOD software...

I used reveal codes all the time! :) And missed it in Word as you say. Happy days.

And wastes lots of electricity worldwide and makes people buy new updated CPU's even when only 10% of the old one was needed to run stuff that the user clicks on to use

I agree with these application areas, but I included home automation in my first maker category, and excluded business applications.

There's also another one, the people who buy SBCs, don't use them and leave them in drawer. The solution for them is to simply stop buying SBCs.

@@Talkathon408 no, the solution for them is for them to give those drawer SBC's to me.

Did you comment before watching the video?

Their problem was to put all their eggs in one basket. This meant when one of their suppliers was unable to supply them with components they couldn't make the boards. I can only assume it was the Broadcom SOC they couldn't get.

The trading side of RPI hasn't shut down, it is prioritising its industrial customers so THEY.dont have to shut down (or go elsewhere).. I expect that Pi's will become more available and hopefully eliminate the need for people looking for JUST one board ( of anyversion) to have to pay over the odds to a scalper who gad somehow managed to acquire some.

@@6581punk I think it's more of a case of having to make contractual commitments to investors who put up the money for the Pi Foundation in the first place. They probably had no choice but to send what stocks they had to industrial partners first. I guess you'd have to say "that's just Capitalism" and leave it at that.

It's ultimately for the best for us that one company does not occupy the entire market..

They have not had a supply chain problem. They have instead focused on industrial applications and staying with the current tech for way too long. I love their ecosystem but the need to start moving on the consumer side or just give up an focus on the industrial side.

You could have both.

Disagree, it needs to have an onboard storage as an option (note the word OPTION). Raspberry PI/whoever could sell a version with M.2 or onboard flash for those who want that option. MicroSD cards are not that sturdy or vibration resistant, short of soldering the card direct to the PCB. I just want an SBC with a secondary drive for data/files (not the OS), without resorting to a janky USB thumb drive.

my odroid sbc has both, sdcard and emmc (removable), rockpi has emmc to usb and emmc to sdcard adaptors , so i can have 3 emmc on the odroid, onboard, via sdcard and via usb, sdcard adaptor opens up options for all sdcard readers, usb adaptor can be expanded a lot (raid?)

You could argue that some SBC should come with an M.2 slot instead of an microSD card reader. I could see Raspberry Pi offer that as an option.

I just go the route of a cheap SSD. Since they're so cheap now it's not a bad option. Just create multiple partitions to try other things with. To produce other installs, I create loop devices onto files on my main PC Linux. Just dd a file of the size you expect the partition to use, create a loop device for it, format it, mount and use an install script. Then just send it over to the SBC and use dd to write it to its own partition. Update the bootloader and you're GTG.

I would love to see something like a Zero 2 W but with a RK3588S at $30-40 even if it only has 2GB of ram it would be good to bring the desktop computer experience to the masses.

We tried this at my school. Massive failure. Everyone was frustrated because they couldn’t browse the web at a reasonable speed, let alone open Google Docs or LibreOffice in less than 3 minutes. (They were Pi3Bs with 32GB Samsung EVO+ SD cards

@@tejasraman6913 That's not a massive failure, that's just organizers not knowing how to lesson plan/teach SBC projects lmao

The term affordable is entirely relative to inflation. The reality is that in todays economy the various SBC makers cannot afford to produce them for the same prices that they once did.

Today's 32-bit microcontrollers can do that job. You aren't going to run a web browser on them. You can plug in a bunch of sensors and run a web *server* though. You're not going to play streaming HD video through them, but you *can* do serious image processing on them.

I think what Nvidia are doing and Orange PI are valuable (whatever happened to the Asus Tinkerboard?) but you can't beat the PI for support. For learning and experimentation you'd use a PI or a Pico. For a product I think you should be prepared to solder the chips to your own board.

As someone who's just gotten into this stuff and is looking to get in I'm looking at mostly orange Pi and odroid or just an esp32 for things I can get away with that.

Agreed, desktop computer is a stupid target market, especially for ARM.

SBCs are kind of dead. If you want something that feels like the SBCs of the old days, you should look at something like an ESP32-WROOM or STM32 development board. Most SBC makers are pushing towards making a microPC instead of staying focused on a computer suited for embedded systems. OTOH, if you like having all this modern power in a tiny package, you're much better off using one of those SFF workstations because they're getting thrown out left and right by schools and businesses, unlike RPis which are expensive and unavailable these days. No real reason to use a 32-bit ARM processor when you could have an x86-64 processor with integrated graphics for the same price.

@@tissuepaper9962 Yeah, I agree. I just like the small boards as I can tuck them away and just use them over the network.

@@OhHeyTrevorFlowers those esp32-wroom boards I mentioned come with wifi/bluetooth and they're smaller than a credit card if you get a headerless version. might he worth checking out in your use case, the boards I use are called ESP32 Feathers.

I have about 10

Well, I started in 2014 buying one, then in 2015 and following years I bought 3 of the 2015 model, I did not check when a new one came out, just that I hate those mini-mini ports that they think are convenient. The Pi 4 model I bought had USB-C power, nice step, but not everything. The Pi-zero I had setup with Pi-hole and one 2014 model I had Music box running, very unstable by the way and not updated anymore. The burden of open source! All in all, they are fun to toy with, but really stable and reliable? I would say no!, those micro sd cards, if a factory default shows up and by taking one out of the slot and having one piece in your hand and the other is still in the slot? Man, what a crap is that. Instead of making things smaller, they should scale up!

I thought of you when I wrote that label! :) I'm very interested to hear that your reaction to the Sigmas was the same as mine. And I also agree that RISC-V will offer new enthusiast opportunities . . .

@@ExplainingComputers I am honored to be in the thoughts of a great mind who thinks alike.

"I put myself firmly in the enthusiast camp. Whether I need all 50-60 SBCs that I own remains a mystery, especially to the missus." I can relate to that. I can relate to that, yes.

A very good point. I had not thought of it that way. Pis got people into GPIO, who then migrated down to more appropriate hardware.

You Sir, are right on the money ! A phone designed from the outset to be re used as a SBC is a wonderful idea and just the kind of green approach that should be adopted ASAP. A hat tip from the northern UK to you ! 😃

I didn't even use a computer.

Agreed. I did much of that on a 32k North Star Horizon back in 1979. We are drowning in IT resources for those needing simpler work done. I often buy reconditioned i5 HP computers for around USD 130, cheeper than many an SBC when SBC are even available.

The TRS80 was a machine I never owned, once used (in a local library), but marvelled at in the Tandy catalogue and shop window for many years.

@@connclissmann6514 I've just bought a HP i5 laptop for a specific use. You can't beat them for value.👍

@@robotsnthat I’ll see your HP and raise a Lenovo T series Thinkpad. I reckon I’ll still be banging away on my T530 for years to come.

I was a university lecturer and freelance speaker for about 30 years.

@@ExplainingComputers ahhhhhh....there...i knew it!

Yup, it was the community and the support that made it such a smashing success. Similar with the Arduino. We had microcontrollers before the Arduino, e.g. the PIC series was relatively popular. But the Arduino really exploded the market, in great part because they made microcontrollers easier to use through great documentation, and fostering a community around the platform.

A good option is the Fujitsu Futro S920 that comes with a dual core AMD SOC (1.5.GHz, I think) and 4GB RAM by default - it will take 8 GB DDR3 SODIMM RAM. It also has an additional PCI-E slot that could take a low profile GPU, though I put an Ethernet card in mine to build a pfSense router with it.

Power over Ethernet seems ideal for these kinds of uses, if the SBC can be powered by it.

The Bud Lite treatment...

they shouldn't be able to decide that 32-bit gets phased out. it's not what we want.

I agree with this -- and they would seem such simple "new" features. :)

I also want to see that comparison. I think if you need gpio or spi/i2c bus then go to SBC or choose MCU. If not then Mini PC or put it in container or just run in server. In my case I use RPi4 for ruuvi tags but now also my main computer has BT so I can also run listening scripts there but I still like to run those outside my main rig. Other stuff is using AVR, ESP8266, ESP32 or MSP430.

TBH, repurposing those used PCs is an excellent way to reduce e-waste. By the time they finally are truly obsolete, we should have better recycling capabilities as well (hopefully).

@@gr-os4gd those second-hand PCs are not as cheap as they were in 2021. In fact, these are not cheap anymore. Everybody is looking for some old computer. Yes, recycling old electronic equipment is an excellent way of saving money and it's good for the environment.

There will always be a less expensive, better performance per watt ARM chip than x86 can deliver simply because of the instruction set difference. I see x86 taking over the mid to high end of the market, with ARM continuing strong where having the most lightweight hardware possible is a valuable advantage.

​@@editingsecrets I think a more traditional microcontroller is a better option at the low end. An SBC is wasted when it sits all day doing nothing but blink lights and read switches, which is what most Arduino/RPi projects amount to. Even an ESP32 is overkill for most of the stuff that people use their SBCs for, excluding the people who want to use them as little desktop PCs.

Yeah the RPi is a good bit of kit, kinda has a Microbee feel to it

Yeah I really love the modern C64 vibes it gives off, just got one on my birthday a few days ago.

You could even get a $100 Linux SBC and not need to deal with dual boot or virtualization at all. If you brick the Linux box, refresh its boot drive with no harm done to your Windows machine.

OpenBSD rocks!

Very interesting. I've just been taking a look ag Gemini. :)

I do everything with scrapped machines- but there's always the increased risk of failure and relatively low power efficiency of older gear you have to plan around. (backups and standbys, etc) I'd have no qualms about jumping back into text-only office apps and doing everything on an SFF again when this current sub-$100 laptop craps out the rest of the way- I can run a separate STB on the TV for any video I need (I don't do ANY editing anymore) and use less power AND BE MORE PRODUCTIVE with multiple devices. That probably has a larger carbon footprint for manufacturing and operation of all this junk I much prefer to call "my toys", except the only actually new COTS are the SFF and STB...I think I'll have to do a deeper dive on real total costs, but I'm pretty good at guessing after 60 years in tech, and my best wild guess right now is I'm a little less burdensome to the planet than with a spiffy new laptop I can't afford.

My pi 400 does that for cheaper.

Your last sentence reminded me of a decades-old saying "What Grove giveth, Gates taketh away." Other players are now in those positions, but the game remains the same.

Thanks for this. The Zero 2W is handicapped by its 512MB of RAM when running a desktop PC. With 2GB or even 1GB it would be a much better board.

Now that is an idea that i have been mulling for a year or two now, as i have a couple of S905's with 2Gb/8Gb i got for $15 and thought i could reformat them as SBC's with Linux instead of Android. However, i just recently read that they may not be able to be wiped completely clean and could still continue to house the original malware that they came with. I am curious.....what do you think?

Yes, it is depressing how much bloat has crept into even simple things like Raspberry Pi OS.

To be fair, I think it didn't happen for the same reason that Pi costs stayed up. Pi costs staid high because people were already in the Pi ecosystem, thus demand for Pis remained high even though they were exorbitantly over priced. It's the same reason the Microsoft window's environment isn't going any place regardless of how many people grouse about it. Or the fact that it outright spies on its users. This wasn't helped by the fact that the Pi has been seeing a lot of use as a ready made 'brain' in commercial/industrial products. Just toss into a hardened case and plug it into your product with proprietary software as a ready made solution. For a lot of industrial products, the added price was peanuts in exchange for a well supported code base. It's a chicken or egg situation. Yes, someone could have benefited from switching to the cheaper alternative, but the first person to defect would suffer from poor software support and have to start from scratch. And the savings often just wasn't worth that.

Yeah. Turns out everyone can slap together a working Single Board computer (just a matter of slapping some reference designs together on a single PCB) and start selling them. But when it comes to software? most cop out and expect the users to sort it out for them. proclaiming it as "Community driven".

I have my doubts Raspberry Pi will ever get supply back up to demand again. They've gotten in bed with the wrong suppliers and they're making too much bank from their industry customers (who are probably scalping a lot of the supply they're buying up).

I haven't even been able to get a 2nd pi 0 in 4+ years. You guys are talking about moon rocks from Ganymede.

@@Drak976 I got a pi zero 2 like a year ago.

I don't think SBCs actually fill that niche at all. Used MiniPCs and old laptops do a much better job at being home servers and low-cost desktop workstations, and their availability is much better than most of the popular SBCs. If I had to setup a home server, I would pick an old ThinkPad over a RaspberryPi every time. Same goes if I needed to give somebody a conputer to use for school or something, I would always choose a piece of used hardware designed for general consumers before I would choose a SBC designed for computer enthusiasts.

You can make it workable but you have to invest time and effort learning to build a more efficient Linux on it - I do it that way myself using Gentoo Linux. Raspberry Pi OS is a great all-rounder OS but on a board of that size and limited power, every CPU cycle and byte of RAM that you can claw back is important - and therefore customising it more can achieve a lot. And that's just a statement of fact, by the way - it's not my opinion of what I think you or anyone else should be doing to follow my example. I am simple giving you a solution to the problem you state that there is with the Pi.

Firefox wants to implement V4L2 M2M for hardware video decoding for the Pi (and possibly other SBCs?). But I have moved on to the Rockchip RK3588 and 1080p is no problem, even just with software decoding.

I think the mini/micro HDMI is the future so more stuff can be fit on to the SBC with the same space.

@@knerduno5942 They're easier to damage and not as sturdy.

Well, they gotta do something in order to get more items on the board. With the newest RPi 5, they added a PCIe - M.2 Slot.@@maxxdahl6062

And on what basis or authority are you making these claims? I am not saying I don't believe you, I'd just like to understand where your information comes from.

​@@terrydaktyllus1320 it's all available out there ... just a simple Google will help you. Inflation has been steadily rising over the past 3yrs due to the effects of the Rona lockdowns all around the world. The fed has been increasing rates to curb it and that has not been quite great for the economy and that doesn't affect only the US, it has ripple effects all throughout out.

@@weiSane You clearly misunderstand me here - I don't do "homework" to make you or anyone else look right. If you have evidence to back up your point then you present it when asked - because I do not have to take on trust anything you tell me. And the opposite is true also. You'll forgive me for ignoring most of your "economics lecture" given that it is entirely unnecessary as something that adds to the knowledge that I currently have on the topic. Did the OP appoint you as their official spokesperson, by the way? I do want to believe what they are telling me but only they can provide the evidence to back up their own claims.

Don't forget price gouging as well.

@@terrydaktyllus1320 damn bro...I was just trying to help lmfao. No need to come out guns blazing. It's not that serious. Enjoy your weekend.