intel

Radxa X4 SBC Unites Intel N100 and Raspberry Pi RP2040

At first glance, especially from the top, the Radxa X4 is your typical Arm SBC:

Radxa X4 Top

But you'll quickly notice the lack of an SoC—that's on the bottom. Looking more closely, what's a Raspberry Pi chip doing on top?! First, let's flip over the board to investigate. There's the SoC: definitely not Arm inside, this thing's an Intel N100:

Radxa X4 Bottom - Intel N100 SoC

I have all my benchmarks and notes bringing up this board stored in my sbc-reviews GitHub repository: Radxa X4 - geerlingguy's sbc-reviews, and I also summarized everything in a video on YouTube, which you can watch inline (or skip past and read this blog post instead):

When did Raspberry Pi get so expensive?

Raspberry Pi 5 and N100 GMKtec Nucbox G3

I just bought this N100-based Intel x86 mini PC (brand new), and it was cheaper than an almost equivalent—but slower—Raspberry Pi 5.

This GMKtec mini PC is called the Nucbox G3, and it comes with an Intel Alder Lake N100 4-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 Pro—and mine cost just $131, after a couple coupons.

That's... a lot of computer for a very good price. But the Raspberry Pi—the famous "$35 computer", should be well below that... right?

Well, I bought all the parts required to build a Pi 5 to the same spec—including the adapters and parts to assemble it into one small unit—and it turns out... the Pi is more expensive. And slower.

The Pi 4 still starts at $35 (for a 1 GB model), but the Pi 5 starts at $60 (for 4 GB) and climbs to $80 for the maximum 8 GB model.

RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC

It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:

StarFive VisionFive 2 Black Background

The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!

The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.

Moving my PC into my rack in a 2U case

This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:

2U Gaming and Linux PC in small studio rack

I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little under-desk studio rack.

So after working with them last year on a similar build (but with a prototype case), I got in touch with MyElectronics and they sent over their new production Mini ITX short-depth 2U PC case.

The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9

(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.)

It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building Emacs.

Well, here's my quick story.

I've been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pis lately—more specifically, work which often requires recompiling the Pi OS Linux kernel for the aarch64 architecture. I recompile the kernel enough I made my own shirt for it!

WiFi 6 gets 1.34 Gbps on the Raspberry Pi CM4

January 1, 2021 Update: My 1.34 Gbps benchmark was flawed. See this GitHub issue and this updated blog post to learn more: WiFi 6 is not faster than Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi.

EDUP Intel AX200 WiFi 6 802.11ax PCIe card in Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 IO Board

After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi, installing Intel's WiFi firmware, and patching Intel's wireless driver to make it work on the Raspberry Pi, I benchmarked the EDUP Intel AX200 WiFi 6 PCIe card and got 1.34 Gbps of bandwidth between the Raspberry Pi and a new ASUS WiFi 6 router.

This is my story.

5 Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

tl;dr: I successfully got the Intel I340-T4 4x Gigabit NIC working on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and combining all the interfaces (including the internal Pi interface), I could get up to 3.06 Gbps maximum sustained throughput.

Update: I was able to boost things a bit to get 4.15 Gbps! Check out my video here: 4+ Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

After my failure to light up a monitor with my first attempt at getting a GPU working with the Pi, I figured I'd try something a little more down-to-earth this time.

And to that end, I present to you this four-interface gigabit network card from Intel, the venerable I340-T4:

Intel I340-T4 NIC for PCI Express x4

What does Apple Silicon mean for the Raspberry Pi and ARM64?

Note: There's a video version of this blog post available here: What does Apple Silicon mean for the Raspberry Pi and ARM64?

Apple Silicon and the Raspberry Pi

A couple weeks ago I tried using the latest Raspberry Pi 4 8 gig model as my main computer for a day, and I posted a video about my experience.

Besides many diehard Linux fans complaining in the comments about my apparent idiocy caused by being a Mac user, the experience taught me one thing: A lot of software still isn't built for 64-bit ARM processors, or even for Linux in general.

But there's one trend that I'm seeing: most of the open source software I use already works great on a Pi 4 running on its 64-bit ARM processor.