The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it.
Unifi released the UCG-Fiber around a year ago that can also apparently finally handle it, but plenty of threads about slow performance with their UDMs since it's entirely done on the CPU [0].
I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT and would prefer something like OPNSense, but it's x86 only and good PPPoE performance isn't guaranteed either - need a CPU with good single core performance that costs more than the BPI-R4, or apparently virtualizing OPNSense allows it to process PPPoE with multiple threads.
I basically stopped buying SBCs several years ago, are there any SoC platforms that have mainline Linux support these days? Or is x86 still the way to go?
I really wish these lists would talk about software support. If I buy these, do they have mainline Linux support? Will I have security patches in a year? Is there decent distro support, or am I stuck with the vendor's half broken default image?
I wish comparisons would get into whether or not drivers have been upstreamed far enough where it is possible to run real Linux distros. And whether or not they've made braindead choices about boot device ordering.
I find it really weird that it's not until you get to the $200 range that anything has USB-C DP Alt mode support. You'd have though that anyone trying to squeeze space would want to drop full-size HDMI or DisplayPort ports at the first opportunity.
I really want a small SBC with USB-C DP Alt mode that I can stuff into a ~60%ish mechanical keyboard-sized case to make into a headless laptop thing so I can justify buying some display glasses like the XReal One or similar. Seems like it would be the ultimate travel computing solution.
That's precisely what I want. I've got all the parts other than the SBC. Even designed my own keyboard with this in mind. You can do it with a pi zero 2 but going from mini-HDMI to full-HDMI through an adapter to USB-C to only then pop out too the XReals is a complete mess of cables and little boxes, not least of which is caused by the HDMI->USB-C adapter needing to be independently powered. I'm tempted to print up a case to hide the mess but it's still, you know, a mess.
Also the zero 2 is a little under-powered. It's fine as far as it goes, it just feels like there's probably performance on the table with a more modern chipset.
> ollama benchmark ... for now, it's purely CPU, with DeepSeek R1 models tested based on the RAM available.
Then the results aren't comparable across different boards across RAM sizes. It'd be better to test a set of different model sizes on all and report -- if it didn't fit. But could you report the full ollama model name and version size slug for each?
> I pull Jeff's fork of the ollama-benchmark software
"This one caught me off guard. Arduino, the company most of us associate with microcontrollers and blinking LEDs, have released an SBC."
Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC?
I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.
If I stripped my old laptop down to a single PCB, it certainly wouldn't boot, it would be missing RAM, and storage. My PCs would have no RAM, no CPU, no storage, potentially no GPU, and most of the servers would be the same. The IPMI/iDRAC etc would boot up I guess if we count that, and we'd potentially get into the BIOS if a device has soldered RAM, but M.2/SATA attached storage or something?
We could debate about strict definitions all day, but I think the vast majority of people differentiate between a Raspberry Pi 5 (not a great example given it needs storage, pick anything with eMMC if you truly want everything on a single board) running a full Debian-based OS, and a Pico running MicroPython (or whatever your poison of choice is) and one task at a time, at least I do when it comes to this kind of thing!
Budget boards start at $42? Not really sure what the criteria was for being included, but it looks like you can still get a RPi 2B for $25. And Orange Pis are available for under $20.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] threadUnifi released the UCG-Fiber around a year ago that can also apparently finally handle it, but plenty of threads about slow performance with their UDMs since it's entirely done on the CPU [0].
I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT and would prefer something like OPNSense, but it's x86 only and good PPPoE performance isn't guaranteed either - need a CPU with good single core performance that costs more than the BPI-R4, or apparently virtualizing OPNSense allows it to process PPPoE with multiple threads.
0: https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performan...
Also the zero 2 is a little under-powered. It's fine as far as it goes, it just feels like there's probably performance on the table with a more modern chipset.
Then the results aren't comparable across different boards across RAM sizes. It'd be better to test a set of different model sizes on all and report -- if it didn't fit. But could you report the full ollama model name and version size slug for each?
> I pull Jeff's fork of the ollama-benchmark software
A link would be nice.
Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC?
I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.
We could debate about strict definitions all day, but I think the vast majority of people differentiate between a Raspberry Pi 5 (not a great example given it needs storage, pick anything with eMMC if you truly want everything on a single board) running a full Debian-based OS, and a Pico running MicroPython (or whatever your poison of choice is) and one task at a time, at least I do when it comes to this kind of thing!