Changes in SBC-City

[Dirk Broer]

And now for something completely different: Another day in SBC-city, a bit of sillyness.

At 3B, Raspberry Towers an inhabitant seems to be terminally ill. 3B, Raspberry Towers was erected together with 2B, Raspberry Towers when the old Raspberry Estate Building that housed the entire -then- Raspberry family was taken apart to form 4B/4G, Raspberry Lighthouse, next to the smaller 4B/8G Raspberry Lighthouse.

The workload for the ill Raspberry Pi 3B is for the moment lightened by an Odroid-C1 from the reserve, that squated in the presently unused part of the old Raspberry Estate Building. This is frowned upon by the other Odroids, who prefer to live on their own, just like the Jetsons, the Cubieboards (that can all stand on their own feet) and the Bananas (that can't). The Bananas had a bit of a falling out after the retirement of the old Banana Pro, who went to the SBC housing for the elderly, where a BeagleBone Black and a Raspberry Pi B+ gave it a warm (or should we say 'cold' with de-activated SBC's?) welcome.

Banana Pi M2 is on a roll now: it ordered a large DEBO flooring and contacted Noctua for a cooler and fan to be placed on top of it. To really outshine the neighbors, who have to do with 30mm or 40mm fans, it will be equipped with a 60mm fan on a Noctua NC-U6. Suddenly the large flooring makes sense: the Banana M2 might topple otherwise. There are even plans for a Chinese HB-802 cooler with a 80mm Noctua fan it seems!

The Jetsons have ordered new powerlines and are still working on improved cooling for themselves. The Cubieboards also have ordered new powerlines and have experimented with a twice as big as original heatsink (area 25mm squared instead of 12.5mm squared) and a 40mm Noctua fan -that presently sits on the Odroid-C1's cooling solution: the old Odroid-XU4 active cooler, combined with Noctuas finest. The XU4 uses a XU4Q heatsink with a 40mm Noctua fan itself.

Rumours are that 3B, Raspberry Towers will soon house an ASUS Tinker Board S to replace the poor Raspberry Pi 3B. Will the mere 30mm fan there be enough? We'll soon find out.

P.S.: Soon to be seen with a photo gallery...first two being the Banana Pi M2, mounted on the Joy-IT DEBO flooring and the Noctua NC-U6 attached. Still have to learn to take pictures with my phone.

[Dirk Broer]

Yet another day in SBC-City, home of the ARM fleet (a.k.a. ARMada)

The SBC-City housing committee has voiced its concerns at the fleet about temperatures in Raspberry Towers no. 2B. Though the inhabitants of nearby no. 3B are doing quite well after their changeover to a 64-bit OS, the inhabitants of 2B are very much bound to a 32-bit OS due to their ARM Cortex-A7s and, from the low voltage warnings on the screen, it looks like they are really having trouble running both CPU and 30mm fan at 5 Volt. This never was the case when an external duo of 120mm fans still kept the ARM fleet cool. The idea is now to mod the PiHut housings of both 2B and 3B by taking the mid-level out, so room comes available for 52Pi Ice Tower Low profile coolers. The two 2B inhabitants so will use up almost all PiHut space, and at least one of the inhabitants of 3B will therefore be housed in the remnants of old Raspberry Towers -presently in use by the Odroid-C1. The idea is that the predicted lower temperatures will increase performance for all four Raspberries.

At last fleet manoeuvres it was established that the Raspberry Pi 2B performs roughly 10 times as fast as the Fleet's original Raspberry Pi Model B+, and five times as fast as the famous Beaglebone Black under the same underlying Debian version. The 3Bs that originally were almost twice as fast as the 2Bs (and performed at the level of the 1500 MHz Cortex-A5 Odroid-C1) are now trice as fast due to their 64-bit OS and perform even better than the ASUS Tinkerboard with its high-end 32-bit Cortex-A17. With the 52Pi Ice Tower Coolers fitted they might be able to do an overclock to at least 3B+ level, meaning 1400 instead of 1200 Mhz. 1500 might even be reached...

The 1400+ MHz would bring them at the same level, Hertz-wise, as the previous low-end 64-bit crunchers: the Nvidia Jetson Nanos, with their Cortex-A57 Tegra SOCs. Their superior IPC, as compared to the Cortex-A53, makes that they perform twice as fast though -at least on the WEP-M+2 Project. This makes fleet procurement look into the rumoured king-of-performance-per-Watt: the ARM Cortex-A55, meaning the Odroids C4 and M1, the Radxa Rock 3A/3B and the Banana Pi M5. At the present SBC supply shortages not all of these can be bought at any time soon though, and Fleet procurement would actually rather have any model of the Raspberry Pi 4 than a Cortex-A55 board, and when pushed to the choice preferably an Odroid-N2+. The Fleet's experimental branch however, that is soon forced to finally hand over the Raspberry Pi CM4 and the Radxa Rock Pi 4B to the operational part of the Fleet, now wants an Odroid-M1, pointing at the availability, the relatively low price (at least for the 4GB model), the much better PCIe 3.0x2 M.2 NVMe storage option, the higher DDR4 speed and the included NPU. The Radxa Rock 3A is at the moment 2nd choice, depending on the performance in active service of the Rock Pi 4B. But the experimental branch really would lay their hands on the Radxa Rock 5B if given half the chance...

[Dirk Broer]

Today the Raspberry Pi CM4 was handed to the active fleet by the Fleet's experimental branch, but grudgingly. The experimental department is not happy with the speed -stock @1500 MHz- and the chosen cooling solution, a 140mm Noctua Redux
-a la Jeff Geerling-
blowing over the CPU, but in this case helped by a Xigmatek Porter N881 chipset cooler on top of the CPU. But just not fastened as the experimental department would have had it. There are plans to mount a Noctua NC-U6 or a PCCooler HB-802, but the experimental department is still looking for a way to securely fasten the cooler to the module/IO board combo. Soon as that happens, 2300 MHz is the very least the Fleet hopes for.

Next launch will be the Rock Pi 4B, in its metal passive cooling case:

The experimental branch is planning an old Pentium Pro cooler as footing, aided by a 40mm Noctua @5V blowing through it. On top they are thinking of a 80mm Noctua @3.3V, to suck hot air out.

All this will mean the end of active service for the old LeMaker Banana Pro, and now the Raspberry Pi 2s and the Banana Pi M2 come in the danger zone. The Raspberries get a chance with Ice Tower coolers to crank up their daily score and their maximum MHz limit, but the Banana Pi M2 already has an even better cooler and has to try to get overclocked to somewhere in the 1200 MHz.

[Dirk Broer]

The experimental department got its Odroid-M1 today, it is now waiting for an M.2 NVMe drive to install an OS, straight from the 'petitboot':
"Petitboot pre-installed into the on-board 16MiB of SPI-Flash Memory helps manage various OS and kernel versions easily and supports booting from microSD, eMMC, NVMe, SATA, and USB storage devices".

Also arrived: two low profile 52Pi ice tower coolers, that went to the completely re-vamped '2B, Raspberry Towers' estate, and two 5V 80mm Noctua's, to help cooling the Odroid-XU4 (in combination with the Xigmatek N881) and the Rock Pi 4B. The chief engineer insists on a 80 to 60mm fan adapter, to make sure the fan fits properly into/unto the Radxa housing. He's a very suspicious man, our chief engineer! He doesn't quite trust the passive cooling housing, as he fears heat will be trapped on the inside. And he isn't all too keen on heatsinks that stand on the ground either.... and then to think of it that his engineering degree is actually in software....

As the Xigmatek N881 is in use at the very moment for the compute module 4, a new dedicated CM4 cooler has been ordered, combining heatsink and fan. The chief engineer seems to secretly hope to be able to mod a Cooler Master Evo 212 or 412S unto it.

The planning is that all new systems are in full operation before valterc of BOINC.Italy overtakes me at the WEP-M+2 Project.

[Dirk Broer]

More changes in SBC city, and not all for the good. After the dreadful tidings of the electricity board, the experimental department came with the advise to ditch the entire 32-bit ARM part of the fleet (with the exception of the ASUS Tinker Board and the Odroid-XU4), as well as the 64-bit x86-64 AMD AM1 part of it. They want to experiment with more advanced hardware that does more [credits] for less [wattage].

[Dirk Broer]

Ever more sad faces from the accounting department force the Fleet command to really ditch the entire 32-bit part of the fleet -at least form the active part of it.
Them rivet-counters from ...accounting (where else?) have thwarted the original plans for a 3rd Raspberry Pi 3, as there were those in the fleet that suggested a 3rd Pi 3 because there's already one Pi 1, two Pi 2's and four Pi 4's -if you can count a CM4 as Pi 4- and have suggested an almost-all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400 instead. They also suggested it to be booted straight from the web, as with the Odroid-M1, just this time to a SATA-600 SSD that is connected via a USB3.0 port. They also pointed out -leave that to them- that the Pi 400 will eat less power and will bring more credits than the two Raspberry Pi 3's that still serve now -so they might be the first 64-bit SBC's that are being laid off. The Odroid-XU4 should be replaced with an Odroid-C4 that uses a mere 25% of the power of the XU4, while having a better [WEP-M+2] performance. It can also easily use the XU4's immense cooler, the Xigmatek N881 Porter with 80mm Noctua fan. The ASUS Tinkerboard S should be replaced with a nVidia Orin Nano, a.s.a.p.

Fleet Command, having heard the accounting department's suggestions, decided to order a Pi 400 to replace the Odroid-XU4, and perhaps the Tinker Board as well (depending on the outcome of the Tinker Board overclocking that the experimental department has proposed). They've also stated to be more interested in the nVidia Orin Nano than they are in the Odroid-C4.

[Dirk Broer]

The Raspberry Pi 400 proved to be a huge success. Not only is it available, it still can be bought for the old price (at least: I didn't have to pay more at Elektor), unlike its stable brothers (Model B's) and sisters (CM4). The direct install to SSD, straight from the net during the first bootup, went like a dream.

But it doesn't stop there. Due to the enormous keyboard-sized heatsink it doesn't need active cooling for its stock speed of 1800MHz -300 MHz higher than the (initial) Model B's and also 300 MHz higher than the CM4's. And Jeff Geerling proved that the Raspberry Pi 400 can be overclocked to 2.2 GHz, still passively cooled!

Not to be outdone by the rivet-counters from accounting, the procurement department procured a 2nd hand nVidia Jetson Xavier NX on the Dutch equivalent of eBay (in fact fully owned by them), Marktplaats. It seems like the 32-bit days of the ARMada are over in 2023.