
Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board - watchdogtimer
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/09/11/rock-pi-x-low-cost-intel-sbc/
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wilhil
I don't know why this has taken so long...

About 5 years ago, I was involved in a project where we purchased Intel based
tablets based off a standard reference design in bulk for about $80 a piece -
that included battery, cameras, screen, casing and more.

The cost of the board only was about ~$30 or so.

I really wondered why no one was selling these to compete against the Pi in
the heyday.

The only problem we had and why we didn't sell to makers was because we didn't
control the design and we had enormous technical problems with EFI/Bios 64 bit
booting only and a headache like crazy trying to reinstall Linux which just
randomly broke all the time.

Truth be told, I wish I pushed through with it.

~~~
micheljansen
Intel was selling the Edison [1] until 2017. I still have one. It had WiFi and
Bluetooth on board, which was nice at the time.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison)

~~~
celly
I still use and maintain about ~60 Intel edisons. Such a great little device.
Onboard storage, 5ghz Wifi, and super low power useage. My only gripe was the
yocto linux distro they used was a bit janky.

I was really disappointed when they discontinued the project. I guess Intel
wanted to invest more in the Movidius ai compute stick, since that is where
most of the Edison team was moved to.

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williadc
The processor in these board is about to celebrate its 4th anniversary, and
its performance wasn't world-beating at the time of its release.

[https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/93361/i...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/93361/intel-
atom-x5-z8350-processor-2m-cache-up-to-1-92-ghz.html)

~~~
onion2k
People buying these computers aren't looking for performance. They're focused
on cost. There are lots of reasons why you might not need something fast.

~~~
rbanffy
I'd even add that being slow and constrained is a feature in multiple uses.

A lab desktop cluster doesn't need to be fast, but needs to replicate the
environment you want to play with.

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baybal2
A little tidbit, Intel still manages to sell 5(!) generations old CPUs in
China, and those are not old stock.

The industry been screaming murder for the last year because Intel stopped
selling low and mid-tier chips as such in China aside from "new old stock"

The new 10nm Atom line refresh has been delayed 4 times already, and will very
likely be delayed for the 5th time.

AMD however does not seem too much interested in China's domestic industry at
all. AMD's China reseller is a company in a tiny dusty office in Shanghai.

~~~
generatorguy
Why is AMD not interested in selling chips in China? Seems crazy to ignore
that market unless the price for access is too high.

~~~
mike_d
AMD _was_ very interested in selling in to China. They did a deal with the
Chinese government that was a little too friendly, and the US government
effectively shut the operation down by listing the joint-venture as an export
regulated entity.

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-joint-venture-
partner-...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-joint-venture-partner-
banned-us-trade-war,39703.html)

~~~
generatorguy
Ah yes a technology transfer joint venture

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aliljet
I wonder if these boards could be used for a DIY 802.11s mesh implementation?
Maybe the hobby alternative to an eero/Google/plume/amplify setup...

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Zenst
[https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-
user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s](https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-
user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s) would be viable.

~~~
aliljet
This might just be more dependent on the chipset these boards are coming with,
but I'm admittedly just guessing.

~~~
Zenst
Seen many OpenWRT installs running upon Intel Cherry Trail, not this
particular board (yet), but certainly one of the more easier chipsets to get
working over some random ARM SOC for sure.

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etaioinshrdlu
Intel Edison was an interesting product at the time -- but they cancelled it
before much community could develop around it. I wish Intel could "stay the
course" a little more.

~~~
avian
Edison was pretty annoying to work with in my experience.

To use the Edison CPU (without their Arduino-like breakout board) on your own
hardware you needed a fine-pitch connector that was more or less impossible to
solder in a typical home workshop. The Yocto Linux was annoying from a
tinker's perspective because it was focused around building static firmware
images and not like Raspberry Pi where you ssh in and apt-get away.

This all didn't make much sense for a product marketed to makers/hobbyists.
More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86. You could
compile a static binary on your laptop, scp it over and it would just work
without messing with cross-compilation etc. But that really wasn't worth all
the other annoyances IMHO.

~~~
userbinator
_More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86._

...and Intel missed the point that x86 without the rest of the PC isn't that
great. I suspect if the Edison was actually PC-compatible (to the point of
e.g. being able to boot DOS and older Windows and run their applications) it
would've had far more popularity (retro-gaming, etc.) than yet-another-maker-
toy.

~~~
rbanffy
But then it'd need to bring in a DOS compatible RTC, a CGA/MDA/EGA/VGA output,
audio out (PC speaker or Sound Blaster?), joystick port, serial port (or PS/2
emulation from the USB bus). Should the SD card pretend to be an IDE hard
disk?

~~~
userbinator
It just needs to have the base AT system board components at their usual
places (which can easily be integrated into a SoC[1]) and a useful bus for
expansion like PCI(e) or even (E)ISA. Video, audio, and other peripherals can
be external.

The Edison module connector could've easily housed a PCI or ISA (which slow,
but more "maker friendly" because the speeds are low enough that standard TTL
ICs can be used) bus, but all they put on it was USB and GPIO.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86)

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partialrecall
Without PCIe it's not clear to me what advantages x86 offers in this form
factor. I guess an Intel GPU is a plus.

~~~
RachelF
The Atom CPU should be faster than an Arm.

~~~
akmittal
Raspberry pi 4 should be as fast as Atom x5-Z8300

~~~
shifto
Yeah but using an Intel Compute stick with the Atom and a Pi 4 both with
Ubuntu the Atom is definitely faster in my experience.

~~~
pizza234
Real-world comparison here:

[https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1907128-HV-1907127HV99](https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1907128-HV-1907127HV99)

it's hard to make an absolute conclusion; it seems that the Pi 4 is faster
than the Z8300 in more cases, but not all.

I wouldn't categorize these results as "definitely faster" though.

~~~
shifto
I think disk IO makes a lot of difference and I guess (didn't look it up) the
Atom might get better IO results out of the eMMC SSD than the Pi4 does.

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drudru11
What I would like to know is how the GPU compares to a n RPi4 or the latest
RPi3. I wish there was a comparison of that.

Regardless, I will probly still buy one of these Rock Pi's anyways :-)

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neilv
This trademark is confusing, with Rockchip and Raspberry Pi already involved
in the little SoC board space.

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mey
Been keeping my eye out for something like this. I have wanted to build a
cheap bare metal k8s cluster for my homelab. While ARM is nice, most
containers are targeted at x86.

~~~
pizza234
It depends on how much you want to spend.

The ODROID H2 is finally available (it hasn't been available for a long time,
due to Intel not producing enough chips (or not selling them to ODROID and
others, not sure)), and you can consider it a high-end SBC or a low-end NUC.

The price for board+4GB RAM is roughly 150$ vs 80$ for the RPi 4¹.

It's the lowest priced x86 system available², and the performance is
significantly superior to ARM boards (in the range 2-4x of RPi 4).

¹= _very rough_ prices; it's hard find the lowest prices, and it's not clear
if it makes sense to do so

²=please no comparisons with discontinued machines (there's always somebody
popping up with such comparisons...)

~~~
mey
Was aiming to get the system together for $500 or less, including power
supplies for a five node system. So SBC/NUC systems above $100 made it less
compelling. Obviously performance isn't the consideration here, but number of
physical nodes.

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dxxvi
I think it should take a nvme card (because of its small size) for storage.

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teekert
Every time I press "More Options" for the cookies and choose not to accept it
just re-presents the screen...

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LeonM
I tried to dismiss the cookie wall and that completely breaks the page as
well. I can't scroll down.

