So many of these things would be attractive if only they had a couple of SATA ports (now it's a reliable RAID-1 disk server) or a second gig-E NIC (now it's a plausible house router/firewall) or both.
Beyond the sata ports and second gig-E nic, i was thinking maybe 8GB of RAM...and then you have an offering not only for the tinkerer market but also the mini, on-premises server for the SoHo (small office/home office) market.
Intel limits these economy lines of cpu to 2gb to prevent that. I generally use Arm chips since they started low but are trying to break 8gb instead of trying to prevent you from creating an efficient solution that relies on good storage and memory instead of CPU.
I hate this protectionism of other market segments by Intel. It's only when they're forced to do they step up and remove these restrictions. When not they throw out a bone to prevent complete movement to the competition with a neutered version (2gb in this case).
Yeah, I think the rockpro64 has reached good enough on all counts but the 4gb max, the rpi4 has 8gb but needs pci-e or dedicated storage I/O, the WiFi is wasted on me. So the search continues..
I checked out the article since a new X86 economy chip could be good too, but I think it would most probably have to come from VIA or similar.
This particular, very old Atom CPU is limited to 2GB, but newer Atom CPUs are not. Current X series Atoms support 32GB and even dirt cheap <$200 atom-based Chromebooks usually ship with 4GB (and support 8GB).
I find it interesting that newer atoms exist in ark that support 32gb, but they are not in any consumer devices where I am, the chip in this board is in all of them, so "very old" == available.
Similarly, with chromebooks, I have an old celeron with 16gb, for a while after it was impossible to buy a celeron that supports 16gb, and increasingly hard to upgrade commodity components. Shortly after there were more i3 chromebooks available, pay 50% more for something that won't actually solve your problems.
