Ironically, the Microsoft ARM Developer Kit that was just released might be a good option. [1] I also personally have used a Qualcomm RB5 [2][3] since last year and can say that it is quite snappy, though the official image is ancient and the modern Debian Linux image Linaro works on for it was still rather buggy. The most robust option is likely Nvidia's AGX Orin Developer Kit [4][5], which Nvidia maintains 20.04 Ubuntu images for [6].
With 4 big Cortex-X1 cores and 4 medium Cortex-A78 cores, the new MS Developer Kit should be much faster than the Qualcomm RB5, which has 4 Cortex-A77 cores.
Also the price, at $600, is decent in comparison with the excessive prices requested by NVIDIA for the faster of the Orin variants.
Unfortunately, the new MS Developer Kit also includes a Microsoft Pluton, and it is very likely that Pluton is configured to allow only Windows to boot.
Otherwise, I would have also been tempted by it, because all the previous ARM-based alternatives have been either very slow, like Raspberry Pi, or very expensive in comparison with the computers with Intel or AMD CPUs having similar performance, like the Qualcomm and NVIDIA development kits.
The Lenovo X13s is basically a laptop version of the new dev kit, and it seems people are running Linux on it successfully [1][2], so hopefully they haven't done anything different with the dev kit.
Linux on it is very broken in any number of situations, its basically at the level of the M1, which is at the moment probably a better choice if you want a 1/2 working machine.
Things you take for granted as working, and performing well, won't. Putting it another way, its at an early stage of bring up, on x86 you buy a laptop it will tend to mostly work in linux with a problem here/there that will likely get resolved over the next year or two. This is the same, only the level of busted is much worse, enough you probably won't want to actually use it as a daily driver.
It's a fine windows machine, and virtualizes linux just fine, but the same can be said of the M1 as well.
Raspberry Pi isn’t the fastest ARM SBC. If you want something significantly faster, order the new ROCK5 SBC with 16GB of RAM. Being new, it won’t have the same level of polish and support (which can be extremely important depending on your application) but these are so much faster than the Pi that it can be worth it depending on your use case.
Nothing in the SBC world is going to come close to an M1 any time soon, though. The fastest ARM SoCs just don’t end up in SBCs.
Looked into it and seems worth a try somewhere in the future. The active community of Raspberry Pi users everywhere online helped me tremendously while setting up and troubleshooting my RPi, that was definitely a consideration to stick with RPi.
When is it due to actually be available? Announced 10 months ago and seems only started sampling last month. Any evidence they aren't also going to get shafted by the shortages?
And as always, this is the biggest problem with Rock stuff.
> ROCK5 maker Radxa says the board supports Linux kernel 5.10 and will be able to run operating systems including Android 12 and Debian 10 Buster.
Why ARM specifically? Many Linux packages are not ported to ARM. Furthermore, non-Apple ARM CPUs are much slower.
There are lots of fanless x86_64 options that are also energy efficient if you are willing to buy from small manufacturers or stick a fanless case yourself.
The M1 performs so well partly because it uses a very advanced fabrication process.
A modern Ryzen is going to have comparable single-core performance, better multi-core performance and slightly higher energy usage.
Yeah, compatibility for x86 is much better. If you want a cheap fanless sbc-style setup then the best options today are likely Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005 based systems (e.g. MeLE Quieter3 or Odroid-H3+). They are around $300 and far more performant and much better connectivity (i.e. they have 8x PCIe-3 lanes) vs similarly priced ARM systems.
The closest ARM systems in price and performance are the new RK3588 based ones like the Khadas Edge 2 or ROCK 5B, but those really are only practical if you really need the NPU and MIPI camera inputs they provide. They carry only a minor power efficiency edge (max draw around 12W vs maybe 18W for the x86 boards), are compromised in software compatibility, and are limited in IO (i.e. either PCIe-2 only or PCIe-3 but with only 4 lanes).
Those x86 chips are an older generation as well. I'd keep an eye out for i3-1215u based boards soon if you want something that can still be fanless and tiny but has more oomph.
Probably underpowered for your needs, but within a year or two I am expecting used Chromebooks to be up-to-date enough to include the current Linux (e.g. Debian) support. So perhaps $50 and will include keyboard, screen, and ca 5W idle consumption.
As it is, I either have to stick with x86_64, go to Apple, or have an under-powered RPi.