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.

If they could somehow fit an m.2 2242 slot that'd be nice performance-wise and reliability-wise.

A microSD card is a terrible storage medium for hosting an operating system.

Dunno if there’s one compatible with the Pi X model yet, but they do make a “SATA Hat” for the RockPi 4 that you can attach to the GPIO pins to add SATA ports: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Penta-SATA-HAT-for-Rock-Pi-4-p-4...

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).

Why am I not surprised that Intel would do such a thing. Good call on using arm-based chips!

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.

Some one mentioned router on a stick on an old post here.

Pi has two vlans and is connected to a switch with one vlan going to wan and the other going to lan

Might be nicer to link to the source of that article, https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/10/02/buy-rock-pi-x-window....

The mini pc itself looks great. I assume that a 2GHz x86 quad core could do more than the Pi, even if it's just an Atom. 4GB max memory is more limiting than what you can get there though.

It’s hard to find any directly comparable benchmarks, but I wouldn’t be so sure that it’s actually faster than the CPU in the Raspberry Pi 4.

It's just a guess. The kernel support should be a lot better, also the graphics driver support. But with those low TDP Intel processors that could be completely wrong.

Yeah, I'm not sure how comparable it really is... I mean, with modest cooling, an RPi 4 can OC to ~2.1ghz without issue. I wouldn't mind if these were slightly larger if the I/O could be mostly on one side. Add 1-2x sata and/or m.2 slots and a second nic and the possibilities really open up. Though USB3 isn't too bad depending on your needs.

Also, kind of hoping that a few more polished options for 4-8 board cluster cases start popping up... The ability to do clustering solutions on real hardware for low-cost testing is really interesting as well.

All of that said, I agree, other than GPU support, I'm not sure that this actually performs any better than an RPi 4, and with the pi having 8gb option in play, this is potentially a much worse option.

1-2 more generations of these super small form computers, and it'll get even more compelling for general use for most people.

There's Atomic Pi for $35 with the same CPU and 2GB RAM - https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Pi-High-Speed-Peripheral/dp/B0...

But then you have to get the power adapter board.

From 60 USD, you get an Intel Atom CPU (x5-Z8350 “Cherry Trail” quad-core processor @ 1.44 GHz / 1.92 GHz Turbo with Intel Gen8 HD graphics @ 500 MHz), 2GB of RAM, 16GB eMMC flash storage, Ethernet/Bluetooth/WiFi, and 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header. Dimensions: 85 x 54 mm.

I really wish the Raspberry Pi form factor hadn't become the de facto form factor for these kind of devices. I much prefer the Beaglebone layout with power, video, and networking on one side and USB on the opposite,