Re:Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
by paulmd on Sunday July 28, 2024 @04:06PM
(#41095587)
Those things are insane value for the money. First breakout product intel has had in a long time, honestly.
The downsides are that it's single-channel memory, which I'm not overly thrilled about, personally, although. Although I understand it's an important element of keeping the cost down, both in terms of die cost and also the systems integration around it. One channel = 1 socket... or soldered memory with half the modules.
That said, the overall package speaks for itself. It's fine. Which is the standard to meet in this class of product. It costs less than $100 for a loaded rig that you plug in and run windows on, what are you really expecting here?
And when you drive down the cost that far, a whole bunch of new use-cases open up. This is what the social implication of moore's law has always been - that eventually your fridge will have a computer with hundreds of MIPS of performance, because it's so cheap why not?
And that was the argument for the RPi initially. Other than the "they'll use it to run computer labs!" which was silly and never materialized either.
The downsides are that it's single-channel memory, which I'm not overly thrilled about, personally, although. Although I understand it's an important element of keeping the cost down, both in terms of die cost and also the systems integration around it. One channel = 1 socket... or soldered memory with half the modules.
That said, the overall package speaks for itself. It's fine. Which is the standard to meet in this class of product. It costs less than $100 for a loaded rig that you plug in and run windows on, what are you really expecting here?
And when you drive down the cost that far, a whole bunch of new use-cases open up. This is what the social implication of moore's law has always been - that eventually your fridge will have a computer with hundreds of MIPS of performance, because it's so cheap why not?
And that was the argument for the RPi initially. Other than the "they'll use it to run computer labs!" which was silly and never materialized either.