Single Board Computers are lame

do you guys remember 2014 it was a much simpler time back then wasn't it okay um maybe not for that stuff but for single board computers it was pretty straightforward if you wanted a low powerered SBC to Tinker with and learn some basic programming or get into robotics you bought yourself a Raspberry Pi B+ and that was that the Raspberry Pi was the SBC for everyone and their Grandma this was a great thing for years as it lowered the barrier to entry for people young and old to learn a popular new skill but as the Raspberry Pi became more popular other companies took note and decided to enter the market and as we know competition is great for the consumer and we began seeing some pretty powerful and Innovative little boards fast forward today and there are so many options when it comes to sbcs but if we at the point of Market saturation with all of these sbcs to choose from there has to be a way for some of them to stand out that's why I want to take a look at the mix tile Blade 3 today this little guy has the same form factor that we know and love from the Raspberry Pi but with some major differences under the hood not all of them good though let's talk about it so when I talk about how the mixtile Blade 3 compares to the competition I'll be doing so in two ways how it compares to the Raspberry Pi and how it compares to well everything else the Blade 3 is an SBC based on the rock chip RK 3588 an 8 core S so that actually incorporates both a quad core cortex a76 as well as an a55 along with that you get a Molly g610 GPU and your choice of 4 16 or 32 GB of RAM this thing is a little beast and all of that horsepower gives you some pretty extensive transcoding options we also get a crap ton of IO and expansion most notably four lanes of pcie gen 3 via the u.2 port for direct IO when put in the official case you get dual USBC which can be used for power and video out dual 2.5 RJ45 ports and HDMI 2.1 outport and HDMI input yeah no USB type A ports which is kind of lame so overall this is a pretty capable little device on paper you get a good amount of horsepower and a good amount of I/O and expansion I'm going to put some numbers up here of some benchmarks and how it stacks up to its competitors you can pause the video and take a look if you want but this video isn't really about those numbers well not completely cuz those only tell one side of the story sure if you buy a computer just for benchmarking then you'll be happy but if you're buying a computer to use it then that's another story here is where we start to discuss what makes this thing unique to use you see that PCI expansion can be used to Cluster four of these together together using a PCI switched built into their cluster box that is freaking cool this is what I like to see something different than the zillion Raspberry Pi knockoffs unfortunately MX style didn't want to send over a cluster box for me to show off so all I have is a single blade 3 oh wow Brett you couldn't just buy one yourself I mean how much could it realistically cost yeah if you went with a cluster box and put four of their mid-tier blade three units in there you'd be spending $1,800 before taxes and shipping $1,800 United States Freedom Units bro remember when we were buying raspberry pies for like 35 bucks now obviously these sbcs have gotten more capable but that's obviously at a cost literally so let's say you have $2,000 to spend on a small low power cluster well in the last few years we've also seen a similar boom in the Mini PC market these little X8 6 based PCS have gotten so powerful and so affordable that we are honestly now comparing them to sbcs cuz they cost the same freaking price spoiler alert those x86 mini PCS will blow these sbcs out of the water in terms of capability so back to our $2,000 what can we get for that well how about four mini PCS each with an 8 core 16 thread ryzen mobile chip 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB mvme you even get USB type A ports and can still keep the Dual 2.5 gig networking I'll even throw in a 2.5 gig switch to Cluster them I know I know these are going to use more power most likely by a factor of three but I'm confident you'll get more than three times the performance and usability out of them speaking of usability they're x86 so software compatibility will be much better on the mini PCS this brings me to my next point I think so many SBC manufacturers today are focusing on putting the most capable arm chips and their devices and adding cool features like PCI clustering but they're ignoring software support at the time of making this video you have the choice of running auntu Debian or armbian on this device and that's their own version so you may not get all of the recent updates and software support that you'd expect I've even seen Android mentioned on their sites but there is no timetable of when or if that'll actually be supported so sure you can have a capable s SOC with plenty of iio and cool features but if the software support is ass then who gives a I tried out the included iunu install and I mean it was fine like as a desktop for watching YouTube and doing office tests it's very capable and a huge leap from the Raspberry Pi if I'm being honest I even installed Docker and spun up some Services given that we have dedicated transcoders in here I tried Plex mlex doesn't support Hardware trans coating on these chips however jelly fin does support it as a version 10.9 unfortunately I couldn't get it working the new stalker image is 10.9 but I think it's a version behind on the jelly fin FFM Peg cuz that option wasn't there I tried downloading directly from their dead packages but that had a different issue Hardware transcoding just didn't work at all I even tried just playing the file directly in VLC and didn't like that either chalk it up to Super highly capable Hardware with software that's just too far behind and if you're you're looking to use this thing as a desktop to get actual work done you're just not going to be able to as a content creator none of my software will even run on here Photoshop Dent resolve OBS nope gaming hell no but Brett it's an SBC nobody is using this as a desktop bro this is a $370 computer and they even Market it that way yes I agree that buying an SBC to run as a desktop is stupid and if you're buying this then most likely looking to run it as a headless system to serve a purpose in your home lab but come on now I'm at a Crossroads on one hand I'm excited that these arm SBC devices are getting more powerful and even powerful enough to run some real workloads but on the other hand they're getting so expensive and the software just isn't keeping up with the hardware development like I mentioned before you can snag an x86 system that will do everything this SBC will do but much better and for honestly cheaper I do like the idea of a super compact arm cluster possibly crammed into a oneu rack mount but I've only ever seen that from one guy on Twitter and he did a small batch sale of them on Kickstarter and it still wasn't cheap until we can get something like that mass-produced and cheaper I just don't see the benefit of going with the arm SBC route right now don't get me wrong I don't think the Blade 3 is a bad device at all I'm positive in the right scenario it's amazing they definitely crammed a lot of features and iio into here so for those of you out there that's cool but for the general user it just doesn't make sense right now do you agree let me know down in the comments what you think so overall thoughts this wasn't necessarily a review of The Blade 3 more so of where the arm SBC Market is headed I mean I used to be a huge fan of these arm sbc's and have tried a lot of them most of them still sitting there over on my shelf but with where the trajectory of these are going I think I'll be hopping off of that hype train I just feel like the entire Market has gone from being this cheap affordable way to learn on a little Arm System to how powerful can we make an arm system and you know figure out the software yourself for some people you may like that you may really like tinkering with these things but I'd rather just buy it and then have it working but that's all I have for you today if you like this video then drop a like if you like content like this then go ahead and subscribe subcribe I want to give a huge shout out to my YouTube members and my patreons you guys are my Arm based SBC with excellent software support you guys are amazing and if you're still watching your 2014 thank you so much and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 35,008

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Id: gZ5Npd6yi1s

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024