This is how you destroy Raspberry Pi

not with Hardware oh you thought this thing was going to be the pie killer no well at least not at 140 bucks this is a pretty cool little computer and I'll get to it in a minute but I do a lot of single board computer projects and one company always dominates that company of course is Raspberry Pi people ask why I don't cover other single board computers well I actually do I've spent over a thousand hours testing sbcs that aren't raspberry pies and I do an occasional video on other sbcs when I think that have something special to offer even for this video I spent over 10 hours testing this little module The Latte Panda Mew for each SPC I detail everything I learned over on GitHub but here's the problem well actually a couple problems Hardware performance thermals efficiency those matter to a degree like the Intel n100 CPU on here eats the Raspberry Pi for lunch then mops it up with its built-in GPU and take the radza rock 5c its arm CPU also beats the pi and it's it's actually cheaper than the pi but if any other SBC maker actually wants to beat Raspberry Pi if they want to sell millions of these instead of thousands it's actually not that complicated it's hard but it's not complicated and it comes down to one word value this is going to be super cheesy but I think of SBC value in a triangle it's not like the Iron Triangle though where you can only pick two I have a triangle where there's cost performance and support the Raspberry Pi 4 absolutely nailed all three it had good performance a low price to match and support has been unparalleled both from Raspberry Pi supporting Linux on it to tons and tons of third parties building around the pi 4 and compute module 4 the pi five well the base price went up and I think it doesn't scale with performance the way Raspberry Pi wishes it would I think 40 bucks or maybe 45 bucks is the ideal price for a pi five right now the base price for this one is 60 bucks it it doesn't matter that it's 2.5 times faster than p 4 there's something about that price point I think would stick better I mean it still sells like hot cakes and that's because the support and thus the overall value is still so good in the pi Hardware ecosystem but this price creates a huge opening other sbcs could swoop in and take over Raspberry Pi's dominance especially if they're cheaper but what does that have to do with this thing 140 bucks certainly ain't cheap it is slightly cheaper than the Turing rk1 so maybe if I can find a four node carrier board I can Crown a new SBC cluster King but the Mew has another trick up its sleeve it all comes down to this chip the Intel CPU it's x86 the pi and all the rock chipboards are arm arm is a different architecture than x86 meaning some things have to be tweaked or changed between the two like Windows runs on arm but windows on arm is a lot less mature than Windows on x86 I covered that in a few videos on my giant Amper workstation right now even after a decade or so covering arm stuff life is admittedly a little easier on x86 and this little chip gives you all that compatibility right out of the box no emulation a huge library of games and apps that just run no need to build your own containers when someone doesn't maintain an arm build that's the big difference and sure this thing costs 140 bucks just for this little compute module but it is twice as fast as the pi five and five times faster building the Linux kernel and I'm kind of a sucker for that Benchmark twice as fast less than twice as expensive and fully compatible with everything x86 over almost 50 years and Intel's gotten a lot better on efficiency this thing's not as efficient as the best arm chips but it's getting close to the pi5 so why does all that matter well if you look back at my cheesy value triangle you're hitting close on price and performance at least if you keep scaling those two up to double the pi five the big question I have and in fact most people making actual projects and products that use these things is where's the support I haven't used Too Many latte Panda products but the hardware is always pretty good same goes for radza Libra computer and some of the others I did have one problem in my testing I put in a few different nvme ssds in this slot but none of them showed up I had to email latte Pand and they told me I could reset the bios to fix it now their instructions told me to flash it with AFU wind gooey and they said it was because of pcie ref clocks and stuff like that so sure I can figure those things out just like I can sort out rock chips tools for arm firm at at least usually I still have these brand new radm 3s I've never been able to boot but looking over to the latte pandu development status page it's obvious that latte panis suffers from the same problems a lot of armboard makers do the hardware is way ahead of the software Raspberry Pi might have a feature or two that's not 100% ready to go when they launch a new board like the PTP timestamp support on the compute module 4 took a couple years but that's not one of the main features there are so many times now when I'll buy one of these boards at retail usually a few weeks to a month or two after launch I'll get it here I'll start testing it and right away I run into problems like HDMI doesn't work or it only works with certain types of monitors or USB 3 doesn't work but USB 2 does or in this case the m.2 slot didn't work right out of the box now I do forgive board makers for the issues because firmware is hard like it's actually really hard to write good firmware but all the times I run into these issues I'm reminded why Raspberry Pi came into the space and has been so dominant for more than a DEC instead of having to be a Linux konel Wizard and understand firmware and eoms 99% of people who buy a Raspberry Pi just want to build a plant monitor or a little robot controller or a tiny music player and if they have problems there's documentation and easily searchable forms to help plus the pi firmware and Linux teams spend countless hours making even decade old Pi interfaces work well with every version of pios that's the value of a Raspberry Pi sure there are bugs just like anywhere but the value is is knowing that most of the time no matter what pie you have things will just work you don't need to monitor a Discord or check on whether something you want to use is going to get supported you don't have to follow Linux patches or switch Linux distros just to use certain Hardware features that are advertised right on the box you just buy the thing build a project with it or put it in your jar and hope to someday and you're done but I said I'd give you a rundown on the latte Pand to me and that's what I'll do because sometimes you can live with little issues if the hardware is just that good and in this case the hardware is that good at least as far as sbc's go this little compute module or some system on module has an Intel n100 s so the n100 has four cores that boost to 3.4 GHz and an integrated Intel UHD GPU my favorite thing is it has nine Lanes of PCI Express gen 3 expansion USB 3.2 SATA HDMI and a display port support it's a lot of expansion for one tiny chip there's also 8 gigs of lpddr5 RAM and 64 gigs of emmc though the emmc isn't all that fast overall the Mew performs more like a low-end desktop PC than a single board computer and efficiency is pretty good too I got 2.5 gigaflops per watt running linpack which is only a little less than the 2.75 gflops per watt on the pi 5 that doesn't even come close to the most efficient arm chips like 5 gig flops per watt on this guy but it just shows how much Intel's changed course not just focusing on burning up power to get higher clocks now being a compute module you can't just plug things straight into it you need a carrier board and Latte Panda has a couple of those out of the gate the one I have is a more basic version with some m.2 slots USB HDMI and this open-ended PCI slot that ETA Prime used to run a full size GPU for gaming in Windows it has a few exposed interfaces but doesn't have the normal 40 pin gopo header you see on most other sbcs but it's a solid package with a fan heat sink I can run at full blast all day long though it does get a little loud if you're willing to underclock it you can just use a passive aluminum heat sink besides a little trouble I had with the BIOS this thing works just like a regular pc I could install Windows or any flavor of Linux out of the box I didn't have to flash any custom isos or spend time twiddling with the vice trees like I do on a lot of py clones but even with the little issues I had one thing I love about latti panda is they have a pretty open development process their bios schematics and all that stuff is up in this GitHub repository their form is a little Barren but at least they have one this Mew has a lot of Promise the hardware is pretty much there building out a new compute module standard to fight against the cm4 and upcoming cm5 though is going to be a lot of work and on the arm side there are already hundreds of compute module boards right now for latte Panda there are only a couple the me has a boost from being x86 but the big question just like all the other sbcs I test is this will support rise up to match the hardware or will itend end up just another memory in a sea of sbcs if you want to destroy Raspberry Pi it takes more than just Hardware a lot more until next time I'm Jeff Garling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 367,083

Keywords: lattepanda, sbc, som, soc, intel, n100, mini, pc, windows, arm, woa, system, on, module, single, board, computer, chip, processor, x86, x86_64, amd64, arm64, aarch64, platform, cm4, compute, embedded, edge, carrier, standard, mu, m2, nvme, ssd, install, linux, ubuntu, raspberry pi, competitor, compete, value, triangle, support, community, open source, bios, uefi, firmware, development, developer

Id: GKGtRrElu30

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024