The CompuLab Fitlet Is A Neat Little Linux PC With AMD SoC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The CompuLab Fitlet Is A Neat Little Linux PC With AMD SoC

Earlier this year CompuLab announced the Fitlet PC as a tiny, fanless, Linux-friendly PC. The Fitlets are finally starting to ship at scale and recently I received one of the AMD-powered Fitlets that's preloaded with Linux Mint. Here's a quick look at the Fitlet...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=CompuLab-Fitlet-AMD-Preview

[uid313]

Would love to see one with USB 3 and eSATA.
Internally two mSATA or two M.2 so you can run two disks in software raid with ZFS or Btrfs.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
IP68 stackable case.
Coreboot support.

[Chewi]

A lot of Utilite owners have become quite upset with the apparent lack of support. CompuLab could be a little more vocal but I think it stems from the fact that a lot of these users thought it would do more out of the box. I don't think CompuLab ever really claimed that but you can't entirely blame the users for thinking that either.

Freescale's closed drivers haven't helped. The Etnaviv project has finally got its act together and consolidated efforts into a single coherent solution that is currently being prepared for mainline. It seems common in ARM land for the software to take some time to catch up with the hardware. Hopefully with the Fitlet being a PC, it really does just work, but I'm still looking forward to getting a great deal out of my Utilite.

[chithanh]

Would love to see one with USB 3 and eSATA.

The Fitlet iA10 does have USB 3.0 and eSATA.

Internally two mSATA or two M.2

That won't be possible, the AMD A10 Micro6700-T (Mullins) has only 2 SATA links and 4 PCIe lanes, three of which are already occupied by the dual gigabit LAN + Wi-Fi.

[Stunts]

Michael, can you please post power consumption numbers on this little guy? A haswell Intel NUC will consume anywhere between 5W while idle to 25W under full load, according to most reviews out there.
How does the A10 compare? The A4 should do a little better on that front, but the A10 should provide a nice baseline.

The only way to compare both so far if by the PSU rating (which is a **very** long shot to real world consumption). The NUC is rated at 65W, whereas the Fitlet is rated at 36W.

Should be one of the most interesting features of this small machine.

Thanks!

[wizard69]

It is always good to hear about new AMD design ins. As has already been asked any review needs to cover all aspects of power usage. Such a product is likely to be used in always powered on situations so it is a real concern. Of course performance is always an interesting consideration but really needs to be judged against other fabless PCs. Obviously there aren't many fabless PCs around so a limited opportunity to compare, maybe a comparison against one of the fabless laptops out there.

What I find most interesting here is that we now have hardware that can give us a passable UNIx experience that is fabless. That is pretty amazing if you look back I time to what was needed to just get a UNIX or Linux machine up and running X in a way that didn't suck.

[Fishscene]

I bought a computer from them once. Did exactly what I wanted it to - except I didn't realize that they did NOT support any OS other than the one it was originally designed for (Ubuntu 9x). Upgrading broke drivers and there was no way to get them working. Essentially, I could no longer trust connecting it to the Internet due to security... I either lose some part of the hardware or risk my machine being taken over. Not pleased at all. Would not buy from company again.

[Adarion]

This wouldn't be exactly beautiful but how far could you not update? I have Gentoo running on a lot of machines and I could basically always update. Some machines for ~8 years, rolling release. I wonder what went wrong when you wanted to update. The only thing I know of that is not updateable could be some binary blobs (esp. used in ARM/ImgTec or something) that require a specific kernel or X version. Okay. And Hercules Monochrome cards or i386 CPUs might not be supported by recent 4.x kernels anymore, but I am sure this is not the case here.

[chithanh]

Possibly he refers to the fit-PC2 which came with Intel Atom Z530 and GMA500/Poulsbo graphics. I think Ubuntu 10.04 was the last LTS release to ship Intel's proprietary gma500 driver.