Canonical + DFI Pair Up For An "Industrial Pi" Powered By AMD & Ubuntu

[blackiwid]

Now build a netbook 10" case around that and it's bought

[oiaohm]

Up to 3.5Ghz basically tells us they're gonna be using the Ryzen Embedded 1606G. It's the highest clocked one. Yep, dug deeper and confirmed that.

Hopefully these are priced right...by that I mean somewhere between $200 & $500. If they are they'll fly off the shelves. These will make great HTPC and retro gaming boxes. If they'll do that then they'll cover most every need outside of development, servers, and high-end gaming. Everything from an office PC to a CAD PC controlling a plasma cutter out on the shop floor to a grocery store self checkout.

You have to remember the Ryzen Embedded 1606G is able to be got in many minipc systems. These miniPC systems are dual ram and can take up 32gb of ram and commonly have dual 1G Ethernet and 3 display connections.

[domih]

<<...I mean somewhere between $200 & $500...>>

A few years ago, I bought an "industrial board", a DFI-GH171 a mini-itx with a V1605B to satisfy my curiosity.

The unit price was about $480.

The industrial customers will never pay this price. They'll get a much lower quantity price. Example: an SI sets up 1,000 signage terminals for an airport, they'll ask their usual DFI distributor what's the price for 1,000 units. Signage people have interest in these boards because they provide 4 x DP++, have a watchdog, can be configured to auto-boot when the power comes back after an outage, have DB-9 serial ports, support ECC, the CPU are guaranteed to be available for sales for the next 10 years, and so on. In other words they were made for them as well as other professionals, e.g. medical equipment.

As a low-life individual buying only one unit, you always pay full price, and contrary to the popular belief, the industrial board distributors will very happily sell you one. They don't really care what you gonna do with it. On the other hand, they'll ask for an "official" PO. They usually want a company ID, just tell them you are a consultant and self-employed. Their accounting department just want to do it by the book, that's all.

Note about the DFI tech. support: the mobo died after about a year, I sent it back and they actually replaced a faulty component on my board. The whole RMA process was with zero hassle. Cost of repair: $0 (still under guaranty). In other words I was royally treated like an SI :-) The system is running AOK since.

The embedded R or V, 1000 or 2000 V series are not targeting personal usage. Their main feature is to provide (a) low power consumption in comparison to their desktop cousins (b) the features industrial customers or SI need. This is at the expense of performance. But if you run 1,000 systems, being able to turn down the power to 10W per unit instead of 45W is THE major feature.

The embedded series is always behind the desktop series. I think the 1000 series is Zen or Zen+. The 2000 series is Zen 2.

On small boards without chipset, the CPU runs in SoC mode: this restricts the number of HSIO lines available in comparison to the consumer AM4 boards with chipset.

For personal usage, you will be much more SATISFIED with a mini-itx and an AMD APU 3000, 4000 or 5000 (65W which can be reduced to 45W). You can find them in local geek-oriented PC brick and mortar stores at MSRP.

<<...The Ryzen 1000-series supports 10Gb Ethernet...>>

Yes, but no mobo maker has used this feature. You do not need 10GbE for signage! I believe that AMD took it out of the R/V 2000 series as a consequence.

If you want 10 GbE with a V1605B, you can. Using the DFI-GH171 (has a PCIe x16 lanes, electrical x8) I plugged in an SFP+ SolarFlare and it worked AOK. I also tried a Mellanox ConnectX3 (max speed 56 Gbps) and got about 20 GbE with IPoIB. Note: the R 1000 series version of the same board provided only x4 electrical.

In comparison an APU 4750G gloriously achieves 46.9 GbE.

If you do NOT need 4 x DP++, a watchdog, DB-9 serial ports, etc do not go the AMD embedded route, you'll pay for things you'll never use...
...unless very low power consumption is your ultimate goal for an always ON system that does not need to be the ultimate performing system. But then again, you might achieve your goal with an ARM board that would do the job.

So it really depends on what you want to achieve with an AMD embedded.

For home usage, just assume it is not really for you.

PS: pardon my English, it is not my mother tongue.

[oiaohm]

Systems targeted (and certified) as industrial tend to be on the high end of the price range compared to the costs of the basic components as they have to be designed (and survive) a potentially very hostile environment (low/high temp, water, oil, dirt, grease, etc.), and typically have to come with long replacement warranties (stuff always breaks in those environments).

There are many different levels of industrial and different pricing.

https://laptopified.com/mini-pc/best-mini-pc-under-300/

There are many mini-pc. Something to be aware of with industrial is that if you are willing to go for a cpu that is 4-5 year old design the price can be quite cheap even that the unit is new.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32839489621.html

Yes a 4 year old cpu design the the complete unit with 8gb of ram is under 300 USD in industrial case.

This funny enough is caused by the long replacement warranties that the companies providing these items have to have enough stock of spares to meet their industrial replacement requirements. The shortest time frame for replacement warranties is 5 years so at 4 years they wish to clear the warehouse space of units they don't need for replacement and sell the units close to cost. Yes home user giving the a upgrade because you don't have X item in stock and it broke is find but there are industrial use case where the jitter of the cpu is important where only exact match replacements can go.

Systems targeted and certified as industrial are really expensive when they are current year tech. Its insane that 1200 dollar industrial system in the first year of sales by the 4 year of sales price is than 300 dollars. That is the industrial market for you the cost reductions. Of course by 4 years if the item had design defects they are known by that point. Yes the number of years of warranties reduce for every year of sale so at 1200 on the first year of sales it has 5 years warranty at 4 years old when it at 300 dollars it has 1 year. Longer the warranty the higher the price here as well. Yes the 10 year warranty industrial items show the same thing decreasing cost with decreasing warranty.

Long replacement warranties have high price but you don't have to buy new industrial systems with long replacement warranties as long as you are willing to buy a few generations old. The few generations old does not have poorer grade of certification. Yes something that is not considered is Long replacement warranties in industrial consume warehouse space and this space has to be paid for result in a constant discount cycle as companies wish to free that warehouse space of old products by selling them at cost or under cost to make way for new products.

[partcyborg]

While there is a place in IoT for everyone do I wonder about the lack of multiple USB ports, lack of a GPIO port, WiFi, Bluetooth, and the rather high power draw. Says in the specs it has USB, but I only see one port on the board and the Ryzen 1606G draws up to 25W alone, so the entire board will likely draw somewhere between 15W-30W (idle to load). The Ryzen 1000-series supports 10Gb Ethernet, but this got reduced to 1Gb, which would have been an outstanding feature if it at least did 10Gb. Why this then needs to be "Ubuntu-certified" when about every Raspberry-, Banana-, Orange-, Cherry-, Rock- and all other PIs come with Linux by default is also a bit unclear. Seems pretty unimpressive apart from the dual HDMI ports, which one gets with a Raspberry Pi 4/400, too.

Sure, the Pis run linux, but they basically arent supported by anything other than their in house fork of debian. For example, the only way to get even vanilla debian onto the Pi 4 is to literally hand roll your own custom image, which requires fairly in depth linux understanding to perform. I am no fan of Ubuntu myself, but in this instance having "ubuntu certified" on the label should guarantee that native installation media is readily available

[Sonadow]

Sure, the Pis run linux, but they basically arent supported by anything other than their in house fork of debian. For example, the only way to get even vanilla debian onto the Pi 4 is to literally hand roll your own custom image, which requires fairly in depth linux understanding to perform. I am no fan of Ubuntu myself, but in this instance having "ubuntu certified" on the label should guarantee that native installation media is readily available

And this is why ARM on laptops and desktops is still a joke until SBSA and its various subgroups like SBBA are truly formalized. Hate Microsoft for all you want, they are the only party really pushing for this by mandating that any ARM computer shipping with Windows must use UEFI so that generic bootloaders and kernels will work across all SoCs like how it is with x64.

[ssokolow]

And this is why ARM on laptops and desktops is still a joke until SBSA and its various subgroups like SBBA are truly formalized. Hate Microsoft for all you want, they are the only party really pushing for this by mandating that any ARM computer shipping with Windows must use UEFI so that generic bootloaders and kernels will work across all SoCs like how it is with x64.

But, at the same time, they mandate that any Windows-compatible ARM devices must be locked down to have mandatory secure boot keyed only to Microsoft, akin to iOS devices and Apple. The pushback against going that far on x86 didn't extend to ARM.

[skeevy420]

You have to remember the Ryzen Embedded 1606G is able to be got in many minipc systems. These miniPC systems are dual ram and can take up 32gb of ram and commonly have dual 1G Ethernet and 3 display connections.

I know. You didn't read my posts after that in this thread. I even linked to one

[sdack]

For example, the only way to get even vanilla debian onto the Pi 4 is to literally hand roll your own custom image ...

No. I do have a Pi4 and some off-brand Pi, and Debian went on just fine with both out of the box. Simply copy one of the available images onto an SD card and boot it.

[arQon]

Up to 3.5Ghz basically tells us they're gonna be using the Ryzen Embedded 1606G.
(snip)
These will make great HTPC and retro gaming boxes.

Yeah: 10-bit HEVC decode is a very good place to be.

This is definitely a bit short on USB ports though, and the "industrial" tag means you can probably expect a $100-$200 price hike for individual units, which will push the cost of them to roughly what a "real" PC could be built for. (And without the single-channel gimping. As you say, YTF are people STILL doing this?!). Even ITX is still much much larger, but OTOH it's also massively more expandable and won't have the "artificial" limits of this, so...
Where this really wins out though is simply "x86, but on an ARM-sized board". I love the Pi, but it's still much less capable than my old NUC just because of binary compatibility cases.

So, interesting, and potentially useful, but I think ultimately it'll come down to the pricing.