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

[oiaohm]

<<...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.

This is not 100 percent right . Yes this can true with signage where you can basically replace it with anything yes they get a cheaper quantity price but they have agreed to something for the cheaper price when buying in volume. Cases where the system is being using with a real-time or close to real-time os where changing boards could be trouble the retail price can be the price the industrial customers are paying in volume. The difference is number of years of support and replacement. Yes you might be getting 10 years warranty for the individual unit and the real-time user might be getting 12 to 15 instead for the same money because you bought volume(yes volume is need to justify the storage of spares past when the CPU goes out of production). Civil engineering computer usage might take 5 year to certify the thing.

Price in these industrial things is highly linked to warranty. The recommend retail price on these embedded systems for most vendors is as high as anyone can pay and that price is your max warranty price as well as your retail price. Yes individual unit consumers get ripped on warranty for only ordering a small volume.

Something else to be aware of yes there is a reason why all embedded system companies can sell individual units in the certification process you might be using 1 from multi vendors so to get the 1000+ unit sales they have to sell individual units as well.

Think about this domih you are doing a controller on a CNC mill. Even in a machine shop there might only be one of these mills heck some cases only one in the world left that functions the way it does(Yes does happen). At this point you are doing a individual unit construction or a handful or unit constructions these are not going to get your the volume discount or the volume negation on warranty extension even as a industrial customer. Yes this does not matter if you have order 100 000 units of some other board of theirs you will still have to pay the higher price on those low volume orders.

So its wrong that industrial customers never pay the price. Its quite common for a handful of units by industrial customers to be bought at full price either due to the usage case being limited or it was for the certification process for the usage(this is generally between 1 to 10 units). Things get a lot tricker when you attempt todo a class room of 20 units with a lot of them you will have todo 2 orders that not large enough for a volume order and exceeds the low volume order limit with a lot of the industrial board maker firms. So they are not quite like dealing with a normal PC provider.

DFI-GH171 cpu is in production until 2028 So you would have bought that while its current generation. Its coming up on the 4 year mark next year. Depending on what orders the maker has will depend how many of those boards it has sitting in warehouse will effect the price soon. At the 4-5 year mark you can also see the individual unit price drop to the volume buy price for 5 year warranty as well on these 10 years of production cpus. Reprice normally does not happen every year. Yes intel does some embedded x86 cpus with only 5 years of production this is why the 10 years of CPU production is a selling point of course that does not mean everyone who has board a board with a 10 year in production cpu has paid for 10 years of warranty.

There are a lot of factors that define when a industrial board gets cheaper. Volume orders and amount in warehouse are the biggest.

[Buntolo]

<<...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.

This is the quality content I love!

[Paradigm Shifter]

Yet another industrial SoC board and only one Ethernet port. WTF is wrong with those people? Why is it so hard to make a sensible, usable small x86_64 board with two ports?

Agreed.

Only ones I've found which are actually easy to buy are the MinisForum UM range. I've got a UM700 which comes with two 1GbE NICs. It's a good little box, about the same size as a "classic" NUC (not the things Intel seem to want to call a NUC now)... the only oddity I've had from it is that lightdm on Arch will fail to start on boot about 50% of the time. Switched to Debian (or Linux Mint, where I ended up because I like Cinnamon) and that issue vanished. Still scratching my head over that. I've got one of the Ryzen 3000 series chips (3750? I forget...) and it's a great deal faster than I expected it to be.

I originally bought it with the idea that it would end up being a proxy/router, but I may end up getting another one to do that, because I like it.

[leech]

When I need something like this, I'll research whether anyone's tried to either run Debian on them or rip out the snap system without breaking anything important. I don't like snappy's loopback-mount-heavy architecture and I don't like how much it slows down application startup compared to Flatpak or traditional uncontained apps.

As Royce pointed out, this is the same hardware basically inside the Atari VCS. Runs Debian fine.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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