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

[phoronix]

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

Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Ubuntu-Industrial-Pi-DFI

[skeevy420]

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.

[sdack]

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.

[mskarbek]

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?

[skeevy420]

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.

I'm most upset about the lack of GPIO and the fact that this has a single channel memory setup when the chipset supports dual channel. Yet another APU limited by single channel memory...really?!? While not much of a "Pi" without GPIO, at least USB GPIOs exist.

The rest...I'm kind of upset that some solutions will need powered USB hubs but I also get that this is very barebones and isn't catering towards desktop/laptop-like usage. As long as it's cheap enough I think we can overlook some of the omissions.

mskarbek Those exist already. Just type in "Ryzen embedded" into most store search engines and you'll find them barebones starting from around $250 and up. This took me a whole 15 seconds to find.

[ssokolow]

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.

[schmidtbag]

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.

I agree with this - without most of those features, it greatly limits the appeal of this over something like a Pi or a Jetson.
Just as a side-note, if this were to include multiple USB ports, they would be connected through an integrated hub, as you find in just about every other system. Including more ports on the board is mostly for your convenience, but digitally, it would be no different than just plugging in an external hub yourself. That being said though, the point of these devices is compactness, so, an external hub is kinda stupid, especially considering you'd need at least 2 ports to make up for all the missing features.

[royce]

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.

Incidentally this is the APU at the core of the new Atari VCS. Considerations aside, it's a surprisingly capable little machine.

[pal666]

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.

used computers can be bought here for $100, i.e. $500 is a bit too much for retro gaming box, and for htpc you don't need x86 cpu, you could use 10 times cheaper arm computer

[CommunityMember]

Hopefully these are priced right...by that I mean somewhere between $200 & $500.

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).

These will make great HTPC and retro gaming boxes.

Most consumers look at the initial price, and will go for the equivalent unit(s) that do not have the industrial pricing premium.