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Comment by dom0 | Hacker News Reader

Even without bytecode and VMs, a x86 machine has virtually no advantage over $otherARchMachine in these niches.

In practice that's just not true. There are a lot of manufactured products using $otherARchMachine, but good luck making a decent self-built video player using anything but x86 (kodi on raspi is simply too slow, hell, even retropie cannot actually run n64 games on anything but the most modern pi, whereas they're perfectly smooth on a 10 year old x86 laptop)

Having a mini-ITX for everything, including even nas storage (I hate the people calling this cloud storage), is so much better it's ridiculous.

I like mini-itx systems and have a very nice mini-itx htpc myself but it is not because I need an Intel CPU.

UHD blows out any dual-core CPU (maybe quad can do it?) so dedicated hardware is an absolute necessity for that.

Even if you could decode video in software the power efficiency is so much worse than using dedicated hardware that it is really impractical.

I am using the video decoder on an Nvidia GTX-1060 and I am paying a huge price for a lot of wasted hardware in order to get access to that. And I am forced to use Windows anyway since I can't get Kodi to sync the refresh rate properly on Linux and a couple hours of wasted time trying to fix that is the limit of my patience.

IMO fixed hardware based on ARM (which costs about $100 vs $1000+) is obviously the better solution for price/performance on video.

What I am paying for is the aesthetic (HDPLEX HD5 case) and the enjoyment of having something I built myself, not technical superiority.

Video decoding is sequential, so adding more cores is not going to help.

It might actually be easier for you to get a dual core which can decode everything you want. Any high-clocked desktop Core i3 should easily handle any reasonable bitrate 4k video in any codec on the market. If it doesn't then there's something very wrong with your video decoder software.

It all depends on how you define "reasonable" bitrate. I am running ~40mbit h265 videos. I have a Pentium G4400 which can only do a few frames per second and I have tested on an i5 also and it still drops frames on high complexity scenes.

More to the point, why would I want to burn 100 watts decoding this in software when I can do it in single digits with fixed function hardware?

[edit]

You may be talking about videos that can use Intel's own fixed function video decoding hardware, which will work just fine on an i3. I am talking about 10bit h265 which Intel Skylake didn't support when I was building my system. Kaby Lake supports it now so if you are building a new system Kaby Lake would be the way to go.

Thought you were referring to h.264 and VP9/10 video, which are still a lot more common, even for UHD (in my experience). h.265 software decoders are still immature, in part because of the lack of content.

> decent self-built video player using anything but x86

The Pi chip was originally designed for set-top-box usage. Much of the die is video decoder, I believe. So if you have the right drivers and maybe an MPEG2 license it should be fast. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-video-features/

Correct

Your average set-top-box (cable or whatever) doesn't have an x86 and it runs fine. But accelerated video play requires proprietary software

Not sure how it works on Android, but I guess it's more or less integrated there (so you can have accelerated video play easily and "in the system")

The majority of users don't care what kind of drivers are on their IoT gadgets, as long as they fulfil their purpose.

Unfortunately video players that are developed for specific acceleration platforms (ie. some ARM board) suck. They're slow. They're buggy. They don't play half the formats you want it to play. Their interfaces are some buggy vendor-branded monstrosity.

Just a few years ago smart TVs, one example of such platforms, had overscan, some without the ability to disable it. (Make the screen look bigger by only showing the middle part of the video)

Again, the way how consumers are buying smart TVs reveals it isn't a problem other than for HN crowd.

they will care when their devices get hacked because the kernel is impossible to update for anyone, including the vendor.

Android, home routers and webcams are the living proof they don't care.

Only because we haven't have a Sasser level event yet, an android is far worse on the security front than XP ever was.

I'm afraid pjmlp is right, and it's baked into the business model - if you make a one-off payment for the thing you're not going to get updates because they want you to buy a new one. Manufacturers will keep doing this until they are forced not to.

Stagefright comes to mind.

Not even close to Sasser or SQL slammer. Imagine every other person not being able to turn on their phone all of a sudden tomorrow morning.

The kernel is important but it is only one aspect of device security

Most vulnerabilities do not derive from it

not like any other aspect is updated within a few months of release either...

That does not sound like the average IoT product.

I keep wondering. What, exactly, is sold as IoT ?

Other than smart lightbulbs, I mean, which are a tiny, tiny market. Why are companies like Cisco interested ? Why was intel interested ?

I work for resin.io - we do IoT deployment & management, and the main customers reliably come from the industrial side. Building monitoring, robots in factories, product tracking and signage in retail, etc etc.

Personally, the consumer side is the noisy part, but not the part that I see changing the world most drastically. Making the world around you and businesses everywhere more automated, better controlled & more efficient is going to make more of a meaningful difference to the world that adding connectivity to your toothbrush.

I work on an office building iot platform. We retrofit existing buildings with iot sensor deployments so we can analyze occupancy, trigger cleaning from usage, guide people to available workplaces, etc... This is a big trend in the building service provider business, they're all looking at iot as a way of improving the QoS to cost ratio. Not much use for intel or cisco in that market though.

I think there are two sectors: home and industrial. So for home sector there would be things such as smart air conditioning, smart central heating, refrigerator. Industrial sector will probably have lots of use cases for small IoT devices with sensors.

Industrial IoT is quite thriving industry. Things like machine monitoring and performance, sensor networks for process monitoring and many other niche cases.

There is a big benefit if you depend on the Linux kernel. Generally you can use latest long term support kernels on x86. For non-x86 devices you can very easily find yourself with a kernel that is over half a decade old, end of lined, lacking support for recent hardware (eg wifi sticks) and similar problems.

It could, but I do agree the use cases are pretty thin.

Probably only when porting binaries, or Assembly/intrisics heavy code.

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