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Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

> Oh wait you've forgotten how important it is to get a developer community started around your hardware cause it's been so long since the x86 was new!

Intel: Huh? Developers? But they don't buy servers full of chips. Why do I have to sell to developers?

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That is pretty much the ARM and POWER problem too, they think they can grow in new markets with these hugely expensive machines in quantities of ten racks.

Both would have significantly more traction if they offered a reasonable desktop class machine, but they don't seem to be able to do it. For some reason there are dozens of RPi type devices but making a $200-$300 device with a reasonable set of expansion ports (sata+USB3+pcie gen3+m.2+10g ethernet+etc) seems all but impossible. POWER has a similar problem, with the only inexpensive devices being old NXP parts (yah NXP is still selling a core that turns 20 years old this year https://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors... thats great if your still selling car parts from 20 years ago, not so great if your designing a part today.).

Sadly, I suspect all the small developers combined are smaller than one hyperscale customer.

That may be true, but its the 1 huge customer vs a million little ones problem. Sure when you win the hyperscaler contract you hit the jackpot, but OTOH, when you don't you go out of businesses. Having a few thousand developers testing/optimizing/etc compilers/OSs/databases/web servers/etc all make it easier to win the hyperscaler contract, than spending months wondering why docker doesn't run correctly and loosing the contract.

So, a company may only be making a dollar on each machine sold, but is gaining thousands of hours of beta testing, or actual engineering in return.

I should add though, that this months basement hacker is next years businessman buying in lots of 5k to fulfill some small niche market. Do that enough times and eventually the next netflix/facebook app just happens to be running on your hardware.

The underlying problem here is that the cost of making an SoC is enormous. So to make, say, an ARM desktop class machine you have only a few choices:

1) Make your own SoC designed for the purpose. You can tailor it to meet your requirements precisely, but given the low volumes you'll be selling, your system will be at least $10,000 a box, likely more.

2) Use a designed-for-mobile SoC. This will hit your $200-$300 price point pretty easily (perhaps even sailing under it by a big margin), but the IO options will be bad, because mobile SoCs don't neeed SATA or PCIe. CPU performance is likely to be underwhelming because mobile SoCs are designed to hit a power consumption level that won't drain mobile batteries or make mobile devices overheat. Almost all the cheap devboards you can get today are in this category.

3) More recently we're starting to see server or networking SoCs, which gives you an option a bit like 2 but with different cost and expansion tradeoffs. Generally a bit more expensive than 2 because networking won't hit mobile volumes, but better I/O capability. CPU power may still be less than you might like. Examples here are the Macchiatobin board and the dev box that Socionext announced last week.

I don't think anybody disagrees that a proper desktop class machine for these architectures would be great; but there are huge economic barriers to getting there. Personally if I was looking at getting a new ARM setup I'd try something in class 2, likely the Socionext box when it becomes available (end of the year, I think they said).

>The underlying problem here is that the cost of making an SoC is enormous.

Broadcom designed a custom SoC for the Raspberry Pi 3 and everything still runs over USB 2.0.

It's the lowest possible effort custom design you could make. The only major difference between the three generations of Pi SoCs (BCM2835, 2836, 2837) is the CPU, so it's a 5 year old SoC designed for set top boxes with a single IP block swapped out.

Raptor Computing Systems will sell you a 4 core POWER9 CPU for $340 each [1]. A desktop mobo with the kinds of features discussed shouldn't be more than a few hundred dollars if slimmed down to one socket and a reasonable but limited set of peripherals (the Talos mobos go a bit over the top with features and hence are >$1k). Someone just has to design one, which is not easy or inexpensive, then hope that developers actually buy them.

[1]:https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M01/purchase.html

It's a few hundred dollars if you have the market volume to sell it at that price. IBM have the volume (presumably mostly for servers) so they can do it. You can't spend the amount it costs to make a new SoC based only on the "hope" that people buy it; you need a business plan that says where the volume will come from, and there aren't enough customers for a developer box alone to provide that volume, so the dev box uses will always be a sideline from something else.

I think you're the only one in this thread asking for a new SoC. Other people are asking for affordable developer boards for existing SoCs.

You can get lots of dev boards for existing SoCs. They have the problems of no PCIe, no SATA, etc that the n^parent was complaining about. If you want those features you first have to identify an SoC that has those; my claim is essentially that such pre-existing SoCs with the kind of features you want in a "developer box" are so thin on the ground as to be pretty nearly nonexistent. "Use a preexisting SoC" is what my classes 2 and 3 are.

Nah, the problem is the SOC mental model where you don't provide a generic IO bus. What ARM/etc really needs is a device with a decent memory and PCIe interface. Random board manufactures can then glue on the ethernet/sata/USB for a few bucks a function utilizing 3rd party chips that can be found on boards frequently costing less than $10.

That way instead of spending millions designing a SOC for each tier of devices you design a "generic" device and sell the ones with busted cores/cache/ram channels/whatever as low end developer machines after fusing the broken functionality off.

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