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Comment by goldenkey | Hacker News Reader

Some of these packages look absolutely beautiful. Being a hardware noob that has only worked with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, I'm used to having to buy all these overpriced accessories to fit into their boards. These mini mobos with integrated cooling fans and all the bells and whistles, look really awesome. Does anyone know how big the mini mobos actually are?

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If you worked with RPi and want more computation power, you might consider Asus Tinkerboard.

It’s not on the same level with this new embedded Ryzen. But the tinkerboard is very compatible with the Pi, same form factor, same pinout, even the DSI displays are compatible.

And it’s much faster compared to RPi, both CPU, networks, and especially the GPU.

The newer Tinkerboard S seems to have sorted the 4k issues too. Should be a capable media playback device with the new hardware decoding support.

I have the older one, bought it about 6 months ago.

Indeed I wasn’t able to make it output 4K@60Hz video signal, but 4K@30Hz works OK here.

The first one is a standard, with a maximum size of 170mm x 170mm (6.7" x 6.7"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

The rest appear even smaller.

Wow, had no idea VIA made these boards. The pico and the mobile are awesome. [1]

Are they considered "embedded" due to not being able to add memory or change very much by adding/removing components?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile-ITX

Rather because the CPU is soldered.

VIA are still going? I have horrible memories of dealing with their kit 20 years ago when I did digital signage, as well as Geode chips which were even worse...

Depending on need and use, the Mini-ITX systems from Via are simple and reliable. I haven't used them much in the last 6-7 years, but at a previous business we used them with a flash card to ship OpenBSD firewalls to client offices for VPN connectivity. Problems were rare (and on-board AES acceleration a decade ago was pretty cool).

Interesting. I remember the VIA stuff had serious graphics problems (granted it was years ago) but the Geode stuff was worse to be fair, the hardware watchdog basically prevented any GPU events at all. How times have changed.

Well, we didn't run GUI desktops on them, they were headless firewalls, so I can't really comment as to how well graphics works, much less 3D acceleration. We weren't running Geodes either, as IIRC that was the super low power and low performance variation and didn't match our needs.

Embedded is subjective and in the eye of the beholder.

Mini-ITX are basically full desktop boards. They usually have a PCIe x16 and two DIMM slots. My current desktop/workstation is one of these (from 2013) (with a socketed Xeon CPU).

mini-itx might have been created by VIA but now it's a size standard made by all major motherboard manufacturers.

I am very weary of VIA after the APC. It was an awful experience, and in the end they just closed the community forum years ago, with a note that it would be reopening in weeks: https://apc.io/forum/

They might all be standard sizes. I'm thinking Mini-STX, Nano-ITX, or Pico-ITX. Its just those smaller form factors aren't very common.

They might be, but as far as I can tell the article didn't mention which standard(s) they are :-).

Different target markets: doesn't look like these have GPIO or any other low-level features. They're just small PCs.

So hook up an arduino on USB (or 10 of them) and have all the GPIO you could possibly want. They're less expensive than a good USB cable, which also means that if you make mistakes you blow up a $2 arduino rather than even a very cheap $200 pc (or even a $50 rPi)

Have a look to the UDOO x86, which is made by SECO. (disclosure: i do some work for them)

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