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Comment by wojciii | Hacker News Reader

Why are these devices limited to ram that's soldiered directly on the board instead of sdimm? type interface that can take any supported ram and would work (I assume) with some timing info provided to the bootloader?

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The ARM SoC (system on chip) CPUs these boards use often cap out at supporting 4GB of RAM. It's also much more expensive and power hungry to stuff a bunch more DDR4 onto a tiny board, and often messes with the layout (i.e., of you need two RAM chips instead of one).

The rk3399 CPU on this board also dates from 2016[^1] so adjust your expectations accordingly. :)

[^1] It's also a well-documented chip that's cheap, provides a nice performance bump over an RPi, and requires fewer proprietary blobs.

> The rk3399 CPU on this board also dates from 2016[^1] so adjust your expectations accordingly. :)

Speaking of which, I keep hoping to see SBCs based on the (delayed) rk3588. [1] "4x Cortex-A76 and 4x Cortex-A55 cores" (should be much faster than the RPi4), some kind of NPU (don't know the specs). Not sure about I/O, but I'd guess it'd be at least as good as the rk3399 is.

[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/01/rockchip-rk3566-rk35...

Pine64 announced recently it will be their base SoC for new products, with the first one being an SBC.

Thanks for the pointer. Just looked. This announcement [1] says the rk3566a, which isn't quite as fancy. Still looks like a nice board. People on the message boards back in March [2] were guessing there won't be an rk3399-based Pine64 until early 2022. :-(

[1] https://www.pine64.org/2020/11/15/november-update-kde-pineph...

[2] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9382&pid=61929#p...

There might be other reasons, but connectors are expensive and take a lot of space. It would also prevent them from differentiating the price.

Most people who I know work with tech and can afford expensive hardware if it makes sense. I would love to be able to use 2x64 GiB RAM with a SBC and would pay for this.

How would you power and cool such a beast? What kind of workloads would benefit from that much RAM while running happily on a CPU that fits on a typical SBC layout?

If you want a tiny workstation-class system, there are entirely decent mini ITX board you can stuff a recent AMD or Intel chip and tons of RAM into. You'll need a desktop-class cooling system and power supply, though, and it'll still have the footprint of 6-8 of these board, and probably about 15x the total volume and power consumption.

And, if you really want an ARM to play with, you can pick an Ampere eMag workstation.

the H2s in my prior comment are fanless and run off 14V to 20V(?) DC - I bought a 400W power supply from mouser(?) and figure that should power more machines then I'll ever need. (Power supply is way overkill, not sure why I got one so big :-P )

Sounds like you'd want something more like this[1].

[1]: http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/mb/introduction.php?S_I...

These(1) look interesting too, but they always seem to be out of stock. They were available in the $150 to $175 range for a while, but its dried up. With 2 NVME and 2 SSD, it might make for a nice lil home file server.

1: http://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20A300%20Series/

A300 is very popular as a mini home server. Only catch is (AFAIU, have not tried yet) it wants a GPU to boot at all, so you’ll either have to put in an APU (eg 3200G/3400G) or a discrete GPU.

X300 is the successor BTW.

>it wants a GPU to boot at all

Oh? I hadn't heard that. Though to be honest, its a bit 'big' for my needs so I haven't looked too hard. Oddly enough - Noise is becoming my primary driver, not cpu or ram. So fanless designs really appeal

I say this everytime SBC's come up: ODroid H2's (1) They're not cheap - about $250 kitted out with 16G RAM and a cheap 250G SSD/M2. But you get full 64 bit linux/windows, dual ethernet, a nice selection of IO ports. And all the low power/small form factor goodness. Bonus - fanless and totally silent when used with SSD.

1: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h2

I imagine the primary constraints are the small form factor and the cost. Memory training and calibration required to support different DIMM modules is probably prohibitive.

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