Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts

i've done the rant many times before [1] but frankly rpi has almost never made sense. there were always things like the ECS Liva/Liva X for $100-125 that were fully-featured, for roughly the same price as a rpi once you consider all the shit you'll need to get that $45 computer booted up. The Liva (and similar booksizes/net-tops, and similar things like AM1 platform from AMD) benefited hugely from using standard drivers and standard BIOS versus a massive amount of early ARM jank (the early RPi days a lot of things were actually soft-float, let alone niceties like UEFI!).

the best argument for rpi has always been the combination of GPIO and linux. But that's a double-edged sword too, because linux isn't really very good at hard-realtime. And you can always just get a Bus Pirate or similar tool for doing just plain GPIO. And nowadays the ESP32 has basically completely displaced it for a lot of those sorts of "GPIO glue" roles.

If you didn't need that, like if you just wanted a low-power fileserver or HTPC... the x86 stuff was better, because it actually worked reliably, at roughly the same price. Like literally just go buy an off-lease mini-tower or USFF mini-pc for $10 from a surplus store, even.

This goes doubly when you consider all the problems with the early rpi. Like basically it uses USB 2.0 (unidirectional 500mbps) as a system bus... but it also dropped USB packets under load due to bugs in the firmware[0], that nobody outside the Pi foundation could address because Broadcom didn't release the documentation for like 5 years.

[0] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297

I am happy to pay the NOT made in China tax for the RPi.

How about running arm software?

According to your link, this board doesn't have built-in PoE, but requires an "optional hat". It links to a "currently unavailable" listing on Amazon, without any price info.

However, I agree that if it costs as much as a RPI, it looks really great.

the 40-pin GPIO header handled through a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller.

This part would be a reason why: very low GPIO throughput since you're limited to what can be shoved through serial and it all has to be must be manually processed by the extremely slow RP2040. The main upside with something like a Pi 4 is that it has zero overhead access to it via kernel api, so you can pipe hilarious amounts of data through its pins or address i2c devices directly from python with existing libraries for almost every sensor, etc.

The Pi 5 using it through a PCIe southbridge is quite a lot worse, especially since it broke all compatibility and it still can't even drive even a simple WS2812 led strip yet a year after release. They've thrown away the last 10 years of community support and development since the layout was standardized with the Pi 2.

I think hardware transcoding is a bit overrated since pretty much every device nowadays can decode most formats at a good resolution and frame rate.

The Radxa X4 is already sold out and pulled from listings by the manufacturer. I expect massive markups for awhile just the RPi 5.

3x? Geekbench scores seem similar for the pi 5 and this machine.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7095621

It’s an impressive system for sure, but I will happily pay a price premium for the Pi ecosystem where I am unlikely to be the very first person trying to deploy any particular package.

The issue with a raspberry case is that N100 Radxa boards have the N100 on the bottom. That's where the heatsink has to go.

This board needs some supporting hardware that RPi doesn’t - a fan and wifi antennae, if I remember. Radxa includes these with a case as well, so the added cost is trivial, but at that point the footprint’s more than doubled.

(That’s not to say that this isn’t preferable; just that it makes different trade offs that in some cases don’t work.)

The fact that it has an RP2040 MCU makes this a pretty darn compelling product

It was $60 + $70 for shipping + $70 in taxes/dues

I've been really impressed with the N100 Mini-PCs. I have a couple running Proxmox and then a few different VMs and containers to do light server stuff. For $180 the Beelink gives you 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD, plenty of video output. Just a fantastic performer.

Noticed the same thing and I hope we see the N305 from the same generation take over or more vendor offering both options. Considering the rest of the platform package, it can really benefit from 8 cores instead of just 4.

The N100 can be a fair step up compared to Rpi5 but even RK3588 is already 8 cores. Would be a shame if many of the current generation of exciting hackable x86 mini-platforms lock in at the N100 as it will feel obsolete years earlier the the N305.

I run/ran stuff on both, as well as various ARM SBCs and previous generations like J4125/N5XXX. Considering the core-count, RK3588 is still a better pick for many use-cases unless single-thread performance is that important. Benchmark comparison: https://bret.dk/intel-n100-a-challenge-to-arm/

I tried one of those N100 mini pcs and went back to the J4125 purely for the thermals. My needs are not great, and the fans on the mini pc were quite loud quite often. The J4125 hums along fanless with a small heat sink no problem.

The main advantage of the Alder Lake N CPUs, like N100, N97 etc. is that they are very cheap, cheaper than the Arm CPUs of comparable speed, so they have made the latter not competitive in most cases, because they are both slower and more expensive and only their somewhat lower idle power consumption can make them preferable in certain cases (a properly configured Alder Lake N computer should have an idle power under 5 W, but going much lower than that is unlikely).

A few months ago Intel has launched a refresh of Alder Lake N, with the code name Amston Lake, which are branded as belonging to the Atom x7000 series and Radxa said that there will be future variants of Radxa X4 that will use Amston Lake.

An alternative to Radxa X4 for the cases when its minimum size and its minimum price are not essential is Odroid H4 ($100 without memory) or Odroid H4+ ($140 without memory). That has the Nano-ITX size (5" by 5") and a big heatsink that can work even passively, fanless.

The Alder Lake N/Amston Lake CPUs have the advantage of peripherals with higher speed than any competing Arm CPUs.

Radxa X4 has 3 independent 10 Gb/s USB ports plus 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet plus 32 Gb/s M.2 PCIe socket. The best competing Arm-based computers, with RK3588 or with MediaTek Genio 1200 have at most 3 independent 5 Gb/s USB ports. All the Arm-based boards that appear to have many USB ports incorporate an USB hub, so those ports are not independent and their aggregate throughput is limited to 5 Gb/s.

Another great advantage is that the Intel GPU is not only much faster than the Arm GPUs, but it has public documentation and it has much better software support.

a kid’s “my first Linux PC"?

Any old desktop from a garage sale (if you can find one). People are practically giving them away these days, everyone wants tablets/phones now. We scored a quite decent one, complete with monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc. for like $25 (IIRC)!

In fairness, that was a few years ago, but I am sure there are deals to be had if you look around.

I would not recommend ARM/SBC for "first GNU/Linux computer" necessarily, you will likely have an easier time on x86, as much as I hate to say it.

I got my kid a raspi 400 a few years ago. She’s enjoyed it tremendously, but I don’t know how it holds up to more recent alternatives. She’s still using it today, though.

Here's a comparison of the J4125 (Radxa X2L/Palmshell) vs EliteBook 8560w i7-2820QM vs Radxa X4 N100.

    https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3667vs5157vs885/Intel-Celeron-J4125-vs-Intel-N100-vs-Intel-i7-2820QM

Not got an X4 yet, but from the link above, it should be about 50% faster than the EliteBook, which in turn is 50% faster than the X2L / Palmshell.

Those things are insane value for the money. First breakout product intel has had in a long time, honestly.

The downsides are that it's single-channel memory, which I'm not overly thrilled about, personally. Although I understand it's an important element of keeping the cost down, both in terms of die cost and also the systems integration around it. One channel = 1 socket... or soldered memory with half the modules.

That said, the overall package speaks for itself. It's fine. Which is the standard to meet in this class of product. It costs less than $100 for a loaded rig that you plug in and run windows on, what are you really expecting here?

And when you drive down the cost that far, a whole bunch of new use-cases open up. This is what the social implication of moore's law has always been - that eventually your fridge will have a computer with hundreds of MIPS of performance, because it's so cheap why not?

And that was the argument for the RPi initially. Other than the "they'll use it to run computer labs!" which was silly and never materialized either.

Been a big fan of Gemini Lake Plus for a lot of years too. It’s cheap and good enough (and with the right modules you can stick 16gb or more (tested up to 32gb) of memory in it, which makes it totally acceptable for light desktop use. Same thing. It’s good enough.

Emphasis on the low power. It’s just a computer, but one that is cheap and yet still capable of doing work.

Host a blog. Home automation. Dedicated SNES emulator. Personal Minecraft server. DIY NAS controller. Maybe good enough to act as a TV media player. Anywhere you might want a bit of always on compute without paying a ton.

This does have provisions for GPIO, there's an RP2040 microcontroller integrated onto the board which is wired to the N100s USB bus on one side and the exposed pin headers on the other. It's set up such that you can flash your own code onto the RP2040 so it should be quite flexible, you could just use it as a simple USB to GPIO bridge, or you could implement low level application logic on the RP2040 itself for stronger realtime guarantees.

There are 2 kinds of uses for this. Those that require a very small computer and those that require a very cheap computer.

You can buy 4 or 5 Radxa X4 for the money that would be used for one NUC-like small computer with an AMD CPU or with an Intel Core CPU.

Radxa X4 is much slower, but there are applications for which it is good enough, so there is no need for a more expensive computer.

For example I would use it to replace an old Intel NUC that I am using (together with several USB Ethernet interfaces) as router/firewall/DNS server/DNS proxy/e-mail server/Web server/NTP server etc.

Radxa X4 would be good enough to ensure the routing and filtering for four 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, while cheaper devices like those using quadruple Cortex-A55 cores are not good enough.

For that Internet gateway, which must work 24/7 without downtime, I keep a spare unit ready to replace the main unit, if necessary. That means a double cost. With Radxa X4, the cost for two units remains very small, which is an incentive for using it instead of a more expensive SFF computer.

The alternatives at the same price, i.e. Rasberry Pi and the similar SBCs that use RK3588, have a much lower peripheral throughput aggregated over all their peripheral interfaces than Radxa X4. With external USB hubs, Radxa X4 could be extended to 8 full-speed 2.5 Gb/s ports or more, or I could use up to three 10 Gb/s Ethernet ports instead of the 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports.

The small size of Radxa X4 would be handy if I would use it as a portable firewall for a laptop. Unfortunately the modern laptops cannot be trusted due to the hardware backdoors that are implemented in them for remote management. So a paranoid user would want to disconnect the internal antennas and connect to wired or wireless networks through an external firewall, for which a Radxa X4, which has a published schematic, would be a good choice.

You can find versions that have 4+ NICs that make great routers running opnsense: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topto...

Very popular for a plex server right now.

Raspberry Pi sized computers are very popular as second systems for experimenting and as home servers on a budget. For many people, it’s an easy and cheap way to get a Linux server running in their home, apartment, or dorm, without spending a lot of money or having a noisy, hot, large old server box.

They do okay for a lot of tasks. This board has a decent GPU for the power envelope. They can’t keep up with a $1000 workstation or server build, but it’s a lot of horsepower for under $100 and around a dozen watts.

Ryzen 7840HS laptop idles around 2.5W when the screen is off (WiFi running and connected, 32GB Ram, 1TB NVMe)

(a) With EU energy prices, a 5 W difference translates to 20-35 EUR per year on the electricity bill.

0.45 - 0.80 €/kWh is surely on the high-end? In most countries it seem to be less than ~0.25 (pr at least 0.3)

https://qery.no/consumer-energy-prices-in-europe/

Yeah, all my N-series machines idle at 6-8W with nothing but an EMMC/SSD and Ethernet plugged it. Older J-series are about the same.

RK3588 boards go substantially lower, and the other RK series look to do less.

I wonder whether these performances come from optimisations driven by actual market requirements

The lightning in the office buildings (using the thin clients in the first place) dwarfs the thin client usage by thousands.

Sure, the totals are less, but...

Haha, no it barely can process 2d graphics, you don’t need to worry about Cuda

It is likely to be able to run LLMs via Vulkan but at speeds that make it near useless

A new hardware project should better use the refresh of Alder Lake N, i.e. the Amston Lake CPUs, which are sold as the Atom x7000 series.

Alder Lake N and Amston Lake are pin compatible, so the CPU model does not influence the schematic and PCB design.

The development material is given by Intel under NDA, so you must contact Intel sales for that.

Nevertheless, you can see the equivalent of a reference design by downloading the schematic of Radxa X4 and its PCB assembly drawings. Radxa is among the nice SBC vendors who provide good documentation for their products. All their products come with their complete schematics, as they should.

For those who do not want or cannot enter in an NDA relationship with Intel, it is possible to design a product that uses a SOM instead of a CPU package. This greatly simplifies the design and the manufacturing, but SOMs are intended for industrial applications, so they are expensive.

For example, I have looked now at DigiKey and I have seen a Advantech SOM with N97 (which is better than N100) at $272, with 4 GB DRAM, which is more than 4 times more expensive than a Radxa X4 SBC with 4 GB DRAM @ $60.

The cheapest way to make a hardware design with Intel CPUs remains to integrate a small SBC like Radxa X4 into a bigger box, together with a custom PCB.

Arm CPUs are not better. To make a hardware design with MediaTek Genio 1200 (quadruple Cortex-A78) or Rockwell RK3588 (quadruple Cortex-A76), you still need to get under NDA the required documentation. Only for microcontrollers like those made by Renesas, Infineon, ST, NXP, Microchip etc. you may find the complete documentation on-line.

For RK3588 there have been published many schematics of various SBC's, so for some less important project one could design a PCB based on the public RK3588 datasheet and on the available schematic examples, but for a serious project one would want the real Rockchip documentation.

In the same way, for an amateur project one could make an N100 design starting from the published Radxa X4 schematic, even without the Intel documentation. However, the Intel CPUs like Alder Lake N or Amston Lake are normally sold in bulk, e.g. 1000 pieces or at least a few hundred. It may be difficult to find a distributor who would sell smaller quantities.

I agree.

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 5 and regret not getting one of these N100s instead for a small home server. A lot of the killer features of the Pi like using a traditional phone charger, being passively cooled, and being "cheap" are no longer there if you want a stable system. On the other hand, the "low power" from ARM systems, it's not that big of a lip compared to a traditional X64 mini-PC CPUs.

Ampere is the main company with that kind of setup (with full EDK II BIOS and UEFI), but they still target server / HEDT, not desktop, and certainly not the SBC/hobby space.

I asked Raspberry Pi about the likelihood of seeing UEFI support this year and it didn't sound like it was a priority, at least not for the Pi 5 generation. Would still love to see it, as it would let distro maintainers focus less on a few "premiere" Arm boards and be able to just have one distro for aarch64.

You can use aarch64 ISOs on some ARM64 computers through UEFI, RPi3+ included. Need to install firmware though. Similar if you use Tow-boot on some Pine64 devices and there is a project for recent Rockchip boards.

I have 2 Rockpro64s which I boot and installed the default ISO of Fedora Server from an ISO file on USB.

I hope Intel continue updating/improving their low power offerings like N100. It has been a great little CPU so far. ARM ecosystem seriously lags behind x86 in terms of standardization. Hunting down ISOs for devices other than popular ARM boards gonna be impossible once the vendor ends supporting their heavily patched Kernel. Seems like that the ARMified future is not gonna be the rosy dream as vendors want us to believe.

ODROID H4 Plus, https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/

It has only 9 (old pcie 3.0) lanes though which is bit limiting. In theory you should be able to use 8 of those lanes and get something like 4x10Gbe, which would be actually really neat, but that requires that the lanes are not squandered for anything else.

If you're feeling a little adventurous, you can find Intel N100 boxes with 4-6 NICs: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topto...

Went down this route and haven't had any issues with heat or having to replace heatsinks, add fans, etc. that others mentioned, but your mileage may vary.

Runs opnsense on proxmox, along with some other containers. It's been a great little box.

Just bought myself an MSI Cubi N for exactly that - 1Gbs ports only though.

If you want a basic idea of an N100, it's essentially a single Alder Lake E-core cluster (4 E-cores) with one of the low tier iGPUs and a trimmed down memory controller.

The presence of the iGPU means it /should/ handle video encoding surprisingly well for what it is.

Old Atoms were able to do that. N100 is way more powerful (better than Skylake at the same frequency).

The N100 is as fast as the i5-6500T.

I'm curious what your application is that needs fast SHA specifically, but yes these Gracemont cores do have hardware SHA-1 and SHA-256 acceleration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracemont_(microarchitecture)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions

SATA is awkward because the drives need a +12V rail, and this board probably doesn't have one, so they'd have to cram another power supply in along with the SATA controller or leave the user to bodge together an external power supply solution. If you don't mind doing the latter you could put a SATA controller in the M.2 slot:

https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Support-Interface-Spports-Windo...

I think they just had to make some compromises for price and form factor. There are a lot of other boards out there based on the N100 or its close friends. You might like the ODROID-H4+. https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/

The advantage of the Radxa X4 is that you can buy it instead of a Raspberry Pi: similar price, similar form factor, similar GPIO options via the on-board RP2040.

As the other commenter noted, I've recently been migrating from retropie to batocera and its night and day for the most part. I've had more quirkiness on batocera due to it being less of a standard platform, but the performance itself is not even close. Full upscaling on retro consoles, and easily handles nintendo switch.

You should then look definitely for Batocera Linux

Fantastic idea. Any specific models I should search for on eBay?

You just don’t have the bandwidth to do that. Even if you use the M.2 slot you’ll be significantly bottlenecked and would be better off using something else - even an AMD iGPU will work better (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/04/13/2100)

I think you mean plugging a mobo into your RTX?

On serious note, since you need big psu to drive serious GPU, why opt to use RPi or any other small form factor?

The aliexpress page loads for like 200ms and then refreshes to a 404 page. All browsers.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807150527509.html

The buy page now has allnet and arace as distributors besides aliexpress.

You need so much active cooling it would fall over if mounted on a vertical a lot.

You are not wrong. However x86 is dead to me for having a BIOS level backdoor built in that you can't get rid of (probably; yes I know about ME Cleaner). Not to mention Intel sat on their laurels for years. ARM are far from perfect, but maybe some competition gets things progressing again.

I presume it would just be attached over USB internally. That would make using it with the official SDK and other tooling as easy as a Pico attached to any other computer.