Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts

At $60 - its able to run anything x86, plus hardware transcoding and a cpu about 3x more powerful than a RPI 5, not sure why anyone would even want a raspberry pi. Not to mention the built in 2.5G nic with PoE and m.2 slot. Adding a PoE and m.2 hats on a raspberry pi would add another $25-40 to the price. Hope they ramp up production on these Radxa boards.

Edit: another source with better image of the form factor. It might actually fit a raspberry case.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/07/19/radxa-x4-low-cost-cr...

Another option if you need single threaded performance along with decent graphics is used corporate mini PCs with Ryzen 5 Pro 2400G CPU from HP, Dell and Lenovo. These are just starting to hit four years since first volume availability this Fall so corporate fleets are increasingly being recycled on eBay. They're already down to around $100 delivered with SSD and Win10 Pro installed and prices should fall even further in coming months as supply increases.

These are terrific for retro emulation as they can easily handle emulating everything up to and including PS2 and Gamecube at 60+ fps (with upscaling too). Toss in an old 2TB HD and it'll hold a library with many of the greatest games ever made that'll take a lifetime to play. Also, don't forget to check out the huge variety of community mods, HD texture packs, cheats and fan translations now available. Around our house we're pretty much opting out of the DLC, multi-service-login-required, 100GB-bloated, DRM hellscape that much of current gaming is devolving into and actually enjoying it a lot more.

I would like to add another comment on the matter of idle power draw, that is turning out to be somewhat disappointing on the platforms of this generation (a).

The TinyMiniMicro PCs from 8/9th-gen Intel are impressive as they can get below 3 W at the wall. Gemini Lake (Refresh) thin clients can also easily get under 4 W. I wonder whether these performances come from optimisations driven by actual market requirements (I guess it can make a difference for a company that run thousands of those?).

ARM RK3588 platforms are champions in this regard. My Orange Pi 5 Plus idles at 1.5W (less than a RPi 4, with the same power supply). However, they are not viable for people who want to run Proxmox.

It seems that almost all N100 platforms idle above 5 W. Also, there are not so many passively cooled options from reputable manufacturers, while actively cooled boxes are not so silent (while TinyMiniMicro PCs are super quiet under most usage scenarios).

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

The N100 seems to be everywhere - presumably it’s some kind of major leap forward in perf/watt or perf/$ versus, eg, J4125? For those in the know, is an N100 mini-pc currently the best place to start for a kid’s “my first Linux PC”?

>This means that I was able to grab the Windows 11 ISO and install it. I was able to go to Debian’s homepage, grab the latest ISO and just, well, install it?

Still the biggest advantage x86 has over ARM in my opinion. I hope one day common ARM processors become as flexible.

Either way its amazing to see x86 processors so cheap, low power, and still rather powerful. I hope to see more devices using these N100's

$60! That seems like a ridiculous bargain. Evidently I’m not the only one who thinks that, because they are sold out. Not in love with the reported temps, but I would probably be willing to throttle the CPU significantly.

Does anyone have experience of putting a huge GPU on something like this and using it for inference? You'd be limited by data feeding over the NVME port, but otherwise you won't be bottlenecked right? Seems like a light weight and cute way to limit non-inference power/weight without having to pay the price of a Jetson board.

We really needed an intel based raspberry pi competitor with built in nvme! This looks amazing!

One of these with Emulation Station should make a fantastic retro gaming machine! I'm using an Rpi 4 as one at present, but for sure it would be better with much more CPU power.

Surprised no sata headers.

I’ll def wait to see if the fanless heat sinks work out on these first

Can't wait to get this & have TrueNAS+Jellyfin up & running on it, certainly beats having to buy so many addons for the Pi & still not have a super reliable build.

Absolutely could not help myself, preordered one. Same speed as my always-on i5-6500t mini-PC, and has a RPi0 on it? Neato. Coherent boot system & mainline kernels? Oh heck yes so much better than this amateur hour most cores make you suffer.

Had kind of been planning to get whatever comes next, at a bigger tdp (more N305 class), but Radxa really nailed the price here, while being very fully featured.

I'm super glad to see an x86 hardware WITH PoE as an option. That seems to be a niche almost exclusively found on arm boards, but OS selection kinda sucks for Arm SoCs (at least the OS I care about, NixOS, doesn't have very good out of the box support for raspberry pi 5 yet).

Genuine question, but what's the use case for this? I do a ton of embedded compute, but it all requires extensive GIPO/PWM, etc. Then I do a lot of desktop compute, but it all requires a GPU and a fair bit of horsepower.

What's the use case for a SBC made to be embedded in a project box, but without extensive IO?

Does anyone know where to buy one of these? Aliexpress keeps saying it is out of stock and has for about a week now.

The main advantage of Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller on Radxa X4 board is that they can now use the Raspberry Pi logo next to the Radxa X4 marketing to increase the awareness that they are "similar to Raspberry Pi". Without RP2040 they wouldn't be allowed to do that...

Two NICs and a giant passive heatsink (or huge slow/quiet fan) would make this a great router material.

I already have a N100 mini-pc to play with, but now I want one of these guys too. So cute.

Can't wait to have a Compute Module(CM) that's compatible with pi-cluster etc.

Curious about the max frequencies on the GPIO pins since I believe it drives them with an RP2040. Not actually sure how the RP2040 interfaces with the Intel chip though.

Where can I buy these N100 chips and get development material (reference designs, etc.) for them?

Rockchip has been super easy, I have no idea where to start with Intel.

I thought the n100 would be a joke compared to an an HP G6 mini with i5-9xxx (small book sized computer), but seems they might be competitive with n100 drawing 1/6 the energy? Is that right? Can n100 do fast SHA256 and h265 / x265 transcoding across multiple containers?

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_processor_n1...

Is secure boot broken by using test keys?

These could be very interesting devices if they were not infected with binary blobs.

That thermal pad looks dreadful.

Does anyone know if the Ethernet controller supports EtherCAT?

I feel like there’s an assault going on regarding the usage of the question mark? I see it all over social media?

In actual questions, however, it is dismissed altogether?

Where are we going with this trend.

That bios screen looks beautiful

Ok so no CUDA, how about OpenCL?