Avantek was, until recently, one of the few "price on the public box" options I was aware of in both server and desktop form factors. In desktop form factor there was another recent addition, the AVA Developer Platform, with a range of Altra SKUs. But it's very expensive just like the Avantek one[1]. In general Ampere is the only real competitor in this space anymore it seems, and they're only focusing on major buyers. At this point you'd think the higher volume would offset some costs and it would trickle down to us, but not really.
If I'm being completely honest: unless your opposition to Apple machines is purely political or whatever (which is whatever, do your thing), your best bet is probably just to buy an M1 Mac Mini, install Asahi Linux on it, and run it headless. You can get some aftermarket rackmount kits that can bundle 1-2 Minis, even, if you actually have racks. The performance/watt/$-spent is simply much better all around due to the massive economies of scale and consumer focus and it's a very modern ARMv8.something machine. All of the competitors are simply much slower in raw performance, have buggier hardware/firmware (often both), and run much more expensive when that isn't the case. Hell, even if you bought the Mac Studio and just ran Linux on it, it would probably still be reasonably price competitive, all things considered, even with like half the chip currently non-functional (GPU, NPU, etc). The hardware really is pretty good.
At this point I'm waiting for their ARMv9 chips to start rolling out before jumping on the Linux train. Maybe they'll do a Mac Studio refresh in a year or two from now...
Upstream kernel support is a bit sparse for the non-server boards.
When I was looking around, there was some stuff in the $500 to $2000 range:
Nvidia's usual Jetson/Tegra lineup
- sometimes has decent CPUs
- Good luck running anything other than Nvidia's slowly updated Kernel with blobs all over. Support drops real fast for older boards, leaving one stuck on old kernels (Jetson Nano and its upstream family was "EOL'd" in terms of kernel upgrades a while ago, even though Nvidia will still gladly take your money for a new Jetson Nano).
- Has a lot of Nvidia stuff attached, so you do get a GPU and a PCIe slot.
NXP LayerScape
- lots of CPU cores, but not great ones
- Claims 2nd highest level of ARM Systemready, so it may work with mainline kernels?
- Has a lot of networking stuff attached, since this seems to be the successor to generations of PPC networking chips.
Apple
- IMO, you already know the pros and cons, and will have already decided to purchase a Mac M1 or not by now.
- Popular vendor with a tendency to not make too many different variants, so some are trying to mainline device support in the Linux kernel (Asahi linux).
Qualcomm's developer platform for WoA
- Somewhat limited in specs and afaik, no mainline kernel support of note.
There are others in this range, such as Amazon's Annapurna Labs, Marvell's various SoCs, Broadcomm, Ampere, etc. IMO, none of them really target consumers or workstations. Some (Marvell, Broadcomm) treat simple public datasheets and documentation as a sin - Marvell's takedowns of fmr XScale documentation in particular. Even Nvidia isn't quite this prudish with their documentation, though they do hold back a bit vs the big x86 giants. Annapurna is found all over the place (Qnap NAS & Mikrotik routers are two places I've been surprised to find them), so there may be reclaimed consumer hardware, but Amazon is similarly stingy with documentation.
Ultimately, I don't feel it is really the year of the ARM workstation quite yet.
> Support drops real fast for older boards, leaving one stuck on old kernels (Jetson Nano and its upstream family was "EOL'd" in terms of kernel upgrades a while ago, even though Nvidia will still gladly take your money for a new Jetson Nano). - Has a lot of Nvidia stuff attached, so you do get a GPU and a PCIe slot.
Note that the Jetson Nano is supported pretty well by Fedora with a fully upstream kernel. This includes GPU acceleration through Nouveau, without reclocking catches.
And just before deprecating support for it entirely (won't get BSP releases beyond JetPack 4.x), they gave it u-boot on SPI with the UEFI module, which wasn't used at all before.
The new BSP release that is released tomorrow in public preview is Xavier onwards only, and sets the baseline to Linux 5.10, with UEFI across the board.
The older BSP release that supports Tegra X1 onwards, including the Jetson Nano, will continue getting security updates for years to come. Just don't expect new features anymore on the NVIDIA binary UM driver stack.
I've been looking at the NVIDIA Jetson [0, 1] devices for a while. They are marketed at machine learning, but they run Linux so it looks like I could use them for generic compute.
Not available quite yet, but several companies have recently announced RK3588 based systems that are something of a middle ground between the existing options. Up to 16GB RAM and somewhat higher CPU performance than the Pi for $100-300ish depending on the board and RAM amount.
I've had disappointing experiences with kernel support for Rockchip systems. Hopefully things have improved since I last experimented (it's been about 3 years), but I really struggled to get stable drivers running for RK3399 and RK3328 chipsets.
aseipp|3 years ago
If I'm being completely honest: unless your opposition to Apple machines is purely political or whatever (which is whatever, do your thing), your best bet is probably just to buy an M1 Mac Mini, install Asahi Linux on it, and run it headless. You can get some aftermarket rackmount kits that can bundle 1-2 Minis, even, if you actually have racks. The performance/watt/$-spent is simply much better all around due to the massive economies of scale and consumer focus and it's a very modern ARMv8.something machine. All of the competitors are simply much slower in raw performance, have buggier hardware/firmware (often both), and run much more expensive when that isn't the case. Hell, even if you bought the Mac Studio and just ran Linux on it, it would probably still be reasonably price competitive, all things considered, even with like half the chip currently non-functional (GPU, NPU, etc). The hardware really is pretty good.
At this point I'm waiting for their ARMv9 chips to start rolling out before jumping on the Linux train. Maybe they'll do a Mac Studio refresh in a year or two from now...
[1] https://www.ipi.wiki/pages/com-hpc-altra
solarkraft|3 years ago
I agree. Especially on residential power it may be worth looking at the power consumption.
The base M1 mini starts to become really cheap used too.
giaour|3 years ago
On the plus side, they're pretty cheap.
glowingly|3 years ago
When I was looking around, there was some stuff in the $500 to $2000 range:
Nvidia's usual Jetson/Tegra lineup
- sometimes has decent CPUs
- Good luck running anything other than Nvidia's slowly updated Kernel with blobs all over. Support drops real fast for older boards, leaving one stuck on old kernels (Jetson Nano and its upstream family was "EOL'd" in terms of kernel upgrades a while ago, even though Nvidia will still gladly take your money for a new Jetson Nano). - Has a lot of Nvidia stuff attached, so you do get a GPU and a PCIe slot.
NXP LayerScape
- lots of CPU cores, but not great ones
- Claims 2nd highest level of ARM Systemready, so it may work with mainline kernels?
- Has a lot of networking stuff attached, since this seems to be the successor to generations of PPC networking chips.
Apple
- IMO, you already know the pros and cons, and will have already decided to purchase a Mac M1 or not by now.
- Popular vendor with a tendency to not make too many different variants, so some are trying to mainline device support in the Linux kernel (Asahi linux).
Qualcomm's developer platform for WoA
- Somewhat limited in specs and afaik, no mainline kernel support of note.
There are others in this range, such as Amazon's Annapurna Labs, Marvell's various SoCs, Broadcomm, Ampere, etc. IMO, none of them really target consumers or workstations. Some (Marvell, Broadcomm) treat simple public datasheets and documentation as a sin - Marvell's takedowns of fmr XScale documentation in particular. Even Nvidia isn't quite this prudish with their documentation, though they do hold back a bit vs the big x86 giants. Annapurna is found all over the place (Qnap NAS & Mikrotik routers are two places I've been surprised to find them), so there may be reclaimed consumer hardware, but Amazon is similarly stingy with documentation.
Ultimately, I don't feel it is really the year of the ARM workstation quite yet.
my123|3 years ago
Note that the Jetson Nano is supported pretty well by Fedora with a fully upstream kernel. This includes GPU acceleration through Nouveau, without reclocking catches.
And just before deprecating support for it entirely (won't get BSP releases beyond JetPack 4.x), they gave it u-boot on SPI with the UEFI module, which wasn't used at all before.
https://nullr0ute.com/2020/11/installing-fedora-on-the-nvidi...
The new BSP release that is released tomorrow in public preview is Xavier onwards only, and sets the baseline to Linux 5.10, with UEFI across the board.
The older BSP release that supports Tegra X1 onwards, including the Jetson Nano, will continue getting security updates for years to come. Just don't expect new features anymore on the NVIDIA binary UM driver stack.
> slowly updated Kernel with blobs all over
It's a heavily diverged kernel tree, but it's all GPLv2, including the full GPU kernel-mode driver (https://nv-tegra.nvidia.com/r/gitweb?p=linux-nvgpu.git;a=sum...) for those. (there's no binary kernel modules present at all on the platform)
Firmware, like everyone else, and userspace is where you have the proprietary bits.
eatonphil|3 years ago
[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/b2po26/nvidia_jetson...
opencl|3 years ago
unregistereddev|3 years ago
bpye|3 years ago
Having fast chips is nice, but I really want to have an ARM platform that I can just throw any Linux, BSD, Windows, etc image at.
TradingPlaces|3 years ago
Just got a Mac Studio (M1 Max), and it’s a pretty smooth beast.
RL_Quine|3 years ago
Kind of, if you can handle the abysmal price.
nicoburns|3 years ago
timthorn|3 years ago