Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#21

Post by sidewndr46 »

amitprasad wrote: post #17
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still bought my 795s7 (a cheap 16-core MoDT (mobile on desktop) zen4 box) anyways, but accepting that I would probably never get bios updates ever was a hard pill to swallow. I haven't had to deal with support for anything defective, but support as in available bios updates being so so so spotty is really unfortunate. AMD is talking about replacing closed AGESA BIOS with open OpenSIL bios some day, and maybe perhap…

How is the 795s7? What do you put it to work on? Just sprung for one at a good price.

I have the BD795M with an RTX 3090. It's a good desktop and gaming machine if you're looking for a compact build.

Support is abysmal

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#22

Post by sidewndr46 »

ndiddy wrote: post #10

The performance on this machine is similar to the Snapdragon 8cx from Microsoft’s first big Windows on ARM push a few years ago (so nowhere near even the 4 year old Apple M1) while the idle power draw is similar to an x86 computer. If they’re not targeting either performance or power efficiency, I’m not sure who would be interested in this computer. I’d say that if you can tolerate Mac OS X for your use case, a used…

Once I looked at the price tag I quickly arrived at the same conclusion. It's a neat product, but I can get so much more computer for less money.

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#23

Post by [deleted] »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #19
mcny wrote: post #2

My minisforum mini PC is dead and useless. I will never, ever recommend anyone to buy a minisforum again. Please do not buy a minisforum. And it wasn't just me. https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum...

I can't speak for the Intel ones but I hear the AMD Zen 4 and later ones have been solid. I have a UM780 XTX that I've been using in a homelab setup and it's been rock solid. Zero issues with Linux (Arch btw), zero hardware issues after nearly 2 years of 24x7 operation.

[deleted]

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#24

Post by g947o »

mcny wrote: post #2

My minisforum mini PC is dead and useless. I will never, ever recommend anyone to buy a minisforum again. Please do not buy a minisforum. And it wasn't just me. https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum...

I think minisforum products are generally decent, but there are things that give me pauses.

I had a mini PC that would sometimes briefly show black screens followed by "AMD driver timeout" issues. I emailed their support, who instructed me to play with a few BIOS settings (slightly weird), and eventually asked me to start a warranty replacement. The emails were not tracked by any ticket system, just as regular emails, and the shipping address was a residential address in California. All of this feels slightly unprofessional, and the residential address thing is almost alarming. But in the end, the issue got addressed, so whatever.

The overall service definitely cannot possibly match Intel with their NUCs or Apple products, not a surprise. But the actual machines are ok.

If your mini PC died within warranty period, I don't see why you cannot do warranty returns. Otherwise, you just had bad luck, just like what could happen with many other devices from other manufacturers.

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#25

Post by bluGill »

geerlingguy wrote: post #12
ndiddy wrote: post #10

The performance on this machine is similar to the Snapdragon 8cx from Microsoft’s first big Windows on ARM push a few years ago (so nowhere near even the 4 year old Apple M1) while the idle power draw is similar to an x86 computer. If they’re not targeting either performance or power efficiency, I’m not sure who would be interested in this computer. I’d say that if you can tolerate Mac OS X for your use case, a used…

The one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.). That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades…

I don't understand this niche. Linux does not need to run on an ARM machine for almost anything. Linux has very good cross platform abilities and so you can build and test on whatever CPU (presumably x86, but any CPU will do), and then when you are confident that everything works cross compile for ARM and things will almost always work. You also have qemu which is slow but plenty good for running some code where this matters.

You do need a little testing because ARM is different, but the odds that are are doing something where it matters are low. I've been doing the above for years and only found two things. First was a bug in GCC (already fixed in a newer version by the time I traced it down). Second was x86 has a strong stronger memory model for sharing data between threads - hopefully you are not doing that (I only hit it because I maintain our cross thread message system).

You also can't test anything that uses GPIO type things - but this computer has different setup and so you couldn't with this anyway. (and you should abstract your GPIO for testing anyway so this because a small test case when you do switch to real hardware)

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#26

Post by m00x »

mcny wrote: post #2

My minisforum mini PC is dead and useless. I will never, ever recommend anyone to buy a minisforum again. Please do not buy a minisforum. And it wasn't just me. https://old.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ocvjby/minisforum...

I got a defective MS-01 and the return process was smooth and they paid for everything. I got a full refund even after the Amazon refund window expired.

I have a MS-A1 and a MS-A2 now and both have been serving massive web traffic for the past 8 months with 0 issues.

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#27

Post by AlotOfReading »

bluGill wrote: post #25
geerlingguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.). That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades…

I don't understand this niche. Linux does not need to run on an ARM machine for almost anything. Linux has very good cross platform abilities and so you can build and test on whatever CPU (presumably x86, but any CPU will do), and then when you are confident that everything works cross compile for ARM and things will almost always work. You also have qemu which is slow but plenty good for running some code where this…

I think I'm probably in the target market for this. I have a board using Linux on an Arm v9.2 chip. It'd be nice to run unit tests with exactly the same binaries and compiler settings. The actual boards are a bit expensive and unavailable for CI purposes (vs HIL). Graviton isn't v9.2. QEMU doesn't support v9.2. This does.

Probably won't end up buying this, but it's not hard to imagine a small number of other people would find it useful.

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#28

Post by ndiddy »

geerlingguy wrote: post #12
ndiddy wrote: post #10

The performance on this machine is similar to the Snapdragon 8cx from Microsoft’s first big Windows on ARM push a few years ago (so nowhere near even the 4 year old Apple M1) while the idle power draw is similar to an x86 computer. If they’re not targeting either performance or power efficiency, I’m not sure who would be interested in this computer. I’d say that if you can tolerate Mac OS X for your use case, a used…

The one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.). That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades…

Yeah Asahi makes this machine even more of a niche product. Even if you're stuck on the M2 Mac Mini, that still gets you ~2x the single core performance and ~40% more multi-core performance than the MS-R1, with much better power efficiency.

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#29

Post by NewJazz »

ndiddy wrote: post #10

The performance on this machine is similar to the Snapdragon 8cx from Microsoft’s first big Windows on ARM push a few years ago (so nowhere near even the 4 year old Apple M1) while the idle power draw is similar to an x86 computer. If they’re not targeting either performance or power efficiency, I’m not sure who would be interested in this computer. I’d say that if you can tolerate Mac OS X for your use case, a used…

Doesn't asahi run on the Mac mini? Probably better than it does on a laptop, no peripherals to support

Re: Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

#30

Post by ndiddy »

bluGill wrote: post #25
geerlingguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one niche they could hit I think is Arm devs who need an Arm machine, want to run Linux (and not rely on Asahi, which still only runs on M1/M2), and want some hardware expansion (PCIe, M.2, dual 10 GbE, etc.). That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose. As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades…

I don't understand this niche. Linux does not need to run on an ARM machine for almost anything. Linux has very good cross platform abilities and so you can build and test on whatever CPU (presumably x86, but any CPU will do), and then when you are confident that everything works cross compile for ARM and things will almost always work. You also have qemu which is slow but plenty good for running some code where this…

Besides TSO like you mentioned, the SIMD implementation is different (SSE/AVX vs. NEON) which is important if you do anything that uses SIMD intrinsics directly. If you're deploying to ARM servers, it's also nice to be able to test the exact same binaries you'll be running on the server.
Post reply on HN