Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi • Hacker News Board

Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi

#71

Post by lproven » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

alias_neo wrote: post #46

marcodiego wrote: post #44

Recent 4-cores, 2.0+ Ghz and 4GB RAM ARM SBC's are plenty powerful for most tasks a home user may need. Media consumption, browsing, light text editing, editing the weekend video and even compiling small code bases. People have been doing that in chromebooks for years. Unless you need to compile large code bases, edit serious videos, process huge amounts of data or CAD/games, a simple cheap ARM computer should be eno…

I wonder if there is a blog post in this somewhere, that I could write. I have a bunch of Pi 4s (4GB). I just put one in an Argon M.2 case and was wondering what to do with it. I have a "gut feel" for how my workstation should behave, I am a (backend) software engineer by profession, tend to work my day job on an i7 laptop (XPS 15, Ubuntu) but at home I'm on Ryzen 7 1800X (Manjaro) and Ryzen 9 3900X (Debian). Is ther…

If you want to experience something really radically different from the rest of 21st century computing, try RISC OS on one of them.

https://www.riscosdev.com/projects/

RISC OS is the original native OS for the ARM chip. It's still alive, actively maintained and developed, and it's FOSS now. It's a 1980s OS that predates NeXTstep and Windows 3, let alone Linux, which means a unique (but very effective and elegant) GUI, and a shell, that are totally unlike anything else you've ever seen.

It's a 35 year old OS. Don't expect miracles. It doesn't support wifi or multiple cores, but it's very very fast and responsive on a single core of a RasPi, and there is a big software library with hundreds of freeware titles and some commercial stuff too.

Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi

#72

Post by salawat » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

Teknoman117 wrote: post #68

salawat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you mean the CPU can only full-duplex with a few GPU's at a time? And are you sure that GPU's are actually talking with each other? Forgive me if I'm woefully out of date/having a massive brainfart, but last I heard, GPU's got CPU-less DMA a few years ago allowing access to system memory, but programming/setting up the pipelines/cleanup/repriming/output consolidation was still solely a CPU-centric work stream.…

Yes, GPUs are able to directly pass messages and bulk data to each other these days. It's completely supported in CUDA, OpenCL, Vulkan, DirectX 12, etc. DirectX calls it "Explicit Multi GPU". It's been around since GPUs transitioned to PCIe, it's just that both AMD and NVIDIA just locked it to the "professional" GPUs, or only used it under the hood of some other feature. AMD GPUs have used PCIe peer to peer copies fo…

Well... Shit.

There goes my free time for the next 6 months. Need to brush up on intra-system component networking and figuring out how to make graphics cards dance.

Must... Become... Massively... Parallel...

Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi

#73

Post by mashc5 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

The tl;dr is it's a standard mini ITX-sized motherboard for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. It has a Broadcom PCIe switch that it uses to power 4 mini PCIe slots, 4 M.2 E-key slots, 1 M.2 M-key slot, a x16 slot in the standard ITX location, and an edge x1 slot. It also has dual/triple-redundant 12v power supplies (barrel, aux +/- ATX, and PoE++ header, though it doesn't use a 24-pin ATX connector, so you need to p…

Do you have any more info on the PWM bug? We’re having some issues with PWM on the RPi4 and I’m wondering if it’s related…

Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi

#74

Post by hinkley » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #65

hinkley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be meeting in the middle and creating SBCs whose bolt holes spacing is identical to some other device standard. For instance 2.5” HDDs, or 3.5-2.5 adapters. Then you can find trays and enclosures and caddies that can be modified slightly to purpose. Expanding holes in sheet metal is easy. Tapping holes, welding captive nuts, and bending are a lot trickier.

For something as lightly loaded as a home computer, rivnuts are pretty darn easy and cheap way to add threads to sheet metal. Brass standoffs with a nut on the back are also readily available and cheap.

Brass standoffs are great but they still require a tapped hole.

I was thinking more of moderate scale. I’d totally rivnut one SBC if I had a friend who could show me how. But I’m not doing twenty or small batches for resale. I think there’s a fraction of people in that demographic for whom a rivnut is still fancy tech. I’ve only heard about them from watching Bad Obsession Motorsports (with Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln) and rivnuts are like a running gag argument between the two hosts. Welded captive nuts always win. Every time.

I just looked at a rivnut catalog, and couldn’t figure out how to find a nut that would work with standard computer case screws, or in fact what tool and nut combinations worked together. I’m not gonna sort that shit out on my own.