[conspire] Home Servers

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Moffitt (nick at zork.net):

> I've probably got to swallow my pride and order one each of the Radxa,
> Mango, Blueberry, Orange Pi zero-format boards for testing.  Those
> seem like about the right level of RAM and such, but they also strike
> me as the sort of over-engineering that can lead to heat-driven
> burnout. 

Don Marti says separately mentions an intriguing Framework Laptop
conversion kit revolves around a motherboard with a AMD Ryzen
7040-series CPU/GPU chip, which I was prepared to dismiss as
stupendously overblown for a home server.  As it turns out, the TDP* is
35-54W, which is... not actually horrible.  _But_, still needs active
cooling.  

And, of course, that built-in defect gets underplayed or not mentioned
at all in reviews.  Because, wow, never mind practicality.  Look at that
high video frame rate for gamers!

Forgive the vagueness, please, but I keep following developments from
the Pine64 people, who make a variety of things including ARMv8.2-A
-based SBCs, and find them promising.  They're currently topping out at
8GB RAM, like this one with a PCIe x1 slot, the QuartzPro64 Model A:
https://pine64.com/product/quartz64-model-a-8gb-single-board-computer/
But, on balance, even they aren't filling the home-server niche, nor are
they yet exploring 64-bit ARM CPUs' ability to drive higher RAM.  _And_
they don't do that "needs lots of code from out of tree" bullshit that
you-know-who does all the time.

They say nothing at all about heat, but the Cortex-A55 ("Ananke") ARM
CPUs used are pitched by ARM Holdings as suitable for "entry-level
smartphone and other embedded devices", so it can't be much.  Nobody
states what that chip's TDP is, but I find it being compared with other
chips with TPD = 6W, so there's that.  (Cited board also has a Mali-G52
2EE GPU, which is reported to have good open-source graphics support,
for those who care.  Board size is:  180mm x 180mm.)

All the Pine64 SBCs appear to be bigger than Raspberry Surveillance
Police's zero-format, but I doubt that's a problem for most home uses,
right?

*Thermal design power, a measure of a CPU's energy consumption under
high workload.  (For the buzzword-challenged.)  Note that this is power
consumption within just the _chip_ at heavy load but not maximum load:
Power consumption of the surrounding main board and other components is
obviously only partly derived from the CPU's.

-- 
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Rick Moen                           may they always be on YouTube."
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