PC Engines APU EOL

[MBastian]

Last chance to stock up on APU hardware. Sadly there will be no new product. A sad day. ;-(

PC Engines apu platform EOL

PC Engines apu platform EOL

www.pcengines.ch

Despite having used considerable quantities of AMD processors and Intel NICs, we don't get adequate design support for new projects. In addition, the x86 silicon currently offered is not very appealing for our niche of passively cooled boards. After about 20 years of WRAP, ALIX and APU, it is time for me to move on to different things.

 

[Stephan]

Personal pro tip: In case of sad day, strawberry cake.

The most annoying thing for me is that there is no other ECC-RAM-capable AMD64 system with a 5 watts power envelope. With open source BIOS (Coreboot). With open schematics. With four gigabit ethernet ports. With three mPCIe sockets. With a bootable SD card slot. And two SIM card slots.

 

[rtech]

Personal pro tip: In case of sad day, strawberry cake.

The most annoying thing for me is that there is no other ECC-RAM-capable AMD64 system with a 5 watts power envelope. With open source BIOS (Coreboot). With open schematics. With four gigabit ethernet ports. With three mPCIe sockets. With a bootable SD card slot. And two SIM card slots.

Is that ECC functionality on every board? IIRC some batches just got soldered normal RAM.

 

[Stephan]

2 GB has 8 chips -> no ECC. 4 GB has 9 chips -> ECC.

 

[rtech]

How much throughtput you get with IPS active?

 

[Stephan]

Depends on OS and ruleset and what you think an IPS is and does. Simple iptables 800..1000 Mbps. IPS which wants to examine every file retrieved from the web will bring even a beefy Xeon to its knees. Linux can use the four cores and four NICs well. BSD maybe at half the speed.

 

[RTM]

I suppose it was bound to happen, given that the APU boards were getting quite dated.

But for those of us who do not want to buy the cheap chinese boxes, it really sucks that there will be no new designs using newer chips.
pc-engines was a highly valued vendor, they will be missed.