Last time I seriously dug into 6 GHz WiFi was with 6E on a Raspberry Pi CM4 with Intel's AX210 card, in 2023.
Back then—and even up until recently—using WiFi 6E or WiFi 7 on a Raspberry Pi meant recompiling Linux, as the iwlwifi Linux drivers weren't included with the default Pi OS install.
But recently, the Intel WiFi drivers were added by default, and now all that's required is loading in the right firmware.
tl;dr: it depends.
About one year ago, I bought an Intel N100 mini PC (specifically the GMKtec N100 NucBox G3) and compared it to the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB.
A year later, and we have a newer $159 16GB version of that mini PC with a slightly-faster Intel N150, and a new 16GB Raspberry Pi 5.
Nvidia GPUs have been running fine on Arm for a while now—I just upgraded the System76 Thelio Astra to an RTX 4080 Super and am testing it now.
But Nvidia seems to have a partnership with Ampere, which probably leads to their drivers getting priority support, and likely a few special edge cases in code to work around a couple PCIe quirks on the Altra CPUs. Nvidia also builds their own Arm CPUs—a lot of them—so Arm support is definitely a priority for them.
Because I get the same question on every video where I recompile the Linux kernel on a Pi to work on GPU or other hardware driver support, I finally made a video answering it:
How do you recompile Linux?
In my case, since I mostly rebuild the kernel for the Pi, I rebuild Raspberry Pi's Linux kernel fork instead of 'mainline' linux (the upstream Linux kernel source).
Raspberry Pi publishes a very thorough guide covering building and cross-compiling the Pi Linux kernel, and my video today mostly goes through that (with a few little tips on making the experience more convenient):
At first glance, especially from the top, the Radxa X4 is your typical Arm SBC:
But you'll quickly notice the lack of an SoC—that's on the bottom. Looking more closely, what's a Raspberry Pi chip doing on top?! First, let's flip over the board to investigate. There's the SoC: definitely not Arm inside, this thing's an Intel N100:
I have all my benchmarks and notes bringing up this board stored in my sbc-reviews GitHub repository: Radxa X4 - geerlingguy's sbc-reviews, and I also summarized everything in a video on YouTube, which you can watch inline (or skip past and read this blog post instead):
I just bought this N100-based Intel x86 mini PC (brand new), and it was cheaper than an almost equivalent—but slower—Raspberry Pi 5.
This GMKtec mini PC is called the Nucbox G3, and it comes with an Intel Alder Lake N100 4-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 Pro—and mine cost just $131, after a couple coupons.
That's... a lot of computer for a very good price. But the Raspberry Pi—the famous "$35 computer", should be well below that... right?
Well, I bought all the parts required to build a Pi 5 to the same spec—including the adapters and parts to assemble it into one small unit—and it turns out... the Pi is more expensive. And slower.
The Pi 4 still starts at $35 (for a 1 GB model), but the Pi 5 starts at $60 (for 4 GB) and climbs to $80 for the maximum 8 GB model.
It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:
The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!
The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.
This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:
I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little under-desk studio rack.
So after working with them last year on a similar build (but with a prototype case), I got in touch with MyElectronics and they sent over their new production Mini ITX short-depth 2U PC case.
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.)
It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building Emacs.
Well, here's my quick story.
I've been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pis lately—more specifically, work which often requires recompiling the Pi OS Linux kernel for the aarch64 architecture. I recompile the kernel enough I made my own shirt for it!
January 1, 2021 Update: My 1.34 Gbps benchmark was flawed. See this GitHub issue and this updated blog post to learn more: WiFi 6 is not faster than Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi.
After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi, installing Intel's WiFi firmware, and patching Intel's wireless driver to make it work on the Raspberry Pi, I benchmarked the EDUP Intel AX200 WiFi 6 PCIe card and got 1.34 Gbps of bandwidth between the Raspberry Pi and a new ASUS WiFi 6 router.
This is my story.