ARM based workstation with a tiny footprint from Korea | XSLAB | V-raptor SQ nano

[snappercayt]

Summary

 

This is a dream machine for ARM tinkerers, has 24 cores in a small size, cute case along with it! 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

"Ubuntu server is pre-installed and the machine is intended as a test and dev machine for those dipping their toes into the world of Arm servers – or as a small server for home or educational use."

 

My thoughts

 Great small machine which is not popular among western media and I wish Linus can discuss more Korean technologies and other international innovations as this product is really ahead of its time. 

 

Sources

 1. https://xslab.co.kr/layout/eng/home.php?go=item.view&num=6

2. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/05/computex_2023_from_sneaker_inspired/ 

Edited June 11, 2023 by snappercayt
double images

[igormp]

A53 cores with a max of 32GB of ram? I wouldn't call this a workstation by any means.

 

FWIW, each of those cores is pretty similar to the ones found in a Raspberry Pi 3 and the Zero 2, but with 6x more cores than those devices.

 

Still, if the pricing is right it could serve as a small build box or thinkering machine.

[williamcll]

24 A53 is a bizzare combination. You code must be very multi-threaded to make good use.

 

Also, for a server, 1 gig ethernet is too limiting. It should at least have a 2.5G port or more.

[hishnash]

2 hours ago, williamcll said:

You code must be very multi-threaded to make good use.

as a workstation part it is odd yes, for server use cases this is not a big deal many servers end up having very low signal threaded load, and mostly completely separable mutli threaded as well. 

[maplepants]

I'll echo the other commenters here that I really don't see that as a workstation. But, I do think it's pretty interesting.

 

Seems like something that's really better thought of as competition or Raspberry Pi clusters. But the trade-offs are really quite different. This old design (A53) is only the second 64bit instruction set, and the current Pi 4 uses A72. 

 

It'd be interesting to see someone benchmark this machine against a 6 Pi cluster, as that would have the same number of cores. Do you know of any coverage that includes performance information? I've searched a little and could find some speculation that it's related to the Banana-Pi, but that uses A73 and not A53.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

It might be useful if you want to develop/host many small webservers locally. I don't see many other uses for many core arm processors, especially an older core like the A53. 

Looking at other offering it's clear it's a dev kit for their webservice arm server processor, they must have developed it a while ago, or didn't have money to license A7* cores:

[Franck]

9 hours ago, williamcll said:

24 A53 is a bizzare combination. You code must be very multi-threaded to make good use.

Being shipped with a server OS that is in my opinion mostly a non issue as majority of those who would buy this would probably run multiple server tools on it that benefit a lot from many core. Like multiple docker, database, web server pool. These kind of host already make use of multi core/thread.