When these ARM boards start coming with UEFI and I don't need to hunt around for blessed OS images with patched kernels I'll be a lot more interested, until then I've got to stick with x86 to maintain my sanity.
No PCIe connectivity is very unfortunate. I think these ARM/RISC-V SBCs are very attractive in combination with high-throughput NICs (or if you're into AI, things like the Tenstorrent cards). That'd be very nice for building smaller prototypes of 100G+ edge compute, CDNs, cloud, serverless platforms etc. without having to shell out for an Ampere Altra (or x86 equivalent).<p>Nowadays there's such a big move towards heterogeneity that good PCIe connectivity feels like table stakes for SBCs.
I'm a bit confused by the wording on PoE:<p>> If you choose to power via PoE you can expect to get 25W of output.<p>Can you power <i>this</i> device via PoE ("choose to power via PoE"), or can this SBC power <i>other</i> devices over PoE ("expect to get 25W of output")? I clicked through some other reviews, but didn't see it addressed.
I'd love something like this with socketed RAM so much, the only ARM boards I've seen with socketed RAM so far are high-end expensive server stuff.
It's always the software that's the missing element.<p>I prefer low end Intel compatible boards because the software just works. I spent too many hours with weird arm devices trying to get them to do basic stuff that is taken for granted on Intel, such as booting up.
I've been looking at these kinds of boards as well: <a href="https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000" rel="nofollow">https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000</a><p>So far, mostly the same results, although I do have another with much more RAM that I'm still writing a draft on.
Why Not Smaller?<p>Why is this board so (physically) large in size?<p>You can see how much wasted space, by looking at this photo:<p><a href="https://bret.dk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/radxa_rock_5_itx_cam_lcd_rtc_m2_mounting-jpg.webp" rel="nofollow">https://bret.dk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/radxa_rock_5_itx_...</a>
tkaiser has some additional information from his initial testing at <a href="https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/Knowledge/blob/master/articles/Quick_Preview_of_ROCK_5_ITX.md">https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/Knowledge/blob/master/articl...</a> if people are curious to know more, though it should be noted these were early release samples and as such, software/firmware isn't exactly perfect at the moment
One of the big selling ports of ARM is lower power consumption so I'd have loved to see some numbers, particularly idle watts.<p>Also, I can find full photos of the board elsewhere but full front and back pics of it would have been nice to include.