Any good alternative to Raspberry for Arm64?

[John F Carr]

On Apr 1, 2021, at 10:02 , Marcel Flores <marcel at brickporch.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 1, 2021, at 3:51 AM, Andrea Brancatelli via freebsd-arm <freebsd-arm at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Practically speaking, supposing I'd like the equivalent of an
>> entry-level server that is not a spacerocket (80 cores...) but not a
>> raspberry with the drives tapes to the raw board, is there anything
>> around?
> 
> I have no complaints about the ThunderX: plenty of cores, easy to 
> spec with ram and storage, even the fancy NIC works without any 
> issue (once you sort out the slightly circuitous configuration).
> I’ve been tracking -CURRENT for a couple of years now with very 
> few issues. Its power draw is reasonable and its modest cooling 
> needs keep it well below spacerocket levels.
> 
> Probably the price-per-performance formula doesn’t really pan out
> great at this point, but as you point out, the space between the
> RPI and say the eMAG is a little thin.

I tried to buy a ThunderX system around the end of 2019 and nobody would sell me one.
Maybe if I wanted to buy a dozen they would have gotten back to me. I went with eMAG instead.
My job is developing scalable multicore software and the server class ARM is a legitimate business
expense.  If I wanted a smaller system for personal use I would be frustrated by the performance
and price gap between a Pi and the next machine with better performance and higher quality components.

(I admit that the Raspberry Pi is a step up from the first ARM system I got, maybe 8-10 years ago, which
had 1990s PC quality memory that randomly segfaulted trying to build gcc.)