6d ago

Cloud services and hardware alternative

I was under the assumption that Raspberry Pi was a US based company, but I just found out they are European and almost all made in Wales.

It’s probably the most European computer you can buy, with a massive following of enthusiastic developers creating alternatives for all the cloud services we are trying to stop using.

This has confirmed my choice to try and replace the US based cloud services my family and I are currently using.

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Does anyone know of a European alternative for a x86 single board pc? I like the pi but it being ARM is a deal breaker for me.
Currently i use Lattepanda and they are great, so if something like that exists but European i would be very thankful.
- x86 is only licensed to be made by Intel, AMD and whoever owns the Cyrix and VIA licenses these days. Intel has not issued new licenses since the 90s and doesn't intend to ever again.
  Due to this, there is basically no chance there will ever be an x86 CPU manufactured in the EU, I'm afraid.
  If you accept the CPU won't be European though, I'm fairly sure there are a decent number of European industrial PC manufacturers to choose from, which are half the time basically SBCs with a heatsink attached.
  I'm curious what you're doing on an SBC that explicitly requires x86, though? I can't really think of anything you'd use an SBC for that wouldn't be workable on ARM unless you need some specific piece of compute-intensive (and therefore not practical to run via QEMU or something), proprietary software—perhaps full fat virtualization of something maybe preventing a docker-like alternative?
  
  It is part convience and part necessity. My entire infrastructure is currently x86 and introducing ARM into it seems like a hassle, if i develop and test software on my x86 based workstation i expect it to just work then, not having to deal with either compiling to ARM or using emulation. Also part of this that currently everything I use runs Arch, which only officially supports x86.
  Which brings us to necessity, my software currently runs with manually written simd instructions. Ofcourse I can write ARM NEON polyfills for these, but again that takes a lot of work.
  So while not impossible to use ARM it currently is a lot of work to use. I'm gonna save that time for when the big riscv migration comes.
  
  Which brings us to necessity, my software currently runs with manually written simd instructions. Ofcourse I can write ARM NEON polyfills for these, but again that takes a lot of work.
  Using the word "polyfill" to describe that is making my eye twitch, so thanks for that!
  
  There IS a European (as in designed in geographical Europe) CPU that's binary compatible with x86 and even can run Windows: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S
  
  Due to this, there is basically no chance there will ever be an x86 CPU manufactured in the EU, I’m afraid.
  They're mostly manufactured in Taiwan anyway...
  
  American components, Russian components, All made in Taiwan!!!
  
  China has entered the chat.
  
  I'm curious what you're doing on an SBC that explicitly requires x86, though?
  Not parent, but I used ARM SBCs for a bit, and while it was nice, my x86 experience with a nuc has been much, much better. HW acceleration works on some RPIs, and sort of worked on my Orange Pi 5+, but only when using an ancient kernel which had some hacks (like, kernel debug messages saying "DISABLE THIS FOR RELEASE!"). And afaik RPI 5 doesn't support hw encoding (not to mention no SSD support).
  Basically, my experience was that the hardware was neat if sometimes limited, the energy consumption was great, but the software/kernel support...ugh. YMMV of course.
- Only thing that comes to my mind are old Fujitsu-Siemens workstations, their mainboards were assembled in Germany (Augsburg afaik). But those times are gone now.

36 comments