PC Engines winding up

ARM isn't their business and flipping to it (which would essentially be moving to a new platform standard like ARM's SystemReady) would be a lot of work, so that's understandable.
 
Modern SOC have become increasingly complex. I wonder what effect that had on a small shop.
Did Pascal design the gear in-house or what is the history over there?

Soekris was their competition and they folded years back.
 
Whom ever made their boards also deserves kudos.
They had good design but their manufacturer had to have good quality control as well for success.
I am guessing made in Tiawan?
 
for a home/small office appliance most of the stuff will do
the cheap ass asus/tplink/whatever routers run for years without problems
they run out of support before the hardware gives up the ghost
i also had pretty generic PC hardware run for years without failure
i still have a generic beige box running 24/24 since 2016 or 2015
 
The generic beige box from 2015 is not small. I would even guess that it's not power efficient compared to these devices. They have a specific purpose. Also, if you need a new one, what are you gonna do?
 
3 Full Sized Mini-PCIe slots. You just don't find embedded boards with those kinda expansion options.
Usually 2 full and one half slot is the most you will find.
 
Man... This is a real loss. I owned & operated over a dozen of these over the years. Currently I have three in service. My experiences with the APU boards were extremely positive.
 
I have bought a few cheap OEM versions of the APU1 off ebay through the years.

Star2Star Starlite
SimpleWAN
Nextiva Clarity
 
That's really a shame. They have a comment on their page to say they weren't getting sufficient engineering support from intel and amd. Haven't used their stuff but have heard good reports from others.
 
Phishfry said:
Soekris was their competition and they folded years back.
Click to expand...

Yes, I've got a few of those gathering dust. Looked at PC Engines as a replacement at the time but Supermicro easier for me to get (not exactly the same type of system, but easier to get my hands on at the time.)

Think Soekris also got hit by the dying machines issue with the net6501 (I can't recall the details) - certainly one of mine died.

So it's sad to see another option closing up shop.
 
I found the statement about low power CPU options weird. There are still plenty of cpuz running fanless.
E3930 would have been a good choice or Ryzen embedded.

Intel seems to have their pet companies that roll out stuff for them.
Reference designs and they work closely with them. Minnowboard comes to mind.
Intel pet project pushed to ADI. I could list many more.
Wonder where the term SD-WAN comes from? They invented the 'market'. Crappy middleware boxes.

They have to be on the edge trying designs but Xscale was dumped right before it would have been useful.
They fumbled on the phone cpu market. Badly. I don't get their strategy. Buying Altera because AMD bought Xilinx?
You can't buy your way out of stupid situations you put yourself into.
 
msplsh said:
Weirdly, somebody on mastodon recently posted this. Pretty cheap, not as DIY (which I liked)

store.minisforum.com

Minisforum UM480XT/UM590

Venus Series UM690
store.minisforum.com store.minisforum.com
Click to expand...
I don't see how that is comparable to the PC-engines APU by any means.
APU has multiple NICs, multiple PCIe-Mini slots, ECC RAM, support for a SIM card, passive cooling...

This one just appears to be a regular small form-factor desktop PC.
 
Intel versions have dual 2.5gb, but are more expensive.

There's nothing comparable, that's why people are all ? about it. I found it interesting by having a similar price point and noticed it also needs 19v and not 12v and required a fan. If that's what low power AMD chips need then the components market has doomed anything like PCEngines.

Here's some PCIe slots but no ethernet. Again with the fan. https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-3-delta
 
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