Snapdragon’s Belated Snap 🫰

Everyone’s talking about a certain new ARM-based mini PC this week, but slipping in under the radar is another entrant in the ARM mini PC game that folks have presumably been curious about: A dedicated desktop with Qualcomm guts.

While some dev-oriented machines have floated out there over the past couple of years, those got cancelled, so it’s been a bit of a mystery what it’d be like to have a Qualcomm mini PC out there. Well, until now: the ASUS Ascent QN10 is the first real Qualcomm machine targeted at being a desktop beast. But is it worth your time? Price-wise, the $1,349 machine, sporting an X2 Elite, seems to imply that ASUS is competing with the M5 Pro, though some base-level chip comparisons suggest that it loses on multi-core performance, though not on GPU capabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9sE3SNMP6s

We not-so-secretly want Alex Ziskind’s device budget.

Still, if AI performance is your goal, the 16 gigs in the base model is not going to get you there, so upgrading to 32 gigs will put you at $1,699—creating a 1:1 comparison with the M5 Pro Mac Mini. Worth it? YouTube dev benchmarker Alex Ziskind got his hands on one, and pointed out something notable: On a pure Geekbench level, the machine holds its own with the M4 Pro.

However, the relatively exotic nature of Snapdragon on Windows might bite you. Ziskind found that a Node-based test failed to live up to its snappy processor, but running the same test in Chrome proved more impressive. (Another weird thing: The NPU-driven Qualcomm actually performed faster in AI tasks with its CPU than its GPU. So, there’s that.)

Add in the immature nature of Qualcomm support in Linux and you have kind of a rough combo if you’re trying to use for anything hackery.

So just as it’s been in the laptop world, Snapdragon is still a work in progress for mini PCs.

Love Your Terminal

Need a terminal on the go? Try an old e-reader

This week I’ve been traveling, and when I was on the road I wanted to take a quick gander at my server. I could have used my phone. Instead, I used an old e-reader I’ve been carrying around off and on for the past five years.

The Onyx Boox Nova3 Color, which I reviewed about five years ago on Tedium, is definitely showing its age at this point, but I’ve been able to cull a little more life out of it by making it a mini terminal on the go. Combined with a tethering-capable phone, it can be a decent tool for

One problem: Boox seemed to fight against my desire to install Termux at every turn. So I rooted it, which is pretty simple to do, as the device is not locked. (I have heard rumors to the contrary over the years, but to be clear: Yes, you can jailbreak it.)

I then set it up for a few niceties, including retheming the Termux interface for e-ink use, installing a lightweight e-ink Android launcher, and switching to the CleverKeys keyboard, which is capable of being set up to allow for a terminal-friendly keyboard layout. (It’s also the perfect layout for a six-inch tablet, so there’s that.)

Combined with Tailscale and some of the other terminal tricks I talked about last week, it makes for a lightweight way to, say, manaage an OpenCode instance remotely, or update your Docker containers while you’re riding the bus.

Problem is, not every e-reader is Android-capable—you probably want to lean on devices made by Chinese manufacturers like Boox or Bigme if you want that specific capability. It’s technically possible to install Android on an old Kindle, but it’s not exactly a friendly solution, with many jailbreaks requiring hardware mods. One emerging option: At least some of the uber-popular Xteink devices allow for adding custom firmware, with one known CrossPoint Reader port that adds a terminal, though that might be a little small for running on the fly.

There may be a time when you pick up an e-reader and you load up a terminal instead.

Mini-Links

» A big case of WTF: In a recent firmware update, Raspberry Pi effectively locked out third-party RAM upgrades to its devices, which admittedly might be of interest at the moment thanks to waves hands. Why do such a thing? The ever-level-headed Jeff Geerling notes that it comes down to the fact that Raspberry Pi is being asked to support these soldered monstrosities. “So while yes, I see Raspberry Pi’s point here, on a technical level, probably even a legal one,” he says. “I just don’t like it from a hardware hacking level.”

» Should you even care about PC-based mini PC options now that the M6 Mac Mini is out? A PC World review suggests that the many of the mini PCs of the Intel and AMD world have met their match.

» Trying to retrofit an old automation on an aging mini PC that you want to commit to something else? Try using a VM to isolate the use case, as MakeUseOf’s Gregory Gibson did recently.

Jargon Clarifier

WTF is an NPU?

The ASUS Ascent QN10 mentioned above, sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2, is noted for its fairly speedy neural processing unit (NPU), which works alongside its graphical processing unit (GPU). You might be wondering: Why should I care about a decent NPU?

Long story short: It’s effectively a very specialized portion of a modern processor that can blaze through very specific compute use cases, such as neural networks. As a 2012 research paper created by researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington explained, NPUs expand the areas where neural networks can feasibly be used:

Rather than contributing a new design for neural network implementation, this paper presents a new technique for harnessing hardware neural networks in general-purpose computations. We show that using neural networks to replace regions of imperative code is feasible and profitable by experimenting with a variety of applications, including FFT, gaming, clustering, and vision algorithms. These applications do not belong to the class of modeling and prediction that typically use neural networks. For each application, we identify a single approximable function that dominates the program’s execution time. NPU acceleration provides 2.3x average whole-application speedup and 3.0x average energy savings for these benchmarks with average accuracy greater than 90% in all cases. Continuing work on NPU acceleration will provide a new class of accelerators—with implementation potential in both analog and digital domains—for emerging approximate applications.

While Microsoft helped develop the concept, Apple popularized the concept in mainstream technology, first adding it to its Apple A11 Bionic chip in 2017. If you owned an iPhone 8, you had an NPU in your hand all that time.

NPUs, which also found room in servers thanks to Google’s tensor processing unit setup, only hit mini PCs in the past few years, thanks to the M1 chip and, later, Intel and AMD processors. As AI becomes more of a thing, expect NPUs become a solid option for lower-end mini PCs down the road. The QN10 is sort of an early calling card on that front.

Deal Watch

» Mini PC manufacturers gotta compete with Apple somehow. Minisforum’s play involves creating a new slim model based around the Ryzen 7840HS, eschewing replaceable RAM with 16 gigs you know you’ll be able to afford. It’s currently on discount on the company’s website for $535.

» Looking for a NAS, but tiny? Beelkin’s ME Mini, on sale for $312 with coupon on Amazon, doesn’t have any room for hard drives, but is capable of holding up to 24 terabytes of storage on up to six NVMe drives. Good luck finding 24 terabytes of NVMe drives, though.

» Have a breakaway Dell monitor with USB-C support? You may find this very strange, very specific mini PC on Woot to be worth your time. The Optiplex 7090 hides behind your monitor if you have the right monitor. If not, you’ll spend the rest of your life explaining why it’s shaped that way.

» Speaking of strange mini PCs, some random company made a cyberdeck with an N95 in it. Interesting choice putting the trackpad in the middle.

Mini PCs In History

Mini-ITX gets its glowup, sans fan

Trying to shrink down a mini PC to something small but actually still attractive is a bit of a tall order, as our piece on Tiny Computers highlighted last week.

But some did try, and one of the more interesting brands to do so was the Hush Mini-ITX, which was one of the first purpose-built computers built for that tiny-but-standardized form factor. The product of a company called Hush Technologies, it was not only built to be small, but silent, which was a fairly big deal in 2003.

Silence came with a cost, however. In a review with a similarly branded Tranquil PC unit, PC World noted that these machines were perfectly lightweight home-office machines, but struggled to do anything beyond that:

Despite their low benchmark scores, both machines proved quite capable of han¬ dling Web surfing, e-mail, and office tasks in informal testing. In the living room, each played DVD movies competently, and (working with my own add-in PCI TV tuner card) each successfully captured TV content at VHS quality. On the other hand, when I ripped a CD on them, both silent PCs took about twice as long as my PC (likely due to the limitations of their slim-line optical drives).

If you’re curious how a mini PC like this was marketed and built at the time of its release, This Studio, which helped design the form factor, has a whole page dedicated to the Hush machine on its website, complete with diagrams. It implies something that you might expect given its marketing: This was a mini PC intended for stereo systems.

Want to build a mini-ITX machine with this case? We found one on eBay, surprisingly.

Alright, a month in on this grand Boxed News experiment. Have any ideas? Tell us! And back at it next week.