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Avantek was, until recently, one of the few "price on the public box" options I was aware of in both server and desktop form factors. In desktop form factor there was another recent addition, the AVA Developer Platform, with a range of Altra SKUs. But it's very expensive just like the Avantek one[1]. In general Ampere is the only real competitor in this space anymore it seems, and they're only focusing on major buyers. At this point you'd think the higher volume would offset some costs and it would trickle down to us, but not really. If I'm being completely honest: unless your opposition to Apple machines is purely political or whatever (which is whatever, do your thing), your best bet is probably just to buy an M1 Mac Mini, install Asahi Linux on it, and run it headless. You can get some aftermarket rackmount kits that can bundle 1-2 Minis, even, if you actually have racks. The performance/watt/$-spent is simply much better all around due to the massive economies of scale and consumer focus and it's a very modern ARMv8.something machine. All of the competitors are simply much slower in raw performance, have buggier hardware/firmware (often both), and run much more expensive when that isn't the case. Hell, even if you bought the Mac Studio and just ran Linux on it, it would probably still be reasonably price competitive, all things considered, even with like half the chip currently non-functional (GPU, NPU, etc). The hardware really is pretty good. At this point I'm waiting for their ARMv9 chips to start rolling out before jumping on the Linux train. Maybe they'll do a Mac Studio refresh in a year or two from now... [1] https://www.ipi.wiki/pages/com-hpc-altra |
I agree. Especially on residential power it may be worth looking at the power consumption.
The base M1 mini starts to become really cheap used too.