I Bought an N100 Mini PC, Then Another

Summary

I have bought dozens of Raspberry Pis over the years, but I'm now turning to the Mini PC for R&D work. The Intel N100 is a low-power processor with 4 Cores and 4 Threads with a Max. Turbo Frequency of 3.4GHz. It can usually be paired with up to 32GB of RAM (despite saying 16GB on the spec sheet) and an NVMe SSD. They've been popularised through retailers like Amazon, and AliExpress as "fanless routers" coming with 2-5 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports. The usual virtualisation extensions are supported so you'll see /dev/kvm appear under Linux, which means it can be used with Firecracker and KVM. Two N100s running two different K3s clusters, each loaded up with different versions of OpenFaaS. Why not buy another Raspberry Pi? With recent developments, a Raspberry Pi 5 can now be bought with 16GB of RAM, and an official HAT with fittings for various types of NVMe SSDs. Compared to the previous generation, I found a 3x speed increase in my testing from Geekbench through to compiling a Linux Kernel in Firecracker and GitHub Actions via actuated. Sounds good? Yes a marked improvement, but still heavily bottlenecked on I/O, cooling solution (to prevent thermal throttling), and once all the various accessories, and adapters have been purchased, our costs are well approaching 200 GBP. Not to mention its non-standard size for its HDMI port makes finding the right cable a constant challenge. Prices including postage: Raspberry Pi 5 16GB - 114.90 GBP, Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply - 11.40 GBP, Argon ONE V3 M.2 NVME PCIE Case - 46 GBP, 32GB SD Card for initial installation - 8.64 GBP, postage: 5GBP. Total: 185.94 GBP. Add a 1TB drive - Crucial P3 Plus SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe - 64.99. Total with 1TB storage: 250.93 GBP. Compared to the latest Ryzen processor, the N100 is no Usain Bolt - but it does come with native support for an NVMe boot drive, support for double the RAM, 4x 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, and full-sized HDMI, and its power brick is included. You can buy it as a bare-bones k...