ARM yourselves! The Compute Blade is here.

[@skaltura]

As a datacenter operator -> This blade format is amazing, we are getting close to commercial viability to offer RPis as dedis.

[@MErocle]

it looks like the world needs more Raspberry Pi CM4s

[@Dreacon34]

Why would you want to host a RPi as dedis when buying and running by yourself will be cheaper compared to the overhead costs of a data center. If it’s only about ARM you could use gigabyte ampere server to get the result . We are talking of 100$ max for the pi and fractions in electricity bills even in Europe

[@ganon4]

Ivan is a model for me. He shares A LOT on twitter and I hope he gets a lot of backers not only because he is a nice guy but because it's worth it too :)

[@MErocle]

Thank you very much! You make me blush 😊

[@pherd-0884]

I've been eagerly awaiting hearing about this again. Also, feels good to see Jeff back at home healthy making videos. Good to have you back my guy.

[@JeffGeerling]

It's good to be back!

[@dom1310df]

I adapted Ivan's 3D printable Raspberry Pi cluster for my mini 3-Pi CI cluster. I'm pleased he still innovating in the field. This one looks sweet.

[@JeffGeerling]

Ivan's shared some excellent designs. I love all the new concepts he comes up with!

[@MErocle]

@@JeffGeerling Thank you!

[@MErocle]

Thanks! I have more to share. A few articles are in drafts. One day I'll be sure to do that ...

[@gearboxworks]

Hey Jeff - Aside from the whiz-bang factor, I am trying to understand the real-world benefit of this over a single box running a hypervisor for VMs. I am sure there are significant benefits - I can’t imagine so many people would spend more money on Pi clusters when a larger single box would be cheaper - but I just don’t yet recognize what those benefits are. Maybe they would be a great in-depth topic for another video?

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Love the thumbnail 😁 And yes, the Compute Blades are really cool, makes me wish I had a use case for them

[@MErocle]

Jeff has put quite a lot of effort into making this lovely picture. A lot of respect!

[@adfaklsdjf]

I figured out the "Blade II" reference, but how does the cyberpunk cityscape and text work into it? Is that also a Blade thing?

[@hackerx7329]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. A rack of these (or something like them) would be fantastic in a classroom. Each student gets access to their own over the network and any work they do on it lives in isolation from the others.

[@headbanger1428]

OK, but what’s the benefit as opposed to a VM. The students would be remote from the rack anyway, so it’s not like they need hardware access. VM sounds like an ideal solution.

[@hackerx7329]

@@headbanger1428 Well, depending on the VM hosts used this certainly could be more power efficient. If your VM host went down either due to any kind of software or hardware issue you could have a bunch of students or even a whole classroom down until it can be repaired or another swapped in. If one blade goes down then only the student it is assigned to is impacted. If If you have the racks of these isolated and accessible in each classroom then even an untrained substitute teacher could reset the one labeled for a student if needed vs having to call IT or submitting a support ticket for a VM issue. And all of that is ignoring the fact that there will ALWAYS be students that try to push boundaries and find ways to break things. With individual small computers you don't have to worry about stuff breaking the VM host and impacting other students either with some weird edge case scenario or an intentionally crafted attack the kid read about somewhere online. I was thinking especially for students learning stuff like programming rather than general classroom use for learning other stuff like English or math.

[@headbanger1428]

@@hackerx7329 Thanks. You’ve made some solid points.

[@ZaneBlalock]

24 Seconds in and I'm reminded to why I freaking love Jeff 😂 - comedy, wholesomeness, tech, and genuineness. Jeff, you're the whole package man! Much love!

[@MyAmazingUsername]

What a nice comment. You're awesome, Zane!

[@alexk4894]

This module definitely looks like a new blade standard. Fantastic!

[@JeffGeerling]

One other form factor that could make sense is to have two or three CM4s per blade, with a rear-mounted backplane that has a fan, network switch, and power routing to each Pi. That could triple the density, giving 240 cores in 1U!

[@oceania68]

@@JeffGeerling Hope you're giving Ivan those Ideas for future reference 😉

[@MErocle]

@@oceania68 let's wait for CM5 :)

[@judsonleach5248]

"Jeff's On!" - And it's not even my birthday!!! 🙂 - Cheers! - Judson & Buddy !!!

[@AzureFlash]

While you were out at the gym in pursuit of vanity, I computed the blade

[@matheuswohl]

thumbnail/title game is good

[@Daggenthal]

LMAO What the hell is that thumbnail?! Hahaha, 10/10 on it bro I love it so much. Edit: Oh my gosh, it just hit me that you mocked it over Blade from the movies, aptly named Blade

[@jmsiener]

This is the greatest thumbnail ever. I wonder what his fam thought of that photo?!?

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha my sister said instant 10/10 too. My wife was like 'you look like that guy from the Matrix' (she's not as much into cyberpunk/anime/etc. lol).

[@Daggenthal]

@@JeffGeerling Hahaha that’s great bro, thanks for doing it that way! I always look forward to seeing your videos whenever you post them :D

[@adfaklsdjf]

I figured out the "Blade II" reference, but how does the cyberpunk cityscape and text work into it? Is that also a Blade thing?

[@ScandinavianHeretic]

Man, these things are just so cool. I have this wet dream on using cephfs and docker swarm on these to create my own cloud for my gaming community / close friends so that we can finally have a proper shared platform where we can hang out and help each other with things in life. So cool...

[@moltenwood]

Wesley Snipes just turned in his grave...

[@unlucky1307]

These look like a ton of fun for a home lab if the CM availability improves like we're hoping. Even with the relatively high cost it seems like a great way to learn and play around with a lot of concepts.

[@rrm4395]

Ivan is the reason there are no raspberry pi 4 compute modules in stock 😂

[@haplopeart]

Unfortuately Eben Upton himself is the real reason.

[@dafoex]

@haplopeart That, and the fact we rely on a global supply chain that's easily crippled, and has suffered three such crippling disruptions in recent years (namely the Ever Given blocking the Suez, The Varus™, and now the Russia/Ukraine crisis).

[@vaz2k9]

Glad your well after the op matey

[@JeffGeerling]

Doing so much better now! Still not 100% but I'm feeling better now than I have in months!

[@benjaminfrohns]

Nice thumbnail :-) Cool product, even if it's not for me.

[@jceggbert5]

That physical security on the TPM is amazing

[@paullee107]

The thumbnail - I just can’t…. Lol - awesome video, thanks for the info!!

[@marcogenovesi8570]

I would not worry that much about the heatsink machining, those seem to be die castings (note the rough surface everywhere, if they were machined they would be smooth) so it's probably affordable enough for mass production.

[@JeffGeerling]

Ah, could be! We'll have to see how Ivan goes about making them. Probably would be a stretch goal item on Kickstarter, since other heatsinks work perfectly fine too... they just don't look so svelte.

[@concinnus]

The masking and anodizing adds some cost but it's just for looks and could be omitted. Well, maybe anodizing avoids shorts but a plastic sheet could do that.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

With so many blades, this video is sharp!

[@paultruzzi911]

I watched this yesterday. But I just noticed the thumbnail for the video. Looks GREAT!

[@michaelreed9048]

So happy you seem to be bouncing back well! AND of course for pairing up with Ivan to get even more news about this amazing #ComputeBlade out to the masses! As always, thanks so much for what you do - and can't WAIT to get me some of these!!!

[@concinnus]

The heatsink looks really easy to make, actually. Not machined at all, just as-cast, masked, and anodized, with thermal pads rather than paste to accommodate the roughness. The clones' incompatibility with the heatsink is another strike against them.

[@JeffGeerling]

Didn't think of that, it could be easier that way! I just immediately thought it was meticulously machined :P

[@StevenIngram]

These blade modules remind of "isolinear chips" on Star Trek: TNG. They were smaller than these, but the shape is very similar. :)

[@TechnoTim]

Great video Jeff! I've been following Ivan's journey on Twitter and this video brings it all together!

[@zackkoukios8123]

Feels good to see Jeff back and feeling good enough for some honest to goodness ninja turtles action

[@JeffGeerling]

I am still sore... :D But feeling so much better than I have in half a year!

[@PetrolHead6901]

Very nice thumbnail hehe. Trying to get a pi zero w 1 so I can have it auto inject PS4 Hen 9.00 without me having to get up and put a usb in it after every start up. Unfortunately, chip production not go brrrrrr until Q2 or something

[@polarfamily6222]

Things just keep getting better!

[@fracturedrealitygaming1326]

I literally only clicked into the video because the thumbnail looked like Cyberpunk FPSRussia, and thought I was gonna see some of the coolest shit ever. I was not let down

[@JeffGeerling]

Hahaha nice. "Hello friends, today we have Compute Blade!"

[@SeanHodgins]

This looks awesome. I shelved a blade style project awhile back because of these, so Ill have a pick a couple up. I have 5 CM4s that have been sitting in a drawer for a few years just waiting to be used.

[@JeffGeerling]

These things would be right up your alley. And I was definitely thinking 'if I paired this thumbnail with the SH style, that would make for a nice viral video' :P

[@Copter64]

Glad to see a new video from you Jeff, hope the tummy is treating you well.

[@JeffGeerling]

Pretty well! Not 100% but getting there day by day! Already better than most of last year.

[@HardwareHaven]

Your thumbnail game is insane... haha Great video as well! Can't wait to see what all you do with these while I struggle to keep up with what's going on 😂

[@KWifler]

JEFF I recently saw a fan on a chip! Solid state no moving parts semiconductor based fan! Coming out in products near the end of '23.

[@bigwendigo2253]

This is an insane project D: also as someone who has taken CNC programming classes and am almost done, as long as you have the model right, it wouldn’t be too hard to machine at all. I saw another user mention it’s probably casted from a mold. That would probably help with the cost quite a bit.

[@HowdyFolksGaming]

The thumbnail is glorious

[@rightwingsafetysquad9872]

Cool. The only "improvement" I would make is to offer a version of the chassis specifically designed for 2U, keep the blades the exact same, but stack them 2 high. That way you can use a single fan 4 times the size of those ones - more airflow and quieter. I'm not sure what the extent of the market for such a solution is, but just knowing it exists is cool.

[@Jianju69]

Those heat sinks would be easy to machine: The workpiece mounts on a jig with four posts through the mounting holes. Run program 1, flip, run program 2, done.

[@Stopinvadingmyhardware]

Agreed on the Pine ecosystem. They’re doing some great cutting edge stuff, but there’s quite a learning curve there.

[@seguramlk]

Nice. I watched Explaining Computers' video yesterday and I gotta say Rock Pi 4's performance is quite impressive for an SBC

[@JeffGeerling]

Explaining Computers just did a good video on the Orange Pi 5 too... I have one and have been just starting to test it.

[@seguramlk]

@@JeffGeerlingYeah, sorry. It was about the Orange Pi actually. But the Rock Pi is good too. Nice Man. I'll watch it. Keep it up 👍

[@thewiirocks]

@@JeffGeerling Love to see your take on it. I have an Orange Pi 5 board with 16GB and so far it seems to be the ideal RPi4 replacement on the high end. It’s rigged a bit more for server use with the lack of Wi-fi and Bluetooth. However, I’ve had no issues with USB dongles. In fact, the software eco system is surprisingly good for a launch product. Not to mention the thermals, given how usable the board is without a fan.

[@4X4NAV]

I came because of the thumbnail. A++ work my friend. Video was good too.

[@Dayton_X]

Best thumbnail ever

[@solarisfire]

The lack of compute module stock (Rasp Pi or otherwise, they're all having stock issues) will seriously stunt sales for stuff like this... I'd love a set of 4 with some 8GB Rpi4s :(

[@JeffGeerling]

My hope is maybe by the time these start shipping (I'd say at least a couple months), CM4s will start trickling back into the retail channel. Pi 4s are already picking up steam a little, and I see 3 B+'s too, but haven't seen CM4s yet :(

[@MrTrilbe]

@@JeffGeerling if the this picks up traction in industry or smaller scale enterprise CM4's may disappear from the consumer market again, which is great for the RasPi Foundation financially, but it will seriously hurt their PR with the rest of us, also having two Greek Lectures at Uni your pronunciation of Kubernetes hurts 😛

[@thewiirocks]

@@MrTrilbe If that happens, I hope some effort is put into supporting alternatives like the Radxa Compute Module. The hardware drought has become rather problematic for those of us who have commercially motivated uses, but aren’t partners with RPi. And it’s becoming a bit of a chicken and egg problem, because you can hardly scale up your testing to the point of needing a commercial partner agreement without hardware availability.

[@solarisfire]

@@JeffGeerling I've seen 4GB Pi 4's trickling... No 8GBs yet. 3B+'s are coming and going rapidly (which I find interesting if they're using manufacturing capacity to get 3's out the door but can't make enough 4's). But yeah, no CM4s this year at all yet.

[@MrTrilbe]

@@thewiirocks well push for that support, work with your commercial interests to build that support for alternatives, "Build it and they will come" and all that jazz, be the relief that you want, but don't become a part of the problem and leave some units for us poor plebs 😝 because as much as i want enterprise grade gear for some projects I can't afford it, power be expensive ATM

[@der.Schtefan]

Getting data from RAM or a TPM chip with a physical attack usually involves flooding the computer you're attacking with liquid nitrogen, then unplugging, and quickly placing electrodes or putting the ram into a specialised reader. Law enforcement does it quite often this way when they raid houses.

[@UCm0i6w5lBlRthCtZEoj99tg]

Protip: if you want CM4s for your Uptime Labs Blades go back in time to the first day the project was announced, order 5 of them, and they will arrive last week 😈

[@dafoex]

Let me clean the TARDIS out and see what I can do

[@helmutzollner5496]

Interesting! Good to see you back and at work. Looks like you recovered ok from surgery. I hope it gave you a break! Good Luck!

[@qm3ster]

And I was of course desperately waiting for this!

[@Rennu_the_linux_guy]

that thumbnail is so good oh mah gawd. also I love watching these so much, I can't wait till I'm moved out and have my own router so I can set up a pi-hole

[@ShooterQ]

This is your best thumbnail yet

[@RogierYou]

Glad to see you have the energy and ability to jump around 👍

[@JeffGeerling]

Barely, at this point... but barely is a lot better than I have felt for the past 6 months!

[@linuswulff03]

I don't need an ARM server, but damn does the blade look hot!

[@JoseOrtiz-pc6mg]

Jeff, thank you for sharing such useful information; I usually keep up with your videos to learn about all the latest Pi info. You rock!

[@johnsonlam]

Thanks for the pre-recorded video, wish you recovery going smooth and back in a better shape.

[@sbstndltn]

Hilarious that I just asked you about the RK3588 CM5.

[@JeffGeerling]

Hehe exactly. So many times I see something and I'm like... oh just wait, I talk about that in my next video! Well, the CM5 not yet-hoping to hear from Radxa soon on it. But I will be reviewing the Rock 5 B (and a little Orange Pi 5) soon!

[@nated4wgy]

Good to see you back at videos man! I can see that classic Crohnie fatigue look on your face though. Make sure you are looking after yourself still bud. Remember we can wait for videos! Go at your own pace. Don’t try to beat the algorithm. Love the work. ❤

[@eltreum1]

Awesome news. I was following his blog and it looked like he was going to shelf it and do something else and forgot about them. I definitely want some of those if they make production. If I was better at circuit design and had time: I always wanted a backplane built that each pi blade socket has power and ethernet. The power, cooling, and ethernet are ran by a chassis controller MCU blade with a backup of course. The CM4 cluster boards you showed do what I want but want it as a chassis with hot swap slots for lots of blades. I work in telco so I am thinking in those design. Every cell tower today needs a shelf of compute and networking blades inside to run it. The scalable power of ARM may be an interesting way to get compute with better power efficiency in our ever-growing concerns of energy consumption.

[@LeafInTea]

Only Jeff can make these arm puns

[@JeffGeerling]

💪

[@radscientist]

Awesome! I think I might have to work a miracle so I can get a dev board. Good to see you're feeling better. Hope everything is healing and going well.

[@tobit6890]

yo dawg, that thumbnail was gold, again

[@TheBodgerIsGreat]

That may or may not be the best title ever.

[@JamesAChambers]

Ugh, the SoQuartz, boy oh boy. That one was a fun one to get working. Armbian is the only one that worked for me at all. It's too bad it's not picking up the Blade's WiFi. Pine64 has their own Blade which I suspect would work a lot better with it. There is apparently a SoQuartz-Blade official board. I should probably pick up the official SoQuartz Blade board and see how that works with it. I've never tried Pine64's actual boards meant to be used with their modules and maybe that's a better experience. It looks like the official Pine64 blade is only $30. I'll try giving one a go. Funny enough the official version of Pine64's blade doesn't have WiFi at all. None. I guess that's one way to deal with the WiFi issues (just remove it from the board!). Thanks for continuing to investigate and be open to alternatives. There's nothing wrong with your criticisms of Pine64's images and ecosystem. I share them for sure. I don't understand why in this moment they don't have a much higher focus on their software/image support with the Pi supply being what it is. What a waste! Thanks as always for your coverage Jeff, take care!

[@JeffGeerling]

Thank you so much for your blog posts too. So many times I'm doing some research and then BOOM, there's a James Chambers post again :D Also, I had a question about PiBenchmarks - is there a command line flag I could pass or something to have the script run on the non-boot drive (e.g. pass it /dev/sda or something)?

[@JamesAChambers]

@@JeffGeerling Great question! It does support that by passing it an argument. I have to be careful not to set off the Google spam filter here but I'm sure you'll be able to adapt it here: curl -o Storage.sh thepibenchmarksurlfromgithub chmod +x Storage.sh james@pop-os:~$ sudo ./Storage.sh /media/james/0019-66CA Chosen partition (/media/james/0019-66CA) has been detected as /dev/sda1 (sda1) Here I used my mountpoint for the test. Sometimes you can use /dev/sda1 directly but if you use a mountpoint (mine was automounted as /media/james/0019-66CA) it should go through without any permissions errors. I'd love to keep doing more with the tool! Recently I've been trying out the ChatGPT craze and trying to have it write an Android application for me for Pi Benchmarks because I don't have time or the money to pay someone to make it. Surprisingly that's actually kind of working. It doesn't work well enough that I can say "Make an app for pibenchmarks.com" and it will spit out a zip file or anything like that. It does model and explain the whole application though and that has been enough to help! Thanks for taking that benchmark! I did see your benchmark on there since it was a totally new model and nobody had tested the SoQuartz on the Blade IO board before. I kind of just add new models as they appear which works well being a small-medium size blog but if the benchmark was more popular (especially among PC users) I would probably spend literally every waking moment adding every model of PC that exists. Pi Benchmarks could probably only exist in the SBC world for me to have any way to keep up with all the models of drives and SBCs. The benchmark is open source and also has an API! You can take any URL from pibenchmarks and simply add /api/ in front of any URL on the site and you'll get the raw JSON data for it (such as pibenchmarks/api/latest). Hopefully nothing I typed here displeased the Google spam filters. Hopefully that helps and take care!

[@JeffGeerling]

@@JamesAChambers That is excellent! I just did some testing and it seems to work great, thank you again for such a nice service to the SBC community!

[@ShadowOfNocturne]

I have been looking forward to these for so long!!! I am ready to back 16 Dev Boards!

[@ahmad-murery]

Although this is beyond my ability to understand but it looks so satisfying, Thanks Jeff

[@BartDTech]

I really dig that thumbnail.

[@the_retag]

that fancy fan board is cool

[@chaoslab]

Welcome ye wearing traveler to the Inn, The Jeffs ARM's.

[@Chris.Wiley.]

Man, those things are slicker than snot on a doorknob!

[@RaidOwl]

Raspberry PI Clone: Check out our board, its faster, cheaper and in stock! Me: Cool, but does it work? Raspberry PI Clone: its in stock!

[@bluegizmo1983]

CM4s are not coming back in stock for single unit sales anytime soon! The Raspberry Pi newsletter at the end of December even said so. They said stock will slowly start to recover throughout 2023, but that almost all the chips are already spoken for by commercial customer that use them for integrated products, and that single unit sales for us people is still a long way off, and that when single unit sales start to recover it will first be with the Pi Zero's, the Pi 3A+, then finally various forms of the Pi 4's with the CM4s being the very last products to recover on the single unit sales market, probably well into 2024, assuming no other supply chain or chip shortages occur.

[@binaryguru]

Those heatsinks are easy to machine. The entire part can be done on a mill in two operations. Because it is small, you can put multipul peices of stock in one machine, only limited by the machine size. Aluminium can be machined at very high speeds. Probably take under a minute per operation on a mondern machine.

[@dmacpher]

I’m currently trying to ice skate up hill

[@rsisente]

We have come full circle. Blades have been around since the 80's LOL

[@sagarchandarana8592]

Acknowledging the effort put into the thumbnail 👌

[@benjaminmosnier]

Took me a minute to see the reference to Blade in the thumbnail... Wesley Snipes would be proud ;)

[@paulwratt]

Nice to see _Black Shirt Matrox Jeff_ putting in an appearance on the thumb-nail ( "nailed it" - _Red Shirt Jeff_ , while using a NG without single shot safety {insert Q1 NG sound effects} )

[@scowler_de]

A video an monday from you and the week is saved :)

[@gianpietroprevitali7103]

Amazing work and progress from the early design. Totally interested.. looking forward to have a chance to have them ...

[@jonahollstein]

Just came to say that this is the worst and best thumbnail and title combo I’ve seen in a while. Well done man

[@WackyT08]

LOL! I love the state of IT the past couple years! First it was video cards being bought up by miners, now RPis are nonexistent with all these 3rd party projects available. Think I'll just sit out all this, and watch.

[@RoadRunnerMeep]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="148">2:28</a> - that's impressive thinking

[@johnh1353]

can only imagine how awkward it was to taking the pic for the thumbnail X-D ... at least it's not the "smile like a donut" pose

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, I will say one thing. Sword-wielding poses might look interesting, but they are a pain and would not serve you well in a fight!

[@CaptZenPetabyte]

Good to see you back on your feet and looking healthy bro, keep up the good work. As for the Blade ... #wishlist!

[@matter9]

The “nightmare” heat sink looks stupidly simple to mfg. Get extrusion for fin profile, cut blanks, load in cnc mill, drill & counterbore, flip, profile & pocket. Tumble, anodize, done.

[@JeffGeerling]

I should've been more specific-nightmare to do so in large quantities while keeping cost down. Every step (a flip, two jigs, etc.) would add cost. But maybe not too bad. Looks like there's a chance Ivan will make them!

[@lukehebb]

This is one of very very few kickstarters I'll actually consider entirely because of who is behind it. Ivan is great and I love the team at JetBrains. This looks amazing, but we've all seen kickstarters that promise the world. This is actually real and done by someone who has a positive reputation

[@jing9202]

I should order 64 of those and then I will have...arm64. Also eight x octopi.

[@JeffGeerling]

Ah... good idea! Let me sell my car to afford it haha

[@blablamannetje]

What a great product, what a great video!

[@Joshinken]

Nice

[@thewiirocks]

I want Been waiting SO LONG for a product like this!

[@trunksviper6583]

is good to see you back in the basement, this blade pi looks pretty cool

[@kickskii]

That thumbnail reminds me of smosh from 8 years ago man those were the good days

[@bennyfactor]

Geerleo took the RasPill and is jacked into the Bladetrix in that title card. Something something 2040rpheus

[@tonysheerness2427]

The more raspberry pi's made the more the demand. A never ending circle.

[@syriangamer89]

I clicked this video for the thumbnail alone 😂

[@jayare7750]

“Until next time, my name is Jeff”

[@gunawan6955]

The cover video is amazing 🤣

[@carlosfelix4057]

I want to buy one just to kick the tires! Thanks Jeff. I have the BigTreeTech combo and while it hasn’t delivered the results I was hoping for it has been a good test of how low I can go for the use case I have on a Pi.

[@broccoloodle]

Ready to order these once online

[@superangrybrit]

The compute blades are the closest thing that what I need in CM4 carrier board. They're fully featured. And I can't wait to get my hands on them. /chef's kiss

[@mastermoarman]

This would be cool if there was a x86 compute module