Khadas VIM4 - Powerful Mobile Setup with iPad Pro 

WHEN ? :-) There is definately a need for an Raspberry 4 8G alternative! If it is faster, I even pay the price if it is more expensive. The Rasp costs almost the same as the VIM4 right now... :-(

Are u able to use a wired vnc connection between a regular windows mini pc and iPad?

Soon is a relative term :)

Thanks for your kind words. I hope to make 'no filler' an integral part of my brand as a creator.

@@tech_craft i like the sound of that, subscribed!

I heartily second this.

Fair points all around. YT is getting more and more competitive - thumbnail is everything these days!

I personally like to have a single board computer just as "Machine learning code" chipset.

Just tried to power the vim4 straight from the ipad ( pro 11 usbc ) and it works, however getting the usbc to work as eth is another story

@@giuseppesaldisato276 I think any iPad Pro with thunderbolt port can provide enough power to power this board. Getting the usb c to work tho, even if it works like the pi4, I doubt it'd be practical as it only runs at usb 2 speed.

And it almost certainly won’t hit even close 1 gbit, max is realistically 325kb/s

@@giuseppesaldisato276 you can do it in the pi- search a video o setting up pi with zeroconf on iPad - that video happens to cover eth over usb which I didn’t know how to do, there were several steps

@@altimmons It has to support USB OTG. I doubt that’s a thing on a USB 2 port even tho it’s using the type C port

I heard back from Khadas how to get it up and running on Ubuntu too - makes we wonder if this could be used for a little screencasting setup with OBS.

Sure thing. I’ll do my best to get hold of a few more.

Thank you very much for replying! I think an x86/64 cpu alternative would be quite interesting to take a look at. Wish you all the best!

Good idea - I always gravitate towards ARM, but I'll pick up something x86 as well

The power situation is a shame. I know plenty of people are using external power even with the Pi4 (through a hub or something), but having the iPad battery as a fallback is always nice. I will see how the fan does in my origrid too. The performance is noticeably better, but whether it's worth cons I'll have to use it for longer to really see.

@@tech_craft Did you get your Origrid yet? I’ve been waiting to see it pop-up in a video.

Yeah, it's never not worked for me - how odd. I use that feature a lot. Maybe drop a line to Khadas support?

Fair points. I'm still using a bunch of Pi3s for similar use cases to you. I'm gathering a few other SBCs to try out and share on the channel.

Would be interesting to see usage case and experience with nvidia jetson sbc’s. I am aware this is for CS and AI tasks and I am so far from this. Wonder what can be achieved with this snd how can it be used.

From my reading of the Khadas forums this is fully supported.

Yea what’s going on with that? Why can’t we get those in stock

@@altimmons because of so called "supply shortages" which meant to be the case.

Not a competition for Pi as price is mad for it.

Good lord- you’d be bankrupt. These cards cost too much.

​@@altimmons Yeah they really expenseive for a SBC. Although wattage could be a factor for many use cases maybe. For example Raspberry Pi 4 at full blast (4 cores) assuming with some cooling is around 6-7 watts. The Khadas VIM4 based on its a 8 core SOC will likely sit at around 18-20 watts, though it could be lower (or more depending on the m.2 but not by a big margin) If you had 4-5 of these that's 32 to 40 cores, that use around 120 to 150 watts? (I'm not an electical engineer so my math could be inaccurate) Comparing this to maybe an Intel Xeon from many years ago like a E5-2690 v3, which has 12 cores and 24 threads (with a much higher clock speed), its probably idle around 100 watts, but that doesn't include cooling consumption and motherboard. Most Xeons are in dual configuration, meaning to get even close to "40 cores", the amount of power usage for 100% usage would be over 300 watts! The problem with the Raspbery Pi doing clusters is the current SOC the ARM Cortex-A72 is many years old, and one reason I haven't purchased any Pi 4s, they are not worth the price for performance for clustered tasks (as well as finding them is not easy so...) This SBC is neat, expensive... but could have its use cases.

@@importprogram you are certainly right about the power usage- I have an old Xeon , 32 cores total, 256 gb of ram and more than 30 hard drives on it - but the heat it puts out is incredible. Now a SBC couldn’t provide all those services, It could provides some. But YMMV certainly- just because this has a NVMe it WILL NOT hit nvme speeds, the 1 gb Ethernet will not hit 1 GB and the AX Wi-Fi won’t go beyond probably 30-50 Mbs, maybe 100 on the one that has a dedicated chip. So it can be a low power server for many things, home assistant, a Slow web server, etc But we should not ignore that a SBC having modern interfaces will allow it to use box speeds. Especially if you add a desktop in here. 70% of the clocks will go to the desktop. There’s lots of people who advertise these SBCs as being a Jack of all trades - Jeff Geerling especially, but the spec and actual are very often fantastically overly optimistic. I have more than 30 SBCs of at least 15 varieties and another dozen microcontroller types- people should be honest of the performance. Now x86 is not an efficient machine, but comparing the listed specs of this board against an Intel Atom or N300 isn’t fair. It actually turns out that most the slow stuff, video decoding, photo decoding, cryptography and any else that’s common and slow, is implemented in hardware in the Intel processor. In Arm , especially the cheaper or slower ones, it is not. Even a modern CPU would be crushed by the requirements if it had to decode all images itself, or do SSL encryption or decompress files to use them, would be beyond unusable. Those are what really make modern CPUs so fast and what makes x86 so complicated. The new ARM chips also have these ASIC or IP domains in their SOC- but the result is that aRM is steadily evolving towards x86, not remaining smaller and leaner. The opcodes are much more sensible, as in MIPS, RISC V etc, because they had the luxury of starting from scratch, so they can say let’s just make each oppose 32 bits and we’ll decode it like this, while Intel has opcodes of a dOzen or more lengths. It’s complicAted. If we were to remove hyper threading on each core the core would be vastly smaller, simpler and power efficient, much more comparable to a modern ARM core. And they know that- see the modern efficiency cores in 12 gen which are one thread each. Anyway tldr all SBC specs are overblown drastically. No spc is sufficient for a “storage” server, that cheap Intel SBCs available at this price (+$200) are probably superior and still low power due to the IP blocks they use on the main products, which arm is getting but still lacks. Look a raspi 4 at $60 - absolutely But at $200 + you are better (much better) off with a used cheap business Dell second hand. I get tired of all the - let’s use 40 Of SBC x to make a super server or super computer. If you made a storage server with a dozen of these boards, it would be dumb as Al, if you spent the money on a low power cpu with real PcIe lanes going to storage or even to SATA it will stomp the SBC. A SBC with say SATA 3 will not max out at 550 Mbs in a SSD. It will max out at 80MBs. It’s why they use EMC and SD cards. SD card might be a bottle neck at 50 Mbs but it’s not a 10:1 bottle next it’s a 30% bottle neck. I do use lots of these for specific purposes but I know how to limit it. If you do want to make it do a lot- absolutely skip the Linux desktop- desktops take a lot of processing

​@@altimmons " get tired of all the - let’s use 40 Of SBC x to make a super server or super computer." .... this could have not been even more spot on, I absolutely dislike this mentality! Also didn't even think about the SATA/NVME speeds, good point, not ideal for storage whatsoever, and as you mention not many are showing the true peformance of these SBCS, which is a shame. Hopefully RISC-V SBC will be the future, but only time will tell.

I'm loving mine. Noticeably faster than the Pi4 but you're definitely paying for that!

I see this isn't your first rodeo 😂

@@tech_craft paid 120 for a 8gb pi, didn't realize they weren't that much originally until it was too late!

The prices now are mad. I don't know if you've seen rpilocator.com/ but you can watch the main vendors for stock updates and hopefully pick up a Pi without getting gouged.

I just bought 4, 3 to scalp on Ebay to recoup the costs… Just kidding, i did buy 2 but i’m keeping both of them

@@msimcox2 seriously tho, if its popular on youtube it'll appreciate faster than any stock

Hi Ken, this setup won’t help with that issue. One option is to connect to your cellphone and use it as an Internet connection.

@@tech_craft I have. Same problem with my phone. If you have any suggestions regarding my situation I would appreciate them.

I haven't had reliable power from the iPad. A few commenters say they have - maybe that's because I'm still on the A12 iPad Pro. The fan isn't particularly loud and the fan control works well so it only spins up at heavy usage times. I've not had any crashes with it for what that's worth.

I haven't really tried. The dual-band WiFi makes for such a nice setup. What issues are you facing? Khadas did tell me of a few possible pitfalls.

@@tech_craft their docs just aren’t great. I’ve got usb0 showing up on the device with an assigns ip but my iPad doesn’t see it as an Ethernet device.

I saw on Explaining Computers that it does fit the case for the VIM3 with some squeezing and a bit of retrofitting. I haven't seen a dedicated VIM4 case yet.

I don't know a great deal about ProxMox but the last time I checked the ARM support wasn't there yet.

@@tech_craft ya you will not get updates through a repo however It's a scripted install that puts the latest ported build onto your ARM64. I only have 8GB so I use it to run container images. Im running 7 ubuntu22.04 containers on it each with their own ip's doing different things. Just wish I had a bit more ram to run more containers..

Good spot! Thanks for taking the time - fixed.

That is annoying. I'll ping Khadas and ask them about the kernel parameter config.

@@tech_craft I asked on the community forums and someone from Khadas responded and never got back to me

@@michaelventarola7100 Hi Michael. Do apologize for the bad experience. Could you please send me the link to your post on Khadas community forum?

@@michaelventarola7100 I think our team already replied today. We were on weekends then : ) And we will always be responding positively to customer messages/posts.

You sure can. The docs have some dedicated sections on using the hardware accelerated encode/decode pipelines. For use cases outside video, I'm not sure how far you can get.

I'm still seeing that at RRP in the UK. Where are you buying from?

@@tech_craft My bad. By "these" I meant these little rigs in general. Raspberry Pis are just insane recently. The only option to get those at RRP is waiting like 6 months for backorders. :')

@@tech_craft I got a Pi4 8GB in the end. Runs very well for my web development needs. Thanks for all your videos! :)

I was, but then I re-read the spec and it has a 1GB. Not sure where I got that from!

Have you seen the upcoming Turing Pi2?

@@tech_craft I have indeed, its on the list for a big project Im doing because I think it will be perfect ... but alas, down here at the bottom of the world things are hard to get and bloody expensive mate.

The price is definitely a kicker. I know a fair number of viewers are using batteries to power their Pis but I do like having the option to fallback to the iPad battery if needed even when using an external battery.

@@tech_craft Thanks mate. I actually code on my M1 iPad 12.9 pro too but after some serious thinking I decided to use it with a cloud hosted server (got a cracking cheap deal at Hetzner). On the pros side it is on 24/7 and I can travel really lite. On the cons side I obviously need to be connected to the internet to use it, but I don't mind as I have a dedicated cheapo 5g sim in it too.

A great option, I've never regretted getting the cellular iPad. What are you running on the server?

@@tech_craft Nothing fancy. It's a minimal Fedora server

Nice. I've been using Fedora a little myself recently and I've really enjoyed it.

A fair point. I ordered a few other cheaper boards and Khadas are also sending me some other cheaper options to test.

For me it's the noticeable speed improvement of eMMC vs SD. As far as reliability goes - I've had another Pi fail on me due to the SD card slot. Granted my units get a lot of use but removable storage is always going to be a failure mode.

Yeah, it's not a cheap setup.

Hopefully they will be back in stock soon!

Pi 8GB is 180 now lol

It wouldn't even start for me when powered from the iPad.