"One thing that particularly attracts attention is the volume of SoCs that Hardkernel might require. The first batch was only 2,000, so it is unlikely that the second batch would hit 20,000. Meanwhile, Intel does not seem to have spare Gemini Lake SoCs at all, which once again emphasizes the scope of the company’s problems."
Very small order sizes counts against availability. If you're ordering 20,000 (or 200,000) chips, then that's enough that you can schedule a production batch just for that order. For a piddling thousand or two, that means you need to wait for a large enough order (or a large collection of smaller orders) to come in to piggyback that small batch onto, or it does not make sense to shift a line over to that chip - for the little Gemini Lake dies, that's about 4 wafers.
It is not about small volume, it is Intel's prioritising Enterprise and high margin demand over anything else ( As they will be fighting against EPYC 2 ) and their capacity planning as well as 10nm has been behind schedule. These SoC are at the lowest priority.
I would expect the volume of these chips to be low - the chip is basically the modern day Atom chip in designed. I have an older Lenovo IdeaPad 200 and it pretty much useless - part of that maybe only 2G memory - with 4G or 8G on this chip it could be better.
But with just web browsing and email, you really don't need much.
It's the nature of memory channels. The way this board does it the lookup table has to be completely in ram. On a modern dual channel cpu 32GB is theoretical max. You CAN add up to 64GB id it splits each channel, like on a normal atx mobo, but it comes with a performance penalty. As ram standards get faster and faster that penalty is less but still there. It used to matter more as recently as amd piledriver, bulldozer ddr3, and even more with ddr2 etc, but with a 4.5Ghz cpu and ddr4-3000 machine that penalty is meh enough its barely even mentioned. My fancy Laptop has 4 sodimm's so i could use 64GB if i really needed that much but I don't so I went with a lirtle faster 16GBx2 for 32GB and to be honest, with that modern system i was actually morw worried about power draw. Ram has to be on to work so even empty ram draws power, that performance hit didn't really worry me, now if they start selling a ddr4-2800 and up kit.....
market segmentation, they want to sell more expensive chips like the C3000 to those who want more RAM. Been using 16GB on J1900 and N3700 w/o problems for years. Perhaps Intel MBs actually check and disable >8GB in the BIOS, ASrock sure doesn't mind.
Too bad AMD ditched the Temash APUs. They had good performance with low power consumption and with small upgrades and 14nm process they could have been a great alternative to Gemini Lake parts.
So assuming 90% yield, which one would really hope they're at for a 4-year-old process with three major refinements under its belt, they'd be able to get more than enough for a second round of these out of a single wafer. I very much doubt many of these dice bin below the power/clock speed requirements of the J4105 - it's not even the highest bin of Gemini Lake. This speaks quite loudly to just how precarious this shortage is. Sure, Hardkernel is probably WAY down the list of who gets first dibs on wafers, but this is still very much not normal.
The shortage seems to be hitting big-name brands hard too, even in the business/enterprise segments - I've been on a waiting list for a new Dell laptop at work for a couple of months now. They normally have 3-day (or less) delivery (I work at a university with something like 5000 staff, so we buy a lot of PCs), but the Latitude I'm waiting on (with an i7-8650u) keeps getting pushed back, only recently getting a confirmed delivery date at all.
Not sure this delay can be pinned entirely on Intel. It sounds like this company grossly underestimated demand, so they've been caught flat-footed with no 2nd batch orders prepped with their suppliers.
I don't understand how they were able to pair the Celeron J4105 with 32 GB of DRAM when it supports (according to its ark.intel.com page) only 8 GB of DRAM. The M.2 SSD support is also weird. According to Intel this CPU has merely 6 PCIe lanes, but these are not even 3.0 lanes, they are PCIe version *2.0* lanes. Did they use that 960 EVO in the picture with x4 PCIe 2.0 lanes, thus halving its speed? Why on Earth would anyone do that? Still, this *could* be done. Going from 8 GB max to 32 GB of DRAM should be impossible though.
While we have Hardkernel's Odroid-C2 (and are happy with it), the large demand for the Odroid-H2 mystifies me (and was apparently unexpected by Hardkernel). Similar boards have been available for a while from various other manufacturers (e.g., Asrock J4105B-ITX, or Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H if you want two Ethernet ports), for a slightly lower price, and with a standard form factor.
It's cute how this is still being spun as "demand exceeds supply". That's very much the glass-half-full line, because technically it's true even if demand is relatively static and supply is falling.
They're having issues providing enough chips. It'd be nice if we didn't all do their PR for them too.
Bean counters destructive phantasies hobble a corp till you can hardly do business anymore, invent and design or make things and the things you make dont make much sense so you add marketing and consultants to further warp and limit the products and services towards early obsolescence. Just like Apple. This is still an up economy. Just like Apple, Intels margin is amorally high. We now have a planetwide distributed network with a processing power beyond anybodys imagination and all we do with it is watching pron and lamenting the unavailability of an obscure chip with a 3 month unfullfilled order of another 2000 chips.
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edzieba - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
"One thing that particularly attracts attention is the volume of SoCs that Hardkernel might require. The first batch was only 2,000, so it is unlikely that the second batch would hit 20,000. Meanwhile, Intel does not seem to have spare Gemini Lake SoCs at all, which once again emphasizes the scope of the company’s problems."Very small order sizes counts against availability. If you're ordering 20,000 (or 200,000) chips, then that's enough that you can schedule a production batch just for that order. For a piddling thousand or two, that means you need to wait for a large enough order (or a large collection of smaller orders) to come in to piggyback that small batch onto, or it does not make sense to shift a line over to that chip - for the little Gemini Lake dies, that's about 4 wafers.
iwod - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
It is not about small volume, it is Intel's prioritising Enterprise and high margin demand over anything else ( As they will be fighting against EPYC 2 ) and their capacity planning as well as 10nm has been behind schedule. These SoC are at the lowest priority.HStewart - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
I would expect the volume of these chips to be low - the chip is basically the modern day Atom chip in designed. I have an older Lenovo IdeaPad 200 and it pretty much useless - part of that maybe only 2G memory - with 4G or 8G on this chip it could be better.But with just web browsing and email, you really don't need much.
digitalgriffin - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
These chips have improved CONSIDERABLY in speed. This is especially true of the graphics. They are nipping at the heels of i3 U' models.piyush1123 - Monday, December 3, 2018 - link
Such a Great Thing!https://www.supplier-in-china.com/
Slangefar - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Rather silly it do not use Intel NICs. If it used Intel NIC it could be used easy with PFsense as router.Eletriarnation - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
You could still use it with iptables and do fine, I had a similar ITX board from ASRock and was able to get gigabit routing out of it.peevee - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
"and can be equipped with up to 32 GB of DDR4-2400 memory"Intel says it is max 8GB:
https://ark.intel.com/products/128989/Intel-Celero...
Anyway, they were able to fit 2 SODIM slots into this thing. How the hell much larger ITX boards have only 2 as well?
Brahman05 - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
It's the nature of memory channels. The way this board does it the lookup table has to be completely in ram. On a modern dual channel cpu 32GB is theoretical max. You CAN add up to 64GB id it splits each channel, like on a normal atx mobo, but it comes with a performance penalty. As ram standards get faster and faster that penalty is less but still there. It used to matter more as recently as amd piledriver, bulldozer ddr3, and even more with ddr2 etc, but with a 4.5Ghz cpu and ddr4-3000 machine that penalty is meh enough its barely even mentioned. My fancy Laptop has 4 sodimm's so i could use 64GB if i really needed that much but I don't so I went with a lirtle faster 16GBx2 for 32GB and to be honest, with that modern system i was actually morw worried about power draw. Ram has to be on to work so even empty ram draws power, that performance hit didn't really worry me, now if they start selling a ddr4-2800 and up kit.....PixyMisa - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
A number of users have reported success running these CPUs with 16GB and 32GB of RAM. I'm not sue why Intel still says the max is 8GB.abufrejoval - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
market segmentation, they want to sell more expensive chips like the C3000 to those who want more RAM. Been using 16GB on J1900 and N3700 w/o problems for years. Perhaps Intel MBs actually check and disable >8GB in the BIOS, ASrock sure doesn't mind.yeeeeman - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Too bad AMD ditched the Temash APUs. They had good performance with low power consumption and with small upgrades and 14nm process they could have been a great alternative to Gemini Lake parts.jamesindevon - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
If Intel was sufficiently desperate, the SoFIA Atom-on-TMSC products should be usable as-is with a custom motherboard for the very low-end.watersb - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
I am finally seeing Pentium Silver N5000 laptops available for sale. Wonder if they will sell out at major US retailers this holiday weekend.Valantar - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
2000 of a die this small - how many wafers would that be? One? Two? More?olafgarten - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
According to my very rough calculation, a perfect yield would get roughly 3000 of these out of a single wafer.Valantar - Thursday, November 22, 2018 - link
So assuming 90% yield, which one would really hope they're at for a 4-year-old process with three major refinements under its belt, they'd be able to get more than enough for a second round of these out of a single wafer. I very much doubt many of these dice bin below the power/clock speed requirements of the J4105 - it's not even the highest bin of Gemini Lake. This speaks quite loudly to just how precarious this shortage is. Sure, Hardkernel is probably WAY down the list of who gets first dibs on wafers, but this is still very much not normal.The shortage seems to be hitting big-name brands hard too, even in the business/enterprise segments - I've been on a waiting list for a new Dell laptop at work for a couple of months now. They normally have 3-day (or less) delivery (I work at a university with something like 5000 staff, so we buy a lot of PCs), but the Latitude I'm waiting on (with an i7-8650u) keeps getting pushed back, only recently getting a confirmed delivery date at all.
IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Geminilake die is not that small.It's around the size of Intel's dual core dies.
voicequal - Thursday, November 22, 2018 - link
Not sure this delay can be pinned entirely on Intel. It sounds like this company grossly underestimated demand, so they've been caught flat-footed with no 2nd batch orders prepped with their suppliers.Santoval - Thursday, November 22, 2018 - link
I don't understand how they were able to pair the Celeron J4105 with 32 GB of DRAM when it supports (according to its ark.intel.com page) only 8 GB of DRAM. The M.2 SSD support is also weird. According to Intel this CPU has merely 6 PCIe lanes, but these are not even 3.0 lanes, they are PCIe version *2.0* lanes. Did they use that 960 EVO in the picture with x4 PCIe 2.0 lanes, thus halving its speed? Why on Earth would anyone do that?Still, this *could* be done. Going from 8 GB max to 32 GB of DRAM should be impossible though.
AntonErtl - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
While we have Hardkernel's Odroid-C2 (and are happy with it), the large demand for the Odroid-H2 mystifies me (and was apparently unexpected by Hardkernel). Similar boards have been available for a while from various other manufacturers (e.g., Asrock J4105B-ITX, or Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H if you want two Ethernet ports), for a slightly lower price, and with a standard form factor.Spunjji - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
It's cute how this is still being spun as "demand exceeds supply". That's very much the glass-half-full line, because technically it's true even if demand is relatively static and supply is falling.They're having issues providing enough chips. It'd be nice if we didn't all do their PR for them too.
808Hilo - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Bean counters destructive phantasies hobble a corp till you can hardly do business anymore, invent and design or make things and the things you make dont make much sense so you add marketing and consultants to further warp and limit the products and services towards early obsolescence. Just like Apple. This is still an up economy. Just like Apple, Intels margin is amorally high. We now have a planetwide distributed network with a processing power beyond anybodys imagination and all we do with it is watching pron and lamenting the unavailability of an obscure chip with a 3 month unfullfilled order of another 2000 chips.PeachNCream - Saturday, November 24, 2018 - link
Profit margins are neither moral or amoral.digitalgriffin - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
32GB memory? According to Intel's spec sheet, Gemini lake only supports 8 GB maxThey do make for nice web browsers or file servers however. I had my eye on one for a while.
alysdexia - Thursday, December 27, 2018 - link
They're not nescient; you are.