FCS, I intentionally didn’t mention specific hardware for two reasons; I didn’t want to overload the OP and would provide additional information if that option was pursued, and there are many options for NAS hardware that can run TrueNAS.
In answer to your question, no, and for good reason.
So what is the conclusion on this topic ?
This is what I read:
That is not the conclusion. The conclusion is that a x86_64 PC is best.
So there is nowhere to buy a second hand PC?
Unless it’s illegal to import a NUC into New Zealand, you could sign on the US or other country ebay site. Many sellers will ship internationally.
I guess the difference for new starters being that there is a HA image which can be directly etched onto a NUC to run HA rather than having to go the Debian Supervised route. I realise that this isn’t much extra effort but not everyone feels that way about the process.
I have been using RPi4 4GB with the best possible SD card for about two years now. We moved to another flat and I started connecting devices (20+ zigbee bulbs, motion detectors, door sensors, temp/hum sensors etc., wifi switches, netatmo integration), then I started adding lovely entities such as monitor of my synology NAS etc. and become experiencing freezing.
Relinked db to NAS/MariaDB, freezing.
Tried SSD disk, problem to even boot it.
So I found this thread and I guess that a dedicated NUC on a solid HW is the way. No reason to play with your HA instability forever. The point is to build smart house and avoid debugging of failing hw…
I am only wondering why @richieframe is recommending three years old NUC8i5BEH with Intel Core i5 8259U. There are newer models with comet lake CPUs at the same price. Is there some particular reason?
The 8i5 has 128MB EDRAM on chip, acting as a massive L4 cache
So, I read something on eDRAM and found a serious retrospective technical evaluation of its usefullness. However, it looks that eDRAM is useful for gaming but not for scientific scenarios. Question is whether smart home is a “game” or a “science” scenario .)
Edit: “eDRAM is specifically used to support the operation of the Intel Iris Plus graphics engine” So in my opinion, the HA must have written specific instructions to use it. Does it?
Neither, it is database and application server, specifically sqlite and python. There are no specific instructions to make use of it, it is cpu hardware that does the job to act as L4 when the graphics engine is not using it.
Some benchmarks can be 50% faster on the 8th gen NUC compared to the 10th gen NUC, and that is because of the combination of EDRAM and a higher TDP. 50% for 2 gens back is absurdly large. 10th gen CPUs usually have way better turbo frequencies, but in the NUC footprint and thermal envelope that does not always happen.
If you want to compare with an HA type workload, Geekbench has 3: sqlite, camera, and speech recognition, though the data sizes in the workloads are not always comparable. Since the python threads in HA have a small memory footprint, more of it can stay in the L4 cache
Looks like you did some serious testing! Thanks. I just skimmed some scientific papers. eDRAM was designed for high bandwidth bigger data but with higher latency applications. In my understanding, if you don’t use graphics or supercomputer tasks, you won’t effectivelly use it. However, applications you mention (face/speech recognition or video handling will), I am not sure with any db apps as I am not too a techy guy but that’s where you can test it. I would expect that low latency is preferable option in db apps where you save history on a continuous basis.
Interesting. Still hesitating to buy old metal as all other apps will benefit from newer cpu definitely. This is really a problem fully dependent on a very specific application of your NUC and I dont think that eDRAM can dramatically increase overall performance of the NUC used for HA.
Do you have data/analysis/graphs to share?
The 10th gen has a clock speed of 4.2GHz where the 8th is 3.8, so in a variety of benchmarks the 8th gen will trail within 10%, but in most cases it is almost a dead heat. Single core performance has less of a thermal limit on the 10th gen, but the 8th gen EDRAM pretty much cancels out its overall performance lead there. Multicore averages are better on the 8th gen, and the outliers are what really push the average up.
For DB access the 10th gen is faster, but for things like generating html content and compiling software their performance is essentially identical.
Here are the big outliers in geekbench v5 multicore:
| Model | Speech Recognition | Machine Learning | Text Compression | Navigation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NUC10i5FNH | 70.6 words/s | 81.4 images/s | 20.5 MB/s | 8.15 MTE/s |
| NUC8i5BEH | 106.7 words/s | 125.5 images/s | 23.7MB/s | 10.3 MTE/s |
That’s really unbelievable. I have been reading deep into the night and now in the morning. There is really not too much discussion on web related to eDRAM. Scientific papers are limited to supercomputers. It’s expensive to build and it’s tricky to maintain temperature at the same die for eDRAM and the CPU cores at once, so intel does not implementing it… finally high latency says it’s not even faster in comparison to dedicated SRAM in some architectures.
However, any ideas for 11th gen? You would really drop new cpus for eDRAM even though they have dedicated instructions for deeplearning applications?
Do you have a chance to compare 8th+eDRAM with 11th gen?
11th gen has faster system mem bandwidth than the EDRAM, so it would cancel out that benefit, and the architectural enhancements would probably cancel out everything else, Tiger Lake is FAST
Edit:
My best guess based on what I have seen is the 11th gen with max speed memory will beat both the 8th and 10th gen in all benchmarks
Yaah. You know, I follow your recommendation. “When you upgrade, GO BIG!” It really does not make sense to buy cheap metal especially when I plan to compare seasons in years of my solar power plant efficiency… one day.
Thanks for this discussion.
I’m finding it very hard to compare NUC’s for a home server. I’ve picked up a NUC7i5 with 32gb memory and 512GB Sata M.2 for $180. It’s main use is home assistant, but I wanted to be able to add other software and experiment with Linux. My hope is to use the NUC for home theater (Kodi) to replace ROKU, run a small samba server, run OpenVPN server to provide VPN to all computers in our home, run PiHole/Adware and anything else I run across such as Mealie. I am not running games. Fan noise is a big factor…I don’t want a jet plane behind my TV…so no i7’s. I’ve tamed the NUC7 fan…not sure how loud the NUC8 fans are…I read “loud”.
I’ve been used passmark scores to select the NUC7i5…but not sure that’s valid and whether I should be comparing single thread scores, multithread scores or average scores.
One other question I can’t seem to find an answer to…will an NVME M.2 outperform a SATA M.2 on the NUC7. It takes either (not sure how it does that…but it does). Is it worth replacing the SATA with NVME?
I will answer these in reverse.
Yes, it will in most cases, depending on the type of operation and the types of drives compared, the difference can be substantial. Some low end NVME drives are not any faster than a high end SATA in terms of performance, but can be far worse in terms of reliability. Drive choices are complex, with your use case you probably want both drives, and the SMB server would store the files on the SATA drive, leaving the NVME for applications and program data.
Also a complex choice, if you are running several operating systems or simultaneous applications, multi-threaded is more important, but not with “peaky” loads where a single thread will max out for a long period of time and all other applications are basically idle.
The fan speed varies with cpu temp and load, if the system is kept at an average load of 0.4 or lower, do not expect to be able to hear the fan unless you are close. The 8i5 has a higher TDP than the 7i5, 28W vs 15W, and if you use that power the heat has to go somewhere, that is why it is louder, but also why it is faster.
If you want kodi and the other things on the same device, I cannot say how good your experience will be, since you will need the system to be in an unrecommended configuration. You either need it to run as a program on the host operating system, or as a VM with isolated access to the graphics hardware.
I am using an older i3 NUC for kodi, but the DB is on the server, so the NUC does not need to do any of the heavy lifting or have a lot of memory, uses a gig at idle, about 400MB more playing a 1080p HEVC file, cpu hits 60% on a single core, the other 3 average 15% each, handling network traffic, subtitle rendering, audio decode, etc. a 4X fast forward starts dropping frames hard, so all 4 cores are desired for a good experience.
thanks for that very complete response. It sounds like the NUC7 with it’s lower TDP may be the right choice for fan noise. I think the heaviest load will be when I run KODI through OpenVPN with 4K internet content, although most content is, at best 1080p today. Not sure of the load when family uses the NUC’s OpenVPN server. It will be an interesting journey.
Kodi does not require a VPN, why do you use one (curious here 
)
Many people want to watch internet content not available in their country or locality, so they connect to a VPN in one where the content is available.