[htpcero]

I am considering a refresh of my trusty but oldie apollo lake fanless HPTC (J4205, mini itx board). I noticed the intel/pentium N6005 (jasperlake) seems to fit the bill (it seems to support 4K 60fps, HDR, AV1 hardware decoding etc). There are no mini-itx motherboards that I could find yet but there seem to be plenty of "mini PCs" built using this part. I am wondering if anyone in the community has tried running kodi (on linux, preferably) on this hardware and if any feedback.

[tzanig]

I am also waiting for an ITX Jasper Lake board but only industrial ones seem available. The most recent commercial are ASRock Gemini Lake Refresh. Would be interesting to understand what kind of expansion can be done to the mini PCs, i.e. haw many SATA ports are available...

[htpcero]

I have the asrock j4205 itx, two generations before the j5040, and it's been awesome. I just noticed it's not listed in the asrock website anymore, it was top of the line for the apollo series at the time. Similar to the 5040 it's a full little motherboard, with 4 sata ports, laptop-style dimm slots etc.
I was considering a refresh with the asrock j5040 too but it's no longer in stock anywhere. Hopefully this is a sign that asrock will come up with a replacement.
These days there is even 10-watt alderlake, there seem to be several alternatives

[Klojum]

I'm using a J5005 (Gemini Lake, 10watt) M-ITX board with 2 SSDs, BT/Wifi card and a Piso PSU. It's drawing some 18 watts in total. It plays just about everything I throw at it. This one is also already MIA in the shops and no longer available.

I'm sure there will be some successor of these boards. There is already a Jasper Lake board from Asus afaik, but it's designed for industrial use with a couple of RS232 ports. It's GPU capabilities may be not fully available.

[smp1]

AV1 hardware decoding

It does not support AV1 HW decoding.
It is also missing hardware advanced deinterlacing (MADI/MCDI) capability, so in fact Jasper Lake is inferior to a previous generation SoCs.

The only worthy Mini-ITX upgrade I can think of is Celeron G6900 + Gigabyte H610I (or similar board). I am very tempted to replace my Asrock J4105B-ITX board with this.

[htpcero]

AV1 hardware decoding

It does not support AV1 HW decoding.
It is also missing hardware advanced deinterlacing (MADI/MCDI) capability, so in fact Jasper Lake is inferior to a previous generation SoCs.

The only worthy Mini-ITX upgrade I can think of is Celeron G6900 + Gigabyte H610I (or similar board). I am very tempted to replace my Asrock J4105B-ITX board with this.

Interesting! this CPU is a bit like going to a different league though, from 10W fanless to the 60W range (cpu 46W + 10-15W), CPU fan and maybe chassis fan would be needed. My key requirement for the living room htpc is that is must be completely silent. I have a very small case, no fans, 4TB SSD.

Thanks for the info on N6005, I thought having some more graphical execution units would make it a better HTPC device, it seems it's not great. Did you consider the 10W alderlake parts? I have some hope that a decent "cpu onbard" fanless mini itx motherboard will come to the market with one of those. Hopefully that's why askrock delayed the gemini-refresh replacement, as the format got quite popular with DIY people.

[smp1]

CPU fan and maybe chassis fan would be needed. My key requirement for the living room htpc is that is must be completely silent.

My main PC is i5 12400 with a stock cooler, no chassis fans. I am 100% sure that G6900 can be passively cooled even with a very basic cooler. Chassis fan is not needed either. Alder Lake-S H0 parts draw very little power under idle/low load. It can also be configured in BIOS to draw as little power under load as you want by adjusting the CPU multiplier or power limits.

Did you consider the 10W alderlake parts? I have some hope that a decent "cpu onbard" fanless mini itx motherboard will come to the market with one of those.

I did consider Tiger Lake ITX boards but gave up waiting for a consumer board to show up. I doubt anything will change with Alder Lake-N.

[3ftomi]

Actually it seems n6005 supports AV1 HW decoding (you have scroll down or go to details: Intel UHD Graphics 32 EUs (Jasper Lake)) and the older j5040 doesn't (in details: Intel UHD Graphics 605) which makes sense.
Anyway, thanks lightening up the topic.

[smp1]

Actually it seems n6005 supports AV1 HW decoding 

AV1 decoding is not supported by Jasper Lake. The correct decoding/encoding features table can be found here.

[htpcero]

This recent mobo from gigabyte came close to what I wanted - https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/N5105I-H-rev-10
Only 1 sata port is a bit of a concern - I currently have two old SSDs in that build, although I could replace one with a low cost/small nvme which this board also supports.
The main problem - N5105 instead of N6005. Somewhat slower, reduced number of GPU EUs. Still it should be able to far surpass apollo lake. I guess I'll wait a little longer, as long as the old board holds

[kurai]

For what it's worth:-

Just got my new Odroid H3+ with N6005 Jasper Lake ... no it definitely doesn't do hardware decode/encode but it manages to play most 1080p AV1 in s/w just fine.

1080p/24 CPU utilisation is at around 45%, and temperatures don't exceed 44°C with fan at minimum (~400RPM).
1080p/30 CPU utilisation is at around 50%, and temperatures don't exceed 46°C with fan at minimum (~400RPM).
1080p/60 CPU utilisation is at around 68%, and temperatures don't exceed 54°C with fan at slight ramp up (~600RPM).

It still can't handle 2160p/60 - it was dropping frames consistently, achieving somewhere around 40 to 45 displayed FPS with CPU at ~90%.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any 2160p/24 or 2160p/30 to test with :/

To put that in context my old Odroid H2 with J4105 Gemini Lake would utterly choke on 1080p AV1, slamming all cores to 95%+ and temps up at ~70°C.
It would drop frames like crazy, turning the display into a slide-show.  Hard to judge achieved frame rate when it was completely bound up like that as all the onscreen playback counters would lag out too, but it couldn't have been more than about 2 or 3 FPS.

To be honest I'm pretty surprised that the uprated IPC/clock-speeds & more iGPU execution units on the N6005 actually managed to successfully "brute force" s/w decode their way so well - it's a very usable viewing state for AV1 @ 1080p.

[htpcero]

Thanks @kurai  for the report! I noticed this board coming to the market, I was wondering, does it come with the back panel 'adaptor' to fit in mini ITX cases? (which is the normal-sized back connectivity panel in motherboards)

Are you running kodi on linux in it?

[kurai]

@htpcero :
No adaptor included - just the SBC board with heatsink pre-installed. The only "accessory" in the box was the CMOS battery 
There are a variety of addon bits and pieces available from hardkernel.com (OEM manufacturer's own site, ships from South Korea) or their various distributors e.g. odroid.co.uk, odroid.nl etc.)
I don't recall seeing anything that adapts it to "standard" ITX category cases, although I wasn't really looking - it's mostly a bunch of specific custom cases, which are pretty inexpensive. Think more along the lines of the 3rd party cases you can find for Raspberry Pi type projects.

The only one I can speak to is the VESA "backplate" which I use to mount it to the back of my TV.  The H3+ is dimensionally identical to the old Gemini Lake H2/H2+, and all the mounting holes on the PCB are in the same places so I just re-used it. It's not ... great ... just a pair of interlocking stamped metal pieces and a plastic sheet with a variety of pre-drilled holes and slots. On the other hand it's completely hidden & out of sight, and anything more robust would be rather overkill, considering how small/light the device is.

I'm running LibreELEC on it ... an `embedded` Linux + Kodi combo.
One thing to bear in mind in with that setup ... the Linux underpinning they use for the Kodi 19.x Matrix builds is only on kernel 5.10
The iGPU on the Jasper Lake requires a newer kernel version than that so I had to go for a LibreELEC development Nightly build, which are only built with Kodi 20 Nexus beta.
I faffed around for a while trying to sort out a 5.11+ kernel to drop my old Kodi 19.4 install onto, but it was looking like a lot of hassle so I just dumped the Nightly build onto the drive (after a full backup, naturally
And what do you know, I shouldn't have bothered with all the messing around - it Just Worked[tm].  Only issue with the Matrix->Nexus migration was 3 or 4 minor utility addons that were disabled for incompatibility - nothing critical that I cared about.
I haven't yet found anything show-stopping in the Nexus beta - everything I normally use Kodi for all works flawlessly.

If you are just doing 'normal' Linux install with Kodi Matrix 19 or Nexus 20 alpha/beta added as a package, then any distro with a kernel later than 5.11 should be absolutely fine.

[htpcero]

While I was about to take the plunge with the O-droid H3+/N6005 (and preparing to 3d-print an "adaptor" so I could use the board in a mini-ITX case), alder-lake N came out, with some very interesting  5, 10 and 15W CPU options, with AV1 HW decoding support and all.

My preferred scenario would be upgrading with an N305-based mini-ITx board - 400%+ faster than my current J4205 (per passmark) with a slight increase in power consumption, still fanless.

Currently waiting for some vendor to offer alderlake-N305 in mini-ITX format, so far all I've seen is (quite a few) custom-format mini-PCs.

[tzanig]

Finally an Alder Lake-N ITX board announced:

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/