alt Hacker NewsThe review shows ARM64 software support is still painful vs x86. For $200 for the 16gb model, this is the price point where you could just get an Intel N150 mini PC in the same form factor. And those usually come with cases. They also tend to pull 5-8w at idle, while this is 15w. Cool if you really want ARM64, but at this end of the performance spectrum, why not stick with the x86 stack where everything just works a lot easier?
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With RAM it will be costing notably more, with 4 cores instead of 12. I'd expect this to run circles around an N150 for single-threaded perf too.
They are not in the same class, which is reflected in the power envelope.
BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread? Y'all Intel shareholders or something? I run both but not to the exclusion of everything else. There is nothing I've failed to run successfully on my ARM ones and the only thing I haven't tried is gaming.
Agreed, at least for a likely "home use" case, such as a TV box, router, or general purpose file server or Docker host, I don't see how this board is better than something like a Beelink mini PC. The Orange Pi does not even come with a case, power supply or cooler. Contrast that with a Beelink that has a built-in power supply (no external brick) and of course a case and cooler.
It allows you to build for what is coming. In a couple of years arm hardware this powerful will cheap and common.
i use the rpi zero 2 for the IO pins
4b / 5 for the camera stuff.
i don’t think using these boards for just compute makes a lot of sense unless it’s for toy stuff like an ssh shell or pihole
I was soured on ARM SBCs by the Orange Pi 5, which does not have an option to ignore its SD card during boot. Something trivial on basically every x86 platform I had been taking for granted.
Yes x86 will win for convenience on about every metric (at least for now), but this SoC's CPU is much faster than a mere Intel N150 (especially for multicore use cases).
the high end of the performance is impressive and this has idle power similar to the processors in it's performance range(AMD Ryzen 7 4800H idles at 45W). This is certainly not meant for lower power computing.
I've got two RK3588 boards here doing Linux-y things around my place (Jellyfin, Forgejo builders, Immich, etc) and ... I don't think I've run into pain? They're running various debian and just ... work? I can't think of a single package that I couldn't get for ARM64.
Likewise my VPS @ Hetzner is running Aarch64. No drama. Only pain is how brutal the Rust cross-compile is from my x86 machine.
I mean, here's Geerling running a bunch of Steam games flawlessly on a Aarch64 NVIDIA GB10 machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjRKvKC4ntw
(Those things are expensive, but I just ordered one [the ASUS variant] for myself.)
Meanwhile Apple is pushing the ARM64 architecture hard, and Windows is apparently actually quite viable now?
Personally... it's totally irrational, but I have always had a grudge against x86 since it "won" in the early 90s and I had to switch from 68k. I want diversity in ISAs. RISC-V would be nice, but I'll settle for ARM for now.
From the article: "[...] the Linux support for various parts of the boards, not being upstreamed and mainlined, is very likely to be stuck on an older version. This is usually what causes headaches down the road [...]".
The problem isn't support for the ARM architecture in general, it's the support for this particular board.
Other boards like the Raspberry Pi and many boards based on Rockchip SoCs have most of the necessary support mainlined, so the experience is quite painless. Many are starting to get support for UEFI as well.