Orange Pi 5 Is A Great & Very Fast Alternative To The Raspberry Pi 4

[avis]

It's so sad that Snapdragon ARM chips are wasted in android phones. Why there are no SBC with Snapdragon 8 gen 1 or gen 2? That would be so freaking good. It would replace desktop for many users. They are so much more powerful then this Rockchip RK3588S

Billions of sold devices, wasted?

2 million Linux users who will buy maybe 10K desktop high-end ARM64 systems? No one will bother designing anything because they will never recoup their expenses.

[unwind-protect]

For me, the killer feature on the Oranges is the PCI-e storage interface. The storage issues always turned me off with the R-Pis. SD storage is notoriously unreliable and slow.

I'm also interested in how the GbE port is connected. USB? I think it has to if they explicitly only have NVMe on PCIe. I wouldn't like USB GbE.

Would be nice to measure CPU load during max network traffic.

[nyanmisaka]

Only thing that I care about? Does it have upstream OpenSource drivers

Rockchip is upstreaming their code with the help of Collabora.

https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588

And the new Mesa panfrost driver for the Mali-G610 (2nd gen Valhall) is WIP. Before that you can use the panfork driver as a good alternative.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/pancsf-a-new-drm-driver-for-mali-csf-based-gpus.html

[NateHubbard]

if only they were a bit cheaper, I could actually reccomend these as little computers for basic use

It's been this way for over two decades now with ARM, all the way back to the Corel Netwinder at least.
I assume we'll have decent RISC-V boards before an ARM desktop ever really makes sense, price wise.

[phoron]

Pity rk3588 needs blobs to init ram. And it has a memory hole. Also ATF for rk3588 seems to have no source available.
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

[willmore]

I'm also interested in how the GbE port is connected. USB? I think it has to if they explicitly only have NVMe on PCIe. I wouldn't like USB GbE.

Would be nice to measure CPU load during max network traffic.

GigE is via an on SoC GigE MAC with an external PHY. Not even the raspberry Pi people put ethernet on USB anymore. The only orange pi boards I can think of with USB ethernet are boards with multiple ethernet ports. Unlike the raspberry boards, they use native ethernet and normally have multiple root USB ports.

[woife]

I did experiment with using a small passive aluminum heatsink with the SoC but that at least didn't yield much difference either to the raw performance or for lowering the SoC temperature beyond a couple degrees

The SoC will heat up the small heat sink faster than the small heat sink can pass the heat to the air, so the cooling effect won't last very long, maybe a few minutes ... I did some measurements when I created my Raspberry Pi-based Recalbox system, and I found that adding one of those cheap small fans already makes a huuuuuuge difference compared to just the heat sink alone.

[Nocturnal64]

What about GPIO speed? AFAIK a lot of projects (like PiStorm accelerator for Amiga and possibly other m68k machines) have chosen Raspberry Pi because of its superb GPIO interface.

[QwertyChouskie]

• An analogue to the 75¢ STM8 boards, $2 STM32 boards, and $5 ESP32 boards on Aliexpress, but capable of running Linux (i.e. the dirt-cheapest thing that I can build stuff for using networking code not written to support bare-metal targets... running regular Debian for easy long-term security fixes if at all possible)

Raspberry Pi Zero is $5, $10 for a version with WiFi.

[BillBroadley]

The NanoPi R6S has the same RK3588S with two 2.5G and one 1G lan ports.

I have this one, pretty awesome widget. I recommend the cnc machined metal case for an extra $20.