Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics Continue With Open-Source Driver & Crazy Fast Compared To RPi 4

[AkulaMD]

From the testing conducted by some people to rock5 (RK3588), it can idle to < 2 watt (about ~1.44 watt IIRC) without connected to monitor. When I testing the OPi5 16GB RAM, 32GB mSD, 256GB NVME, It goes around ~2-2.5 watt when idle, connected to monitor. When browsing or youtube-ing, IIRC, it's about ~7 watt. Not bad, but my elitedesk 800 G4 i5-8500T idle at ~4.6 watt and youtube-ing around ~8-11 watt. So, there's the number for you.

Thank you very much for the informative numbers, it helps me to better see the context. Speaking of low power, browsing or youtube-ing on Cortex-A520 as mentioned in the original post would surely get us better wattage numbers than that of the OPi5. As the original poster, I hope we can get a newer and if possible the newest small core (cheaper fee/royalty) rather than some old big core.

[t.s.]

Actually, I don't want that much power, but I want new CPU cores so that they're energy efficient. I would love to have some low-power Cortex-A55 (or even better, Cortex-A510 or Cortex-A520) cores since if I had a single-board computer it would probably mostly be idle or near idle.

From the testing conducted by some people to rock5 (RK3588), it can idle to < 2 watt (about ~1.44 watt IIRC) without connected to monitor. When I testing the OPi5 16GB RAM, 32GB mSD, 256GB NVME, It goes around ~2-2.5 watt when idle, connected to monitor. When browsing or youtube-ing, IIRC, it's about ~7 watt. Not bad, but my elitedesk 800 G4 i5-8500T idle at ~4.6 watt and youtube-ing around ~8-11 watt. So, there's the number for you.

[t.s.]

Hmm... link is broken for me.

Anyway, I'll bet its fan can get a bit loud. N100-class machines can easily reach > 20 W, under load. Of course, you should be able to adjust that through tweaking your frequency-scaling settings, at the expense of a little performance. Intel's N-series mini-PCs are sure having a bit of a moment. Good performance, good software support, and lots of good deals to be found.

Strange. I can still open that. Try this one: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005234874016.html. Or just go to aliexpress and search for N100 mini pc.

Dunno about the fan. I've tried these kind hardware, but with 5700u one (~$187 barebone). It could go ~54 watt for that 15 watt CPU. And yes, the N100 use about ~22 watt when full load (reviewed).

Sadly, when x86 mini-pc like N100 can be had for ~$130 ready to use OOTB, the opposite happened with ARM SBCs. The majority of SBCs with good-modern SoC is quite expensive. When you want to buy a complete SBC with the case, storage, and the rest, the price usually north of the x86 one.

[elvis]

The real question is: how does videocore vii compare in terms of performance to rk3588's mali g610 mp4 valhall? Does anybody know?

I think currently the "panfork" drivers for various rk3588 / mali g610 boards don't support Vulkan under Linux at all (only OpenGL / OpenGLES). The repo hasn't had a commit since late 2022, and the last time I tested my Orange Pi 5 board, there was no Vulkan support under Linux. (Android supports Vulkan through proprietary drivers available for that platform).

I don't know the back story, but the panfork drivers for that GPU still haven't been upstreamed into mainline Mesa, and the author of that forked repo seems to have been blocked by the Mesa team. I'm not super interested in open source drama, but between the lack of support from the hardware vendor, and the in-fighting within Mesa, the rk3588 platform appears to have some serious issues on the software front for the time being.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/5560

https://icecream95.gitlab.io/maybe-i-misremember.html

At least the RPi5 (and RPi4 before it) are finally at a spot where all support for the GPU and popular graphics APIs are now upstream in the kernel and Mesa directly (all that work was contracted out to Igalia). As Michael pointed out, the challenge from here is that commits were made late (presumably not to leak the existed of the RPi5 too early), which means Debian 12 Bookworm very likely won't get the required packages directly, as they'll sit on older stable Mesa versions. So it's going to be on the shoulders of the RPi foundation presumably to add the required kernel and Mesa packaging into their own repos so that the hardware is supported well in a timely fashion.

My biggest frustration with a lot of the "YouTube influencer" type personalities demoing their pre-release hardware is that none of them have been able to compile in this very recent Mesa code, so all of their videos have been very banal "here's me opening YouTube and looking for dropped frames" type videos, which are honestly pointless time wasters if they're doing that on generic 2D framebuffer / software rendered code. I'm thankful that Phoronix has bothered to do the hard work, get the drivers going and do the tests presented here. So far, this has been the only worthwhile information about the GPU performance available online.

One thing I don't understand: Does it support OpenGL? In the Raspberry Pi 5 product page they claim OpenGLES and Vulkan, but article talks about GLmark 2.

The Mesa merge request seems to indicate the GPU exposes full OpenGL3.1, however there's software work to be done yet for full compliance. So it appears both OpenGL and OpenGLES are available.

The RPi foundation are probably being conservative, and only announcing fully compliant things. Likewise I assume some Vulkan 1.3 features will probably sneak in to future drivers, despite them only announcing Vulkan 1.2. The RPi4 is somewhat in the same boat, with full Vulkan 1.2 compliance achieved a little while back, as well as a few extra features past that, but not enough for full 1.3 compliance.

[coder]

The Orange is largely comparable in price to the Raspberry,

It's close enough for some, but they're not equal. As I said, the Orange Pi 5 starts at between 41.7% and 66.7% higher than the cheapest Raspberry Pi 5. That's actually a big deal, when it comes to product design. And yet, the Raspberry includes Wifi, a second HDMI output (which requires a license fee paid to CEC). With Orange Pi, you have to pay extra for WiFi.

Granted, Orange Pi 5 has plenty of advantages over Raspberry. I'm just saying you can't overlook that price difference, nor the fact that the specs aren't entirely in favor of Orange.

so money needn't be the deciding factor.

That's highly-specific to the individual or circumstances, whether we're talking about a single unit or thousands, and whether it's being used for commercial purposes (where cost can be very important), education, entertainment, etc.

For an individual like you or me, it sounds like we can easily afford whichever catches our fancy or better meets our needs. However, the designers of these products have a market in mind, and they have to make design tradeoffs for that market. Even though we might not have the same constraints as other customers, we're still impacted by those tradeoffs. That's the downside of mass-market products (but, there are even bigger upsides!).

[Times Two]

The A55's don't add very much compute power. So, it doesn't go very far towards addressing uid313 's complaint that they're "quite old".

Otherwise, I'd agree. If you have the money, you'll probably be happier with the Orange Pi 5... so long as you don't mind running the proprietary GPU drivers -- I think the open source ones are still far behind.

I'm also not sure the Orange Pi 5 doesn't at least want active cooling. I'm sure it's more efficient than the Raspberry Pi 5, but maybe it still throttles on passive cooling?

The Orange is largely comparable in price to the Raspberry, so money needn't be the deciding factor. If I needed/wanted a PC for ARM64 software development as far as I can see the 16GB Orange Pi 5+ is the first and only item ever offered at a reasonable price that might fit my bill.

[coder]

Actually, I don't want that much power, but I want new CPU cores so that they're energy efficient.

That's largely due to the process node. Each of arm's A7x cores is bigger than its predecessor, if made on the same node. On the same node, all will burn more power than their predecessor under load, at the same frequency. They try to deliver an even greater increase in performance, and that's the only reason you can say they're intrinsically more efficient.

So, if you want low power and don't really care about performance, then what you really ought to care about is the manufacturing node (and what clock speed they're run at). The max clock speed is usually something you can override, but it won't help if you're concerned the idle power is too high.

I would love to have some low-power Cortex-A55 (or even better, Cortex-A510 or Cortex-A520) cores since if I had a single-board computer it would probably mostly be idle or near idle.

Well, then maybe you should check out the ODROID-C4, which is powered by quad-A55 cores:

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/

For that matter, so is the Orange Pi 3B, but its SoC is made on 22 nm, while the one powering the ODROID-C4 is made on 12 nm.

Actually, I noticed they claim the ODROID-N2L idles at just 1.5 W and yet it has 4x A73 + 2x A53:

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2l-with-4gbyte-ram/

The one thing you're not going to find are the latest & greatest ARM cores, in a low-cost SoC of the sort that power these SBCs. ARM charges too much for them, so they only end up in higher-end chips.

[uid313]

The A55's don't add very much compute power. So, it doesn't go very far towards addressing uid313 's complaint that they're "quite old".

Actually, I don't want that much power, but I want new CPU cores so that they're energy efficient. I would love to have some low-power Cortex-A55 (or even better, Cortex-A510 or Cortex-A520) cores since if I had a single-board computer it would probably mostly be idle or near idle.

[coder]

You've basically described the Orange Pi 5/5B/5+. In addition to 4xA76 cores they have 4xA55.

The A55's don't add very much compute power. So, it doesn't go very far towards addressing uid313 's complaint that they're "quite old".

Otherwise, I'd agree. If you have the money, you'll probably be happier with the Orange Pi 5... so long as you don't mind running the proprietary GPU drivers -- I think the open source ones are still far behind.

I'm also not sure the Orange Pi 5 doesn't at least want active cooling. I'm sure it's more efficient than the Raspberry Pi 5, but maybe it still throttles on passive cooling?

[Times Two]

Unless you wanna lay down another Ethernet cable across the whole house just to hook it up to your Raspberry Pi then you're stuck with Wi-Fi which and this new Raspberry Pi 5 still only have old shitty Wi-Fi 5, the same as in Raspberry Pi 4. 🥹

It only has 4 CPU cores, all of them Cortex-A76, I would have loved to see a heterogeneous big.LITTLE architecture with 4 weak cores and 4 strong cores. If I had a single-board computer it would likely mostly be idle so weak, low-power, energy efficient cores would be nice. Also the Cortex-A76 core is quite old, the newer cores are more energy efficient, so that's good too if you want to run without a fan.

I hope we get some interesting competitors that offer Wi-Fi 6 and more modern cores in a heterogeneous configuration.

You've basically described the Orange Pi 5/5B/5+. In addition to 4xA76 cores they have 4xA55. Wi-Fi 6 is available as are boards with 16GB RAM. For some folks there may be some good reasons to select the Raspberry over Orange, but I'd take select the Orange every day.