Benchmarking The Potato & Firefly: New ARM Linux Boards

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Benchmarking The Potato & Firefly: New ARM Linux Boards

When receiving the long-awaited AMD ARM board yesterday I also received Le Potato Libre Computer Board and the Firefly RK3399...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Potato-Firefly

[chuckula]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for reviewing these boards. In addition to benchmarks, any information about limitations in the Linux distros that work with each board would be helpful. The Raspberry Pi is extremely popular not because it has magical hardware but because it has a low price point and strong software support with an active development community. That's really important since unlike in the x86 world you can't just slap any generic Linux distro you want onto the hardware.

[dh04000]

Hi Mike,

Michael goes by Mike to his friends?

I am now petitioning that we all call him Mike from now on.

[caligula]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for reviewing these boards. In addition to benchmarks, any information about limitations in the Linux distros that work with each board would be helpful. The Raspberry Pi is extremely popular not because it has magical hardware but because it has a low price point and strong software support with an active development community. That's really important since unlike in the x86 world you can't just slap any generic Linux distro you want onto the hardware.

Raspberry Pi would sell quite well even if it had worse community support and hardware. It's the one most people recognize.

[chuckula]

Raspberry Pi would sell quite well even if it had worse community support and hardware. It's the one most people recognize.

People recognize it precisely because it has the support in the first place and that was 90% of the work that went into the Raspberry Pi project, not the technical minutiae of designing a simple single board computer. There are loads of more complex boards than the Raspberry Pi floating around that are easily technically superior but die on the vine anyway without the software community support.

[darkcoder]

While those small and cost effective Raspberry have a lot of uses, I would really like for them to come with a bigger more powerful brother.

Would like to build a descent hardware desktop or laptop ARM based, but as mentioned some of those other brand boards end up nowhere, and Raspberry as single board is too limited for what I want.

[uid313]

Nice with USB Type-C.

But too bad about 17-year-old USB 2.0 and 22-year-old 100 Mbit/s Ethernet.

[grege]

More boards using Mali graphics. One reason the Pi is popular is that it uses a Broadcom GPU and the Pi community has managed to make a functional open source reverse engineered driver.

[coder]

While those small and cost effective Raspberry have a lot of uses, I would really like for them to come with a bigger more powerful brother.

Would like to build a descent hardware desktop or laptop ARM based, but as mentioned some of those other brand boards end up nowhere, and Raspberry as single board is too limited for what I want.

Well, that's pretty much what this LeMaker Cello board is, or you can get an ODROID-XU4 or maybe a Nvidia Tegra Jetson board, if you want a fast GPU and have deep pockets.

I was tempted to go in that direction, as I was itching to upgrade my Pi-based micro server. In the end, I went for Intel's Apollo Lake. If you want something that's well-supported and "just works", it's hard to beat x86.

http://www.up-board.org

Although, since the UP^2 was still a ways off, what I actually got was an ASRock J4205-ITX.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J4205-ITX/index.us.asp
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16813157731

A few years ago, ARM seemed to be moving so fast I thought the industry would be awash with boards like LeMaker Cello, by now (except maybe standard PC form factors, like mini-ITX and mini-STX *nudge* *nudge*). Sorry ARM, maybe next time.

[caligula]

While those small and cost effective Raspberry have a lot of uses, I would really like for them to come with a bigger more powerful brother.

Would like to build a descent hardware desktop or laptop ARM based, but as mentioned some of those other brand boards end up nowhere, and Raspberry as single board is too limited for what I want.

You can extend and enhance RPi with USB devices. USB is an universal hub. You have this one host and everything on the board and also the external devices are connected to the host. People have even connected SSDs to USB/mSATA bridge dongles.