Orange Pi 3 review: A Raspberry Pi rival that's a serious disappointment | Hacker News Reader

Orange Pi 3 review: A Raspberry Pi rival that's a serious disappointment

techrepublic.com

30 pointsDaviey37 comments

Linux SBCs are in a bit of a sad state. There was a rush to the market, which has led to many boards being in a very sad state when it comes to software support. Moreover, no interesting SoCs have come out for these things in just about forever.

Software support for the Raspberry Pi is pretty good, but just about every other hardware platform doesn't get enough support. This is because the vendor doesn't want to, cannot cope with support, or the community isn't there. And that makes them very difficult to use. As is the case for this board. How do you release a board in 2019 for which the standard image is a three year old release of Ubuntu?

I'd say Odroid's announced N2 [1] is probably the first interesting SBC to come out in long time, just because it has an SoC that should be a lot more powerful and feature-rich than any other SBCs. 4x ARM Cortex A73 + dedicated gigabit + 4 GiB DDR4 + a Vulkan capable GPU is a really compelling package for $79 (or $63 for the 2GB model). But also for that it's a certainty that software support will suck, at least initially. They already announced that when running GNU/Linux the GPU will only support Wayland and not X11, and their initial Android release will run a 32-bit userland on a 64-bit kernel (how do these things happen??).

[1]: https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/

The Odroid H2 is also a fantastic little bit of kit: x86, 4x PCI-e, SATA connectors, 32Gb of ram max.

Great little low-power hypervisor for playing around on.

x86 SBC's are really in a different market from ARM based ones. The software support is vastly more mature, and they also tend to be more expensive (>$100 for x86, well under $100 for ARM).

Hopefully this will start to change as ARM standardizes via things like SBSA and SBBR/EBBR.

I think a lot of this will come down to why x86 isn't going anywhere for a while... the tooling that everyone uses from OSes, drivers, etc around it all. Though once you've added a case, psu, ram, etc... I'm not sure you wouldn't be better off with an ITX build. (though it's time for a new nano standard).

100% Agree.

This is why these boards are so cheap, and the board makers are putting very little of their budget towards software support.

The N2 looks like it will be a great board. And Odroid is the best in the game in terms of providing software support.

I imagine over the next few months, RK3399 software support will become more mature since there's so many of them on the market currently.

Also found this wiki page about chip maker openness: https://linux-sunxi.org/Comparison_of_chip_maker_openness

The excuses seem to go straight from "too new" to "too old" without passing through "working fine".

If the problem is "market demand too low to fund a development team that can deliver stable software before the hardware is obsolete" aren't those precisely the symptoms you'd expect?

I realized that when I got the first PINE64. Sounded great on paper: 64bit, gig ethernet 2GB memory. But the OS provided was terrible. And there were hacks and patches all over the place.

I would have loved to keep buying more, and the PINE guys came out with more devices. But I've stayed away due to the utterly poor software support.

The H6 processor it uses isn't well supported yet and is still reasonably new. See support here: https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort

Armbian has only started to work on it, see here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-...

Orange Pi make some great boards, they just take a while for them to be well supported. The Allwinner H2+/H3 which was originally released in 2014 has only got really good software support over the last 2-3 years.

Who is using a Raspberry Pi to browse the web and watch Youtube videos? That's a crazy way to review an SBC.

If the advertised features are the gpu and 4k, it's the minimum that should work well.

(The RPi actually runs a browser pretty well).

The RPi is incredibly popular as a Kodi and emulation machine. Browsing the web and watching YouTube videos is well within its abilities; the YouTube plugin on Kodi is a reasonable good, ad-free interface to YouTube.

That said, yes, some websites are grotesquely slow; but that's more a poor reflection on them.

The primary factor with using a Desktop Linux is GPU support. The Videocore IV in the Raspberry Pi is as close as to open source as you're going to get on an ARM board. Plus it's been around since 2013 according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

Compared to this to the Mali-T720 MP2 in the Orange Pi 3, GPU support in Linux is virtually non-existent. https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali

This article is a little outdated but is still very relevant: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7037-multimedia-related-stuf...

Also, note that GPU support on Android is usually a lot better compared to Linux. This is because they are using an older, more mature kernel.

>Also, note that GPU support on Android is usually a lot better compared to Linux. This is because they are using an older, more mature kernel.

The kernel has very little to do with GPU support. It only contains a small shim to allow userspace libraries to access the hardware.

GPU support on Android is done entirely through proprietary code, sourced from the chip vendor. Even projects like Lineage OS use binary blobs pulled from the vendor's packages.

For 1080p video decoding, the Pi is actually surprisingly good at it (smooth source file playback at the original 30 fps). I use it as a Kodi machine plugged into my TV.

Unless you have a need for using the GPIO pins or the camera interface, I really don't see a compelling use case for SBCs in general. I am happily using a network of Raspberry Pis to control my model railroad and I have track sensors connected to the GPIO pins. I have also used a Raspberry to acquire data from a CO2 sensor via USB and upload to a server. I put a few of them around my house and discovered that some rooms had disconcertingly high levels. What I have _not_ done with Raspberry Pi is to surf the web!

What CO2 sensors are you using? (I understand that the cheaper ones infer CO2 levels from measuring other things, but interested all the same).

Its this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H7HFINS/ref=oh_aui_sear...

I put a four of them around my house, each connected to a Raspberry Pi. CO2 levels were way higher than I expected.

Thanks. Huh, they're far more expensive on amazon.co.uk (£132)!

They're pretty much the cheapest general purpose PC one can purchase. The market for cheap PCs is _enormous_.

And the RPi can output composite video, making it accessible to just about anyone with television.

It's not bad except that video playback in the browser is not really up to the mark. Wouldn't a Chrome book be a cheaper and better solution for people who need to a general web browsing system?

The main sticking point for Raspberry Pi (at least for me) is the community, and the constant optimization and stability improvements on the software/kernel side for the sub-par hardware. Of course you can buy a device that would run circles around the latest Pi models, but that's missing the point, imo.

Exactly. You gotta stay with the crowd on Arm SBC's or you'll vastly increase the risk of being the first person who is doing something with the non-Pi platform and then hitting bugs and configuration issues. I hope pi teams will eventually upgrade their hardware platform.

There's a substantial audience for SBCs as Multimedia PCs, Emulation consoles, and even as a primary desktop. The RPi interface has effectively become a peripheral standard for all the different case/input/etc hats it can wear. (RetroFlag makes great use of this). With a low price point and reasonably decent performance, why wouldn't they have such an audience?

So yes, that the Orange Pi struggles to watch YouTube videos, scroll through web pages, et al is an important concern. It sounds like driver support just isn't there for the hardware it provides.

I'd hazard to say, on HN no less, that SBCs as tinker boards for robotics and cybernetics projects are the minority use-case.

While the Orange Pi 3 may have driver issues, the older models work quite well. Just as you suspect, I'm using an Orange Pi One combined with a usb arcade board/stick to run RetroOrangePi[0] and for game emulation it works great.

0. http://www.retrorangepi.org/

edit: typos

I can't speak for the Orange Pi 3, but I have an Orange Pi PC2, two Orange Pi Ones, and an Orange Pi Zero and I'm very happy with all of them.

Interesting, while the OP might not find the boards interesting my interest is piqued. Anyone know if the GPU could be capable of running OpenCL or similar? Could be a hidden gem for cheap edge-AI on the edge. Though it sounds like GPU support could be rudimentary at best.

https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-...

I have one of these, currently you're limited to the 3.10 kernel from Android.

I bought one for the gbit ethernet & emmc. No intention to use it as a desktop.

Once support is mainlined and armbian is working it'll be great. At the moment though you can't even buy a case!

This article has nothing substantial in it.

What kind of analysis is this?

"I'd normally include a range of benchmarks for the board but I had so much trouble running them on the Orange Pi 3, only a few are worth reporting."

Then it goes on:

"Pi 3 recorded an average connection speed of 45.7Mbps via iPerf, a perfectly reasonable result and comparable with the Raspberry Pi 3 boards and the Rock Pi 4. It also racked up a score of 22 on the GLmark 2 GPU benchmark, slightly above a reported score of 18 for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B on Ubuntu 16.04."

They'd better let numbers speak instead of letting emotional writing confirm a weak hardware review.

It wasn't a hardware review though, it was a platform review. If the platform has so many issues that you can't even test the hardware in an apples-to-apples comparison, that's worth mentioning in a review.

What I understand is that they can write whatever they want and wave their hand when it comes to benchmarks?

By the way, what part of the cited comparison where the "platforms" as you want to call them, compare on equal foot let them off the hook for a professional benchmarking in other areas?

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