The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
The article claim that you can't compare a $150 "mini PC" to a cheap Pi is unrealistic.
I got a lot of flack (elsewhere not here) for setting up a mini-cluster for K8S that used mini PCs that I claimed are cheaper than Pi. Note that I can actually buy a mini-PC for $150 whereas you can make up any imaginary MSRP you'd like for a Pi but you're paying $170 today on Amazon regardless if the unobtainable price is $5 or $99.
There are plenty of low performance PC compatibles from Beelink and similar places that cost less delivered tomorrow than a Pi delivered tomorrow AND have higher performance specs than a legacy Pi.
What is your definition of a dead market?
"Generally available" means that I can order one or a dozen today for MSRP or less and get a shipping date between "today" and "end of the week".
"In demand" means that I can order one today for a little over MSRP or look around for a sale to get one under, but I might not be able to find a single supplier who wants to sell me a dozen at once.
"Speculation bubble" means that I can't find anyone to sell me one at MSRP without going to ridiculous lengths like setting bots out to scoop the competition, and I certainly can't call a distributor to get a dozen at MSRP -- but if I'm willing to pay a high premium, I can buy one today.
I think RPi4 is in a speculation bubble.
I'm sure the pricing doesn't bother enterprise or industrial users, and the Pi Foundation is almost entirely devoted to catering to them.
But hobbyists are super sensitive to pricing and ease of access, and the only reason to still use it is that tons of projects are already built to run on Pi's. Even then, Units are almost entirely allocated to enterprise/b2b demand, so the retail customer market is so extremely undersupplied that it's just not worth actively hunting for days just to run an interesting app you wanted to tinker with.
That's a temporary situation though. The RPi foundation folks have said the expect supply to be back to normal sometime this year.
Call me crazy, but I don't have any problem believing that things will get back to normal soon, and that Pi's of various sorts will indeed return to MSRP, or very near MSRP.
So much so that out of 30M a year the Pi foundation decided to allocate an extra 100k for end users, which did improve availability, but still it's clear that most production is going to corporate partners and not end users.
And not to beat a dead horse, but there's good reason to believe that this situation is temporary and that supplies (and prices) will stabilize sooner than later.
All of this "the market for Raspberry Pi is dead" stuff seems like pure hyperbole to me.
I expect to go into 2024 with the same problem.
You can also use my telegram bot https://github.com/sschueller/rpilocatorbot which will send you a message as soon as the one you want is in stock.
I just got myself a CM4 a few days ago thanks to rpilocator.
This. I replaced my Homebridge/PiHole RasPi 4B 4GB with a J4125 Acer Desktop system at a cost of $88, all in with all accessories needed from ebay. It has 4GB of upgradable ram, a reasonable SSD, 1G ethernet, and a bonus Sata port for a NAS. It even included a power supply! Pihole's web UI is shockingly faster for me too.
Edit: Link to system, price went up a little, still better than a Pi. https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=i...
If you really want to deep dive on this topic see parky towers https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
From a quick look it looks like the MiniPC has half the cores, half the max ram, half the shipped ram, much less I/O performance (SATA @ 400MB/sec vs NVME at 3GB/sec), much less network (1 x GigE vs 2 x 2.5Gbe), much older/slower USB (2.0 vs 3.1), hugely larger (looks like 20x the volume), and likely has a fan.
So sure the MiniPC is a good for for some uses where power, noise, and size don't matter. But if you want a router, firewall, server, or desktop you might well be much happier with an 8GB ($140 with nice passively cooled metal case) or 16GB rk3588.
On performance it's hard to say, if you want to compare performance post any open source benchmark you want. Although I don't have the 3GB/sec NVME JeffG benchmarked in the original post, but anything opensource that exercises the CPU/ram should work. I do have a kill-a-watt around if there's interest in perf/watt.
For running DHCP, router, dns-masq, firewall, and the mentioned PiHole seems like a much better fit for a Rk3588 @ a few watts and 10 or so cubic inches than a used system @ 600 inch^3. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Rk3588 faster than a celeron J4125.
The RK3588 is a 4 big core 4 little core design, so throwing out 8 cores as a point of difference is kind of misleading. Yes, there are 4 extra small cores in there.
If you just want a small cheap system, used ebay systems are pretty hard to beat. J4125 class CPUs are an excellent choice. At this point "faster" is less important than "works" I think. And the RK3588 isn't even touching the price you can get a used J4125/J4105 for. $55 https://www.ebay.com/itm/115671002802
Claiming a J4125 is "big" and "noisy" is similarly misleading. J4125 is a 10W TDP. RK3588 is a 12W TDP. You can passively cool either. N5105 and N6005 are similar power profiles. My J4105 idles at 3-5W, runs proxmox with my firewall and a bunch of VMs for databases and servers. 32GB RAM.
I couldn't find a Rock5 with case and power supply for anywhere near $150, and not even a bare board with 8GB for that. Let alone your claimed $140 for the full package.
Then there's architecture... A lot of packages you can find off the shelf for x86 just aren't built for arm. It bites you in the random places and burns time. Lots of time. I've burned far too much time trying to make ARM servers work.
Here's the link for the $119/$139 deal:
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
The ship today price from amazon was $180.
I was curious about system power (not just TDP), so I hooked up a kill-a-watt, at idle, ubuntu 22.04, normal stuff running (like sshd) and so far it's taken 7 hours to accumulate 0.01 kwh, sadly not very accurate yet, so I'll leave it go till at least 0.02 kwh, looks like an average idle around 1 watt.
I've been pondering some easy benchmarks from the command line, so far I've come up with:
1) openssl speed -bytes 16384 sha256 sha512 aes-256-cbc rsa2048
2) 7z b # benchmark mode for 7zip
3) wget https://github.com/jtsiomb/c-ray/releases/download/v2.0/c-ra...; tar xvf c-ray-2.0.tar.gz; cd c-ray-2.0; make; time ./c-ray-fast ./sphfract.scn -s 3840x2160 -r 4 -o output.pnm -p
4) any similar ideas that are easy, reports a useful number (or a few) in 5 minutes or less?
I'll run similar later on the rk3588, once I get a better idea of the idle watts.
Using geekbench 5 your J4105 gets 396 single-core and 1294 multi-core. The rk3588 gets 684 single-core and 2680 multi-core. So rk3588 is 1.7x the single core performance and 2.0x the multi-core performance at around half the power (2w vs 4w).
I've not found make problems with ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Large source code compiles like building rust/go just work, and so far I've found all the ubuntu packages I expected. Sure I'm sure there's some codes that don't like AArch64, but the situation does seem to be improving.
Benchmarks are fine and good, but immaterial. I don't really care about 50% more or less speed. It's a server. If I do my job right +/- a few 10s of ms for response time is immaterial. The speed delta between the EMMC and SATA M.2 may well make up for raw processor speed in my use cases which tend to use the I/O.
Your particular board is very niche. I mean, yeah, you have nice ethernet. But that's it. I need my M.2 slots. I need more ram. I could get an x86 board with everything for more $$$, nvme, 2.5-10GBE. It's a compromise.
The J4105 is like 1/3rd the price of the rk3588/rk3588s.
I could go on. To each his own. I'm glad you like your board :) Enjoy it.
My theory is that, despite the economics for using Pi's completely flipping to making it a ridiculous decision for most applications, the decade+ of tutorials, Youtube videos, forum posts, github READMEs, etc all describe using Raspberry Pi's as the way to deploy XYZ open source project is enough of a "moat" that it just keeps the demand high enough to suck up supply.
Also I don't think that people realize how good 3-5 year old technology is relative to the price. There's definitely a great arb there right now, and I think it's just going to get better.
The Raspberry Pi brand is wildly strong, but it's eroded for me because of scalpers and lack of availability - hopefully they can right the ship before it's tainted for good.
While this doesn't apply so much to mini x86 PCs, most random ARM SBCs have hit or miss software support, as Jeff mentions in the article.
Admittedly, I would prefer a RPI over whatever board this article was about, if I could get one for (near) MSRP. Part of it is the price, a "$35" computer is cheap enough to fry it making a mistake, or permanently lock it in a box as a camera controller in the garage, or whatever project idea requires... then buy more for the next project.
A lot of RPI tutorials treat it more like a software appliance, where you run one thing on the device, and if you want to run a second thing you use a second RPI - more like a Linux-based microcontroller than a server. Thats only possible at the $35 price point. I have a used PC that I use as a server at home for a few things, running a 2015 i5 chip. I would never use it to just run one thing, or lock it up with a project. It basically has to sit in my house, hosting a bunch of things at once. Meanwhile I've been buying a handful of Pis since 2015, and I have them scattered over the house... one controlling smarthome stuff, one controlling the 3D printer... one in the garage... etc.
The article literally says the opposite.
> Assuming Pis ever become available at MSRP again—and right now that still feels a long way off
Like comparing a Chevy Volt on the used car lot that I could buy tonight vs a hypothetical Tesla concept car with an anticipated delivery date of 2026. I'm sure the vaporware has better specs but its not "fair" to pretend to compare them.
But, you are in a sense technically correct on a small scale, yes.
CM4 are much harder to find though. Hopefully that changes this year, but from what I've heard it will take longer for some reason :(
So basically not available.
And as you said CM4's are impossible to get. I have one I ordered two years ago.
Nothing against Pi. I have some older models and their great. Just the market availability and price gouging makes them impractical right now.
The article is about the RK3588, it's a substantial upgrade in CPU performance, I/O performance, and network performance over the PI4. It also connects things directly to a much faster PCIe instead of relying on USB connected chips. I think of the Pi4 as popular, but a toy.
I compiled either rust or go (I did both, so I forget) 7 times faster than a 8GB ram Pi4 with my rk3588. It's really in a different class than the Pi4.
The rk3588 is in the order it today, get it this week type availability. I found it for sale in 3 places, 2 with ship times of 2 weeks, 1 with a get it the day after tomorrow.
MiniPCs are in the similar class, but compared to a $120 rk3588 with 8GB ram are often a bit lacking. Often MiniPCs are used, less than 8GB ram, don't have two 2.5G ethernet, require a custom wall wart+barrel connector, often have a fan, are usually in a cheap/plastic case (instead of a CNC machined case with integrated heat sink for $20), and in a much larger case. My case is 3.75" x 2.75" x 1" or so.
So yes, you can get a used MiniPC, maybe you don't mind missing a 2nd ethernet port, and sure you can buy more storage/ram. But for the size and power efficiency it's going to be hard to match. I suspect the x86 in the $120-$140 range (with 8GB of ram) are going to be slower, but I'm hoping someone posts some benchmarks to compare.
Generally even the mini PCs are much larger than the rk3588.
So it's silent, reasonably fast, and enough ram to run everything Iv'e tried. Software compatibility has been good, my first choice of OS worked (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS), compiling rust and go "just worked", and it's a decent little server.
So generally smaller, quieter, more efficient, and lower power than whatever plastic encased random mini PC. I think I'd have a problem getting something nicer and cheaper in a PC, even used.
I'm curious about the Celeron N4020 vs rk3588. Keep in mind that the rk3588 vs Pi4 isn't really in the same class. In a compile based benchmark my rk3588 was 7 times as fast as the Pi4. JeffG's geekbench multi placed it 3+ times faster than the Pi4. On the same compile benchmark the rk3588 was about half as fast as my quad core xeon system from 2015, not bad for a few watts.
Do you have a transcoding benchmark you prefer to compare? Or something else media related? Or storage? JeffG managed 3GB/sec which is pretty respectable for a small/cheap widget.
I've seen decent x86's, but matching the spec (case, 8GB ram, 2x2.5G, usb-c power supply, fanless, etc) leads to some pretty old x86's and higher prices. Not to mention that I'm far from convinced that chips like the celeron N4020 are an upgrade, even ignoring power efficiency.
Keep in mind that the rk3588 is MUCH more available than the Pi4. The day I looked I found them at 3 stores, but decided to use Amazon with quick shipping instead of the cheaper aliexpress with 2-4 week delay. Keep in mind the rk3588 is smaller and lower power than most (all?) mini PCs. It's takes up less space than my phone on my desk and is about twice as thick. The passive heat sink/case is cool to the touch under normal use, and only gets noticeably warm if I'm running something intensive, like a make -j 12 on a large build.
I've heard Raspbian and OpenWRT have newer kernels working, unsure if all the required bits are upstreamed though. Progress is being made though, and people have newer kernels working.
Although, if you have twice the ram and a huge SATA and huge amount more CPU power, that just means it spends a higher percentage of time in sleep mode, so its probably about same total energy consumption, just higher peak power consumption.
Its worth pointing out that prices have gone up somewhat but "generally" "away from overinflated areas" you pay a bit more than a buck for a watt-year of wall outlet power, so trying to spend an extra $50 upfront to go ARM and save four watts will take a VERY long time to pay off, perhaps infinity depending on inflation and interest rates, if you're plugged into a wall; battery applications have stranger financials of course.
Mind sharing how I can find one of these?
You can search on Amazon and pay about 10% to 25% premium to the dropshipper or get a general gist of the market and then order off the website (where it'll cost like 20% less but then you have to pay for shipping, no such thing as a free lunch). Sometimes old models will be cleared off cheaper on Amazon, you really need multiple tabs open while you're shopping. Usually you get a windows 10 pro or win11 installation of questionable genealogy installed on a fraction of a TB SATA for the price.
Its hard to keep track of who's drop shipping from the factory for you on Amazon vs who's just entering orders for you on AliExpress vs who's selling natively from stock (like traditional retail). Unlike the ARM SBC marketplace they actually have stuff in stock for sale when they advertise a MSRP, I haven't run into any issues like that.
I'm pretty happy with the ultra low end of the Beelink products. Their numerous competitors are likely pretty similar.
NUCs and the like are more expensive than buying ARM SBC boards, but they are probably more reliable. Probably. Of course for twice the price you could buy 10% or 20% more devices for a project.
I set up, well, am currently setting up, a medium sized Rancher and Elasticsearch cluster for reasons that are hard to explain, so I needed an odd number around half a dozen. So far, so good.
And now that the power envelope is closer to a gen 4 Intel (which is trounced by modern Celerons like the n6xxx and n50xx series), the functionality gap is more obvious.
To be fair, though, I think that most people have unrealistic expectations of what low-end SBCs can do as far as “desktop computing” is concerned.
I do use a Pi as a very nice, utterly silent and fast thin client (backed by an i7 in a closet), but if I wanted to run local apps (browser, light office, etc.) I’d just go and get a NUC or an $150 refurbished small form factor desktop (there are great Ryzen boxes with modern mobile APUs from Minisforum and Beelink, but I am extremely wary of their quality control, and the really interesting ones are too expensive to risk it).
I am curious to hear more about this. Do you have bad experiences to share?
That is exactly what I have found.
To me, the beauty of the Pi and other SBCs is GPIO/SPI/I2C - you have a Linux machine that's only a short hop from the Real World.
For running a homelab k8s cluster or a mini-desktop, a NUC / minipc has always been a better option.
I agree that there's a stronger justification for the desktop (and TV-dongle / emulation station, for which there's just a lack of better-suited competition) use case than the home lab one.
Actually, I'd argue that the market segment is squarely a first world one, mainly because it's far from the most convenient computing platform and alternatives are far more useful when you can only afford to own a single computer. Being unable to make calls or use messaging apps (access to whatsapp is almost a requirement in tons of countries), and coming with no built-in battery makes them a complete non-starter as a potential main device.
That’s a hard no from me.
Otherwise I’d be all over it, as the specs look great!
Arch Linux on ARM has also come a long way in the past few years.
I'm not running a server farm with 1000's of nodes and full time staff to make Linux work on them. Rather I've got a bunch of homogeneous devices for personal use and the more similar I can make them all the better. It's why I moved away from the embedded ARM dumpster fire to low power amd64 motherboards for my Kodi/WifiAP machines. They generally just work, and if they do break there is still no bespoke tinkering.
The Raspberry Pi only mitigates this by being popular enough that there is interest to keep it going and develop around its warts and keep the software going. But it's not without its pain when you step away from Raspian.
If I needed another AP, I would get another decently powerful but lower idle current machine to replace the main entertainment center one, and then trickle the N3700 elsewhere. Or if I didn't want to do that, I believe I have seen one or two amd64 boards targeted at being RPi replacements. The biggest thing is I want expansion PCIe so I've got flexibility later.
For power supplies, I'm using PicoPSUs on both. But I've also seen motherboards that take 18VDC. Or if you are willing to do some wiring you could power multiple motherboards from one supply.
Fun seeing Jeff try out the expansion slots. The m.2 NIC is cute. I hope eventually CXL starts giving us some new smaller more modular add-ons. But it's not that small so I imagine cards being cable-attached in many situations.
It's wild how long the PC market has been able to go without facing intercompatibility issues. x86 everywhere is a slow thing to change course on.
I wish Intel's Lakefield had a cost-optimized sbc for it. That chip was so awesome, so small, so low power. With 1 very very nice core, solid gpu, and all ram on package. It would have made a very interesting sbc part. Trying to ship them in enough volume to get somewhat modestly priced chips from Intel would have been an absolute nightmare though, a huge gamble. That seems to be something brands like Chuwii have gotten really good at- finding what chips they can buy for below retail, and selling really nice machines around that at screaming value to consumers.
Truly useful, truly open hardware, cannot exist under current market conditions, for one reason or another. For now, we're all stuck with defaults; despite all of our progress, every computer you can imagine primarily using relies on someone's monopoly, and I imagine there is a nonzero amount of wealthy, powerful people who do not want this arrangement to change.
For example, Honeycomb LX2 (https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...) -- very solid, great specs, upgradeable RAM up to 64 GB, but its price has been increasing over time, now at $919. Still, looks tempting to me.
Allwinner SoC have pretty active community that provides really good hw support. https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
Pine64 and Olimex have several hw boards available to buy.
Another one is NXP IM.X series that also has really good mainline Linux support.
Wouldn't half as slow be twice as fast?
Things get weird at 5W. There's phones and tablets, but these aren't really general compute devices. But then comes these SBCs like Rasp. Pi, Rock 5B, Le Potato, Beaglebone Black, etc. etc. These use phone/tablet CPUs but in a form factor conductive to USB ports and HDMI ports... like a SFF Desktop.
I've seen people say "Its a great small desktop!!", and hook up the Rasp. Pi (or whatever) to a $200 27" monitor drawing 80W and I'm just... confused by that. You're not making a good power-consumption argument, or a cost-benefit argument either, most of your costs are on the damn monitor (both in power and in $$$).
I think there's value in the $60 7" screens though, which return the form factor closer to its Phone/Tablet roots. With such a small screen, the price is dramatically lower, while the power-consumption plummets to 5W SBC + 5W Screen (10W total).
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In theory, 10W total power consumption fits inside of 15.4W requirements on PoE. So there are real benefits to cutting the power consumption to an appropriate size.
I guess there's also a myriad of "headless" applications where a 5W Rasp. Pi (or competing SBC) is useful. But in my experience, most of those headless applications should be a VM and/or Docker image instead.
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With that being said: this Rock 5B seems to draw 15W worst case, which leaves the available area for PoE. That could be fixed with a local battery pack (1270 Lead Acid packs are only $35) + some kind of power-controller to even out the power-draw. I admit that's a bit of custom electronics, but those kinds of custom-electronic problems are why we have ATMega / Arduino Unos laying around, right? :-)
My first search revealed: https://store.ui.com/products/u6-lite-us
> Power method PoE, passive PoE (48V)
> Max. power consumption 12W
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> I guess 15W SBC is not so much of issue for PoE?
Its not just 15W SBC, but also ~5W screen (assuming 7" screen). So it'd be closer to 20W worst case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet#Two-_and_f...
> The original IEEE 802.3af-2003[1] PoE standard provides up to 15.4 W of DC power (minimum 44 V DC and 350 mA)[2][3] on each port.[4] Only 12.95 W is assured to be available at the powered device as some power dissipates in the cable.[5]
Talking about original PoE standard here. Looks like 13W is closer to the practical maximum.
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It looks like there are newer PoE+ and 4PPoE standards that increase the power.
> U6-LR
U6-LR requires the updated PoE+ standard which gives more power.
I suspect that quite a bit more than 1% of users play graphics heavy games or otherwise tax their machine beyond the practical limit of a cheap ARM SBC. If you'd said 2/3, I'd be much more inclined to agree.
Somewhat funny is that the top 2 and 3 PC games most popular in 2022 have 1993 graphics, Minecraft and Roblox [2]. Another list puts Minecraft on 4 and Roblox on 3 [3].
[1] August 2022, GeForce Now Surpasses 20 Million Registered Users, https://gfnsource.com/article/218/GeForce-NOW-Surpasses-20-M...
[2] https://activeplayer.io/top-15-most-popular-pc-games-of-2022...
These little boards usually offer GPIO, SPI, I2C, and sometimes even CAN natively, which makes them awesome for plugging into real world devices without needing another microcontroller hop in the middle. I've used boards in this 5-10W class for automotive reverse engineering, higher-order drone control like computer vision / flight planning (paired with a microcontroller for the hard-realtime control loop), and robotics. I think they're awesome for that use case.
In theory, the Beaglebone SBCs are excellent for this.
The Beaglebone Black (2014 era design, but still works) has Hard-Realtime PRUs for those kinds of loops.
More recent Beaglebone AI (2018ish) has a Cortex-A + 2xArm Cortex-M4, so two embedded microcontrollers for you to use onboard.
The most recent Beaglebone AI 64 has a Cortex-A main-core + Cortex-R cores for guaranteed realtime operations.
Oh yeah, and those PRUs never went away either.
The $10 to $20 price point for "PoE Splitters" runs around 15 watts at 5v fixed and you're going to have to pay the $20 to $30 price point if you want selectable 5 / 9 / 12 volt output and more than 25 watts or so.
The place to buy these things is the security camera field. They're all about wanting a couple amps at 12 volts for IR illuminators off a PoE cable and applications similar to that.
Like a lot of no-name power equipment don't expect it to last in hot summers in an attic and don't expect to run at 99% of listed current for very long without overheating. Its better than the totally fake budget USB charger market or mostly fake ratings PC power supply market, but its not like buying engineering stuff from big names where you can trust the ratings (like a Mean Well 15 watt industrial supply will actually output 15 watts at industrial temps for a decade or so, at least so far, but you'll pay $$$ for real true ratings as opposed to consumer imaginary ratings)
If you actually need 15 watts I'd buy a "25 probably fake watts" splitter and expect a long life from it for less than $30 delivered.
The market price was about "fifty bucks" for similar just a couple years ago.
The newer standard uses all 4 twisted pairs, so its 71W power / 48V / 4 wires == 370mA on the average on each pair of wires. Though "worst case" 960mA due to unbalanced power draw it seems.
The 4PPoE standards also run with 1Gbps protocol, meaning all 4 twisted pairs are data. So all 4 are data + power. I'm not quite sure how it all works electrically... though I loathe to be the guy to design the splitters to pull power evenly from 4 different pairs.
VLM assumed one wire pair, 71W specification, 960mA worst case current draw == 70V+.
Which was incorrect, because there's 4 wires. In PoE classic, 2-pairs were for data + 2-pairs for power. In 4PPoE, there's 4-pairs for data and the _SAME_ 4-pairs for power.
There are additional PoE standards extending up to about 71W at the client device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet#Standard_i...
802.3at, aka PoE+, can deliver 25W and is not hard to find even on affordable switches.
https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/download/20230...
(https://github.com/armbian/community)
https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/DietPi_ROCK5B-ARMv8-Bull...
Until very recently, the Rock 5 was only supported by more bleeding edge builds and I tend to stick to more stable images when I'm reviewing a board—especially the builds that come recommended by the vendor themselves.
But it was good to see you confirm one of my red flags about the board:
I have been looking for a good board to run https://github.com/pimox/pimox7 (I currently use my Pi 4 8GB for that, hosting a bunch of test LXC containers), and something faster that could boot off an NVME without hassle would be great. Looks like the Rock 5B isn’t it.
If it can get good upstream kernel support and the price comes down, these could be good for all the situations where a Pi felt too slow.
If instead these continue to rely on custom kernel forks and have 3-digit pricetags, they're probably best left as a niche option.
> This Orange Pi 5 uses the same Rockchip RK3588—well, almost the same. The Orange Pi has the RK3588S, which has a little less bandwidth than the chip in the Rock 5. It has a lone M.2 slot on the bottom running at PCIe Gen 2 speeds, which means this SSD only gets about 400 MB/sec—just as slow as on a Pi. The Orange Pi 5 also only has 1 Gbps Ethernet, and not even a full 40-pin GPIO header, but it does have a full size microSD card slot, so that's an upgrade! But the Orange Pi 5 is a lot less expensive. You can get the same CPU and GPU performance, at least—and in my case it actually benchmarked a tiny bit faster—for half the price!