Doesn't matter anyway. They shot themselves in the foot by removing hardware video encoding. I switched to the Orange Pi 5 so I can keep my video encoders and also benefit from the nice TPU.
Also are you saying that you've already switched to the Orange Pi 5? That's amazingly fast considering the RPi5 was launched less than 2 weeks ago.
Doesn't strike me as odd. Orange Pi 5 has been available for a relative long time.
After seeing the Raspberry Pi 5 they were holding on for is not worth it, they finally pulled the plug with Orange Pi 5.
Way to talk about emotional decisions while being bitter about some bad experience with another SBC.
I have personally had great experiences with other SBCs, and I'm not just talking VisionFive2, but ARM ones, over the years.
There's a lot of them, and it takes some care in choice. Insist on the few ones that have SoCs with good upstream support. There's also a tendency for good ones to come in series; the already named Orange Pi 5 has many predecessors, and established reputation.
And a friendly reminder below that Raspberry Pi does have its own dark history.
Be it Codec licenses to use the hardware acceleration, camera DRM, or hardware bugs.
Such as the USB protection dropping too much voltage on the first Pi, or the 2nd generation rebooting when exposed to light, or the third "+" models erratic ethernet behavior.
Or the main serial port suddenly not working, because now it's bluetooth's, and you have to use an alternative, unreliable one which baudrate scales with cpu clock. And that broken serial port staying broken despite RPi4 added more hardware serial ports.
Or RPi4 shipping w/o a heatsink, and throttling constantly until one is added.
And RPi5 still not supporting voltages above 5v via usb-pd, despite demanding more peak current than ever before.
Then there's people issues, like forgetting its good-for-society not-for-profit and focusing on making money. The "Pi 400", as well as prioritizing industry customers; it was really hard to get a Pi4 for a period of time spawning years.
I'm saying this despite I own all models, keep most of them in use still, and will likely get a rpi5 down the line, just to mess around, despite trying to move most of my computing to the standard RISC-V ISA.
That's fair.
> about some bad experience with another SBC.
I didn't say one bad experience. I've tried a load of those "pi-killer" SBCs that have universally crap software support. Normally requiring some old version of Debian/Ubuntu and even then with some of their "killer" features broken. It is good to see Orange Pi actually doing some work there, maybe it is time to try again with an alternate board.
I am bitter because it's frustrating that unlike hardware bugs that are actually hard to fix once you've started shipping, software can be updated. But none of the other companies invest in that. It feels like they are just on to the next version, desperate to keep ahead on features. Compared to Raspberry Pi, where for example, things like the Pi 4 throttling issue are fixed/improved down the line.
> RPi5 still not supporting voltages above 5v via usb-pd
I didn't see this one. Do you have details?
Like the previous boards, it doesn't support usb power beyond 5v. This time it's usb-pd proper, but still has that limit.
So It's the same as usual. Most usb supplies out there (majorly phone chargers) won't output much current at 5v, only at higher voltages, thus you need to buy a known-good supply especially just so that the rpi is happy.
And, as happened the last time, the old one is probably not good enough, as current requirements went up.
[1] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/
[2] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK/blob/master/examples/...
The rPi foundation doesn't care about the individual end users anymore. They make most of their money supporting commercial vendors. They're keeping up the appearance of being good to the little guy so they can keep their support ecosystem alive and well.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
[0] - https://www.raspberrypi.com/success-stories/korg-synthesizer...
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/04/230329-Yodec...
Yoto Player is another example but I don't know how many Pi-based ones they shipped, I'd guess more than 10k but I don't know.
(I say this using a cm4 for image acquisition commercially. Because of the way our pipeline works, I skip the hardware encoder anyway - first, it's a complete pain in the ass to use, and second, it can't handle full-resolution images from a pi camera. We're slower than video because of the resolution, but still capture between 1fps and 1/10fps depending on configuration, with enough headroom to do some on-device image classification using tflite, rotation and JPEG compression, etc.)
Obviously, it would need benchmarks, but taking that post at its word, the 5 can transcode twice as fast in software as the 4b could do in hardware.
That doesn't mean some other hardware platform wouldn't be drastically better, I just don't get the extreme reaction about the 5 when compared to the 4.
I have several Pi's around the house that I use for various projects, and none of them have ever involved video encoding. The one thing I can think of where it might be beneficial is my plex server, but that's an x86 machine right now, and it'll probably stay that way.
Then again, I feel the same way for remaining ARM, when they could very well have, with a similar timeline, moved to RISC-V RVA22+V. Many do not understand this now, but will in the coming months when VisionFive3 and other RVA22+V boards launch.
Such a wasted opportunity for Raspberry Pi.
Look how long it takes them to bump their software releases. And you want to throw an entirely new architecture in the mix? Why? I don't understand how you can be shocked by the decision to stick with what works and sells (very well). Which of their goals would be furthered by taking this significant risk?
Panfrost team is doing good work for GPU drivers for the RK3588 boards, but I expect that to take longer