The Orange Pi 5 Plus

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/01/20/1800

by rcarmo • 3 years ago

156 174 3 years ago

user_78327• 3 years ago

Keeping in mind that the i7 runs at nearly six times the wattage, this is pretty good3, and the key point here is that the Orange Pi 5+ generated the output at a usable pace–slower than what you’d get online from ChatGPT, but still fast enough that it is close to “reading speed”–whereas the Raspberry Pi 4 was too slow to be usable.
This also means I could probably (if I could find a suitable model that fit into 4GB RAM) use the Orange Pi 5+ as a back-end for a “smart speaker” for my home automation setup (and I will probably try that in the future).

This is pretty interesting for me. I had (wrongly, I suppose) assumed that hardware requirements for LLMs were “have a recent NVidia GPU” but this proves otherwise.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Hi! Author here. Mind that I had to test with relatively small, "dumb" LLMs. I have no doubt I can run whisper.cpp on the RK3588 _and_ a tuned LLM to handle intents, but it won't be a very smart one (I am hoping to find a good way to run quantized Mixtral, but given the RAM constraints on the 4GB board I didn't even try).

Edited to add: I'm looking for something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704982 (LLM in a Flash) even if I find something with 16/32GB of RAM, which is why I looked at OnnxStream as well (but of course the inference in LLMs is different, so I can't leverage the NVMe just yet).

user_78327• 3 years ago

Thanks! How "bad" are these LLMs though, especially for smart home-esque basic tasks? I'd imagine them to be alright-ish?

Havoc4• 3 years ago

I’ve run larger models on mine - work but quite slow.

You can get a 32 orange off aliexpress today already

timnetworks• 3 years ago

Inferencing can be done in software entirely (e.g. INT8) but it's very slow compared to GPU or APU. nVidia cornered the market because everything (tensorflow and everything after) is optimized for it, but you can get good results on AMD now, and on ARC too in some cases. And slow results entirely in software (CPU-RAM), which for personal and non-constant use may be just fine too.

user_78327• 3 years ago

Thanks! Do you have any guides/websites/github repos for running these models on CPUs?

nabakin• 3 years ago

Over the past year or so various projects have made it possible to run LLMs on just about anything. Some GPUs are still better than others like Nvidia GPUs are still the best for token throughput (via TensorRT-LLM), but AMD GPUs are competitive (via vLLM) and even CPUs can run LLMs at decent speeds (via Llama.cpp).

user_78327• 3 years ago

Thank you!

382• 3 years ago

is their website dead or something?

http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Well, it was there when I revised the draft early this morning... I'm betting having the link here won't help their uptime :)

382• 3 years ago

I'm not removing it. with all due respect, without a working URL the article is kind of useless to me. ultimately I want to buy or see the official pages on the hardware, which currently doesn't seem possible.

politelemon• 3 years ago

Is it running on an OrangePi perhaps?

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/eLIyr

ComputerGuru• 3 years ago

I can't take any of the benchmarks seriously when he is using very different hardware across the tests. I can somewhat understand comparing Orange Pi NVMe to the RPi 4 SATA because that's what ships out-of-the-box (but there's an NVMe hat available), even though it'll be rate-limited to USB 3.0 speeds. But I can't understand comparisons to the u59 micro that are actually run on an Intel machine and then not using an NVMe in the Intel for comparison.

This abounds across all tests, from the very first I/O tests that show the Orange Pi 5+ beating both Intel configurations to the OnnxStream test that shows Intel beating the Orange Pi 5+ even though the Intel unit has to load/stream the model from its paltry SATA disk while the Orange Pi 5+ is outfit with an NVMe drive.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Hi, author here. I tested with what I have, and with what I currently use to work and test with that is in the general price/performance range. If that isn't obvious, then I have to apologize and make an explicit note of that.

My u59 ships with SATA SSDs, as it happens.

I do have an Intel i7 13th Gen with PCIe 4.0 NVMes (and several modern Macs), but that would be so far off base (and so expensive) that it isn't even comparable. The i7-6700 is much closer in "value", if you will.

However, you are mis-reading the way the OnnxStream test works. It is still CPU-bound for the most part.

adrian_b• 3 years ago

I did not understand your complaints, so I have searched the specifications of Beelink u59.

This is a small computer with the previous generation of Intel Atom CPUs (Jasper Lake) and it happens to support only SATA SSDs, so your suggestion of using a NVMe SSD would have been impossible.

Even with the current generation of cheap Intel CPUs, i.e. Alder Lake N, for instance N100, the CPUs have very few PCIe lanes and most cheap computers do not have an M.2 socket that works at the full PCIe 3 speed of 32 Gb/s like the SSD of the tested OrangePi computer, but they have sockets with only 2 lanes or only 1 lane, which work at half speed or at quarter speed.

Most computers with RK3588 have a full-speed M.2 type M SSD socket and this is one of their advantages over most other computers in this price range.

Since the OnnxStream performance depends both on SSD and on CPU performance, there is no surprise that an Intel Skylake CPU using AVX2 instructions is so much faster than Cortex-A76 with much lower clock frequency that it wins the benchmark despite the slower SSD.

The only benchmarks more informative than these would have included comparisons with a computer using the direct competitor of RK3588, i.e. Intel N100 (which is faster for CPU-limited tasks, but not necessarily for those involving I/O or video), but it appears that the author does not have such a newer computer.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

You are 200% correct. I intended to use the N5105 for comparison, but it lacks the right instruction set--and I do end the article mentioning the N100 as something I'd like to compare with.

The RK3588 designs stood out to me as having a very nice PCIe layout (the RK3588s, for instance, doesn't), and that is one of the main reasons I wanted to test the Orange Pi 5+.

jerrysievert2• 3 years ago

i use an orange pi 5+ as a read replica for all of my home logs, open telemetry, system metrics (gathered via snmp), and environmental data.

i have it configured at 16gb of ram, a 2tb nvme, connected to my network at 1gbit, and to my nas to run iscsi at 2.5gbit.

it is a very nice little system, and has been rock steady running ubuntu 22.04. i plan on making it my primary database server, but that's a later project.

it's been in service for 8 months now, and has been quite impressive. highly recommended for those into small compute home databases.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Incidentally, one of the LXC containers I have running on mine has a copy of my IoT metrics database (2 years, roughly 10GB in SQLite, a bit over that when imported into Postgres). Queries are lightning fast compared to the Pi, even doing aggregations--which is why I mention at the bottom of the article that I intend to move my home automation stuff to it.

applied_heat• 3 years ago

What is your IOT metrics stack?

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

There was no mention that this costs >$100 which does limit its usage compared to a $35 rpi.

jsheard• 3 years ago

At current rates the best Pi you can get for $35 is a Pi4 with just 1GB of RAM, which isn't in the same league as the OP5+ 4GB.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

The article mentions that author wanted to see if the orange pi 5 plus could be the successor to the Pi4.

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

On the other hand, you can in fact do a lot with a RPi4 with 1GB of RAM. For me, once you reach $100 I'd much rather get one of the NUC-like boxes.

moffkalast3• 3 years ago

The Pi 5 + heatsink + customs fees also comes up to just over $100.

tonymet4• 3 years ago

I'm a longtime Pi fan but I'm really dubious of the single board computer market .

At $5-$10 (pi-zero / W) and $35 (pi3 / pi 4) these little boards made a ton of sense.

Pushing into ~ $120-$150 to me doesn't make any sense. You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case.

I saw his point on the per-watt performance which is valid, but are people running a room full of these things? Why spend so much to save 10 watts ?

Someone please enlighten me on how this segment still remains viable.

stefan_• 3 years ago

But the per-watt performance of these chips is usually terrible, made as they are on older silicon processes. Any recent-ish laptop CPU will have no problem beating them.

nic5472• 3 years ago

The Intel N100 is a Alder-Lake N chip, based on Intel 7. It's four of the small cores you find on 12-Gen Laptop processors, made with the same process.

It's successor arch, Meteor Lake has only recently launched, so the N100 shouldn't be too far off in terms of efficiency.

edvinbesic• 3 years ago

This resonates with me. I have a few zeros, 3’s and 4’s for random things (nerves projects, dns, bastion host etc) but the price point now puts it squarely in the “I better have a good use case for this” rather than “I want to tinker around and if it ends up in a drawer no big deal” camp.

tonymet4• 3 years ago

i'm with you. i'm leaning toward moving them all to a proxmox server

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

It's an interesting segment, especially now that Intel N100 machines are out. But it essentially depends on what you want to do, and what use/need you have for ARM hardware.

Me, I write fairly low-level stuff that runs on ARM (for kicks), so having one of these as a server/development sandbox makes a ton of sense (even though I have Macs and VMs and whatnot, some things you can only do with hardware).

I grant that you won't find normal people filling their closets with these. But when you walk past, say, a phone exchange, a 5G base station, or any other of hundreds of invisible machines out there, they'll be running a variation of these boards (perhaps slower and dumber, but soon ramping up to this kind of thing), because Intel lost the embedded market years back.

beachy2• 3 years ago

It's a good question. Here's my specific use case, I'm sure there are plenty more.

I have a golf simulator running in the cloud (AWS) on a g4dn.xlarge ec2 insurance.

At home, I use a raspberry pi 5 as a thin client. It plugs into a 4k projector and streams down the display of the cloud PC.

Because it's cheap and reliable, I can leave it in place sitting up on the ceiling attached to the projector. I wouldn't want to devote a more expensive laptop to the job - the raspberry pi 5 is just man enough for the job, powerful enough but only just.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

I did mostly the same for a while, but with a Pi 4: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700

jhot2• 3 years ago

I recently bought a mini pc with an AMD 5500u (6 cores, 12 threads, 15W), 16 GB DDR4, and a 512 GB nvme SSD for $225 (on sale a bit). I suspect it would run laps around the orange pi despite the similar price and wattage.

plagiarist2• 3 years ago

Which mini PC was that? That sounds great.

eropple7• 3 years ago

I've got a Ryzen 5560U mini-PC in my k8s cluster at home, and it's great. It is faster than the OPi5's that are also in the cluster; those are around the same speed as a few-year-old Celeron or so (edit: originally I said a N5105 but I'm not actually that sure). But I have them in my cluster because CPU perf isn't the only axis that matters. They're also cheaper, they're fanless, they're physically small, they're ARM so I can use them for arm64 builds at speeds faster than qemu offers, and they use less power. I guess I'm here for heterogeneous hardware.

jwells89• 3 years ago

Vastly better hardware and software support too by virtue of being x86. Preferred flavor of *nix, Windows, Haiku, whatever, as well as the possibility of virtualization of any of the above.

Not to knock ARM SBCs — ARM is great and I think holds a lot of promise for the future, but there’s no arguing that the platform tends to be restrictive outside of mainstream devices (e.g. Samsung Galaxies and Macs).

tonymet4• 3 years ago

which one did you get?

dxxvi• 3 years ago

I was going to say that mini pc's were more powerful and cheaper but then I realize that cheap mini pc's like yours use HDMI 2.0 (it can drive 2 or 3 4k@60Hz monitors but not 8k@60 like this Orange Pi 5 using HDMI 2.1). Mini PC's using HDMI 2.1 must be at least $400 a piece. At that price, the mini pc's CPU is much more powerful than this orange's.

varispeed2• 3 years ago

Why spend so much to save 10 watts ?

That's a wrong mindset to have. How are we going to improve environment if we will be careless about energy?

As in the saying > If you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves

jadamson• 3 years ago

How much energy was spent on raw materials, components, assembly, and shipping?

georgyo• 3 years ago

I used to think this way as well, but then I started doing the actual math.

My last power bill was ~$103 for exactly 256kw, or put another way about $0.40/kwh. For context this is in NYC. I'm sure other people have cheaper power elsewhere.

0.01kw * 24 hours * 30 days * 0.4 $/kwh = $2.88 a month or about $35 a year.

If something is going to be on constantly, the ROI on a 10watts savings can quickly out pace the initial investment.

And that is every 10 watts. Something using 100watts continuously is 10 times that.

This affected a bunch of my other thinking as well. Having a raspberry pi in my home as always on server costs as much a small linode instance and much less reliable.

Macha• 3 years ago

Similarly, I upgraded the GPU in my server from a decade old formerly high end gaming GPU to a modern lower-mid range because I wanted new video encoders, and a smoother Linux driver experience. But it's idle 99% of the time. The difference in idle consumption (80% lower on the new GPU) works out to €50/year, which means even if I didn't use any of the other features of the GPU, it would pay for itself in 3 years.

Video encoding power draw is also 86% lower and even if I found something to max the new card out, it's still 40% lower than maxing out the old card (for a lot more compute power than the ten year old card).

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of money. I thought my electricity was high because it's gone up a lot to 0.12 in South Texas.

MuffinFlavored2• 3 years ago

or put another way about $0.40/kwh.

I pay $0.16/kwh net of everything (all taxes + fees). That's insane.

tonymet4• 3 years ago

You're right to account for TCO. It's another good reason to try to sleep devices, use WOL.

also minding the cpu power state of the device , making sure it's running efficiently and going to sleep whenever possible.

evanreichard• 3 years ago

That’s wild. I’m right outside DC and last month I used 2066kWh for a total bill of $258.85. So, 0.13c/kWh.

I’m all electric heat pump. That ran for about 300hrs last month, so accounts for around 800kWh.

kornhole• 3 years ago

If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit.

My Orange PI 5 has been running Nextcloud, Mastodon, Jellyfin, XMPP, Cryptpad, Vaultwarden, and about a dozen other services/sites for about a year. I love it. Some apps only run on X86, and I install those on a VPS.

vladvasiliu2• 3 years ago

If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit.

Ideed, but I think one would be best served to actually do the math. I like having my own router on which I can segment stuff, for example, having my smart TV on the network but not allowing it to phone home and deliver me ads.

I have an old 6th-gen i5 I salvaged from work, which, I thought, must draw a lot of power, so I started looking at newer low-power models, like n5xxx or n100s. Well, if you want one with multiple network ports, it quickly costs around 2-300 Euros. You can also forget about having 10 Gb ports, although such Internet speeds are becoming common where I live, and you can get a 30 Euro dual 10Gb adaptor off Ebay which fits in the PC I already have.

Anyway, I don't actually need 10 Gb right now, so it's not really an issue in practical terms. But 300 Euros isn't exactly pocket change for me, so I sat down and did the math. I'd need around 3 years to break even on electricity costs. Then I went and bought a watt-meter off Amazon. Turns out, the horror-stories of older computers drawing around 40-50 W at idle didn't apply to my specific box, and it only drew around a third of what I had estimated, which means an 8-9 year break-even. Of course, rates will most likely increase over that period, which would bring it closer.

kristopolous• 3 years ago

There's some arm-only stuff that's fun to work with like risc-os and AOSP. Also if you're trying to fill out a support matrix, having an ARM machine is a useful thing to have around.

It's also cheaper and probably easier to work with than Apples ARM systems for these purposes (although the used market for the m1 will probably cross below a new pi within 2-3 years)

MuffinFlavored2• 3 years ago

You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case.

The last time I read a post like this I immediately rushed to buy an N100 that I now have sitting in my living room doing literally nothing, lol

It's funny how huge the market is for people (like myself) addicted to having the latest and great tech gadgets.

I have multiple of every Raspberry Pi... doing nothing.

sho_hn2• 3 years ago

I end up eventually using them up in various DIY projects. I like to have a pile around because it lowers the inhibitions to get started with one! Nothing to break your new-whim momentum like a missing part and shipping times.

intrasight• 3 years ago

I also had multiple Pi's doing nothing, and took advantage of the Covid shortage to sell them to folks who may be doing something.

Now waiting for my Pi 5.

ClumsyPilot• 3 years ago

The Point of PI is not the computer - it’s the GPIO, camera kit, infrared camera, various HATs, such as gps or motor control. It’s for making a camera that opens a door when it detects a cat, or puts more food when birds eat all the food in a feeder.

It’s not best for being a server in a closet

paulmd3• 3 years ago

The point of the pi was for teaching computer science in educational settings.

Of course it largely failed at that (imagine running a lab full of raspberry pi 1 model b with the original full-size sd card and phone usb chargers) but everything else is a retcon/product pivot. It wasn’t invented for hacker anything.

theodric3• 3 years ago

I spent a couple grand[1] building myself an all-flash Pi CM4 NAS that I reckon will deliver RoI in ~25 years at €0.39/kWh. I did it for the sport, mainly, and because I wanted silence and minimal power draw. It works pretty well, though!

The Pi has a nice ecosystem, is better for hardware hackery than N100 mini PCs, and like all cheapish consumer products, people will kinda buy them just to buy them. I have a Pi5 sitting unused on my desk. Doing my part to pay for Eben's private island, I guess. I'll find a use for it eventually.

[1] https://github.com/theodric/NASty/blob/main/NASty-bill-of-ma...

tomcam• 3 years ago

I’ve set a reminder for this date in 2049 to make sure ROI was achieved

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

if i knew the drawbacks of the apple tv and the extra money i'd have to spend on apps just to get it somewhat functioning as a network media player, i'd have been better off with the orange pi 5+

if it works as advertised.... my previous experiences with their zero line have been.... trying...

prakis• 3 years ago

There is a huge demand for Pi clones in the Industrial segment. Check RevolutionPi.com. $200 for a single Pi is cheap, the equivalent Intel Box costs close to $2000, yes 10x. It's even difficult to get decent number of Industrial Pis on time.

znpy• 3 years ago

Pushing into ~ $120-$150 to me doesn't make any sense. You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case.

And the power supply. Current-day SBCs aren't like the first-gen raspberry pi, where you could just recycle your old phone charger and off you went.

404mm• 3 years ago

Pi 5 is the first Pi I did not buy. I was always the early adopter of all Pi’s but that ended with 4.

For me, the killer was a combo of 3 things: 1. Too expensive relative to performance. 2. Availability of quite decent N100 (and similar) boxes with expandable memory and storage. 3. Not interested in Pi that should be actively cooled.

I always wished the Pi had eMMC storage but it never happened for the non-compute module versions.

I still have a few Pi’s around the house and they are plenty powerful for their purpose.

hammyhavoc• 3 years ago

Checked out RISC-V yet? That's becoming more interesting than ARM for me.

justin663• 3 years ago

What's the "I have less than a hundred dollars and I want a reasonably performing Linux desktop" RISC-V SBC option?

bpye3• 3 years ago

I’m in a similar boat with the Pi 5 being the first I haven’t bought. I do have one of the VisionFive 2 boards, but I’m more interested in the Milk-V Oasis board that’s supposedly coming near the end of the year.

Software support for RISC-V isn’t as good yet either. I don’t know of any hardware that supports the hypervisor extension, there is no IOMMU spec today, many distributions don’t give it the same support as ARM64, etc. It is definitely improving rapidly, but I don’t think there have been any really compelling RISC-V SoCs just yet.

pyaamb• 3 years ago

Been following the progress. Exciting to see it catch up on the software side!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1apoFXZ9ad8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhPKZ5JpbHw

moffkalast3• 3 years ago

I suspect the Pi Foundation was getting really annoyed at other Pi compatible boards capturing the high end ARM SBC niche. Their flagship Pi 4's Cortex-A72 is now almost a decade old and not even fast enough to run more than a very basic lightweight desktop and completely out of the question for the market section.

Each Pi so far was about a 30% jump in power consumption, this time it's over 130%. They couldn't get the performance they needed, so they cranked the Pi 5 TDP beyond what was sensible to compensate. I mean 5A over 5V USB-C is borderline non-standard and basically maxing out the current port without needing a regulator. It's really funny seeing the N100, a CISC for fucks sake, get 2-3x the performance while pulling 2 watts less under load. This is their AMD Bulldozer moment.

qwertox5• 3 years ago

I feel like these boards now have only one way to improve, and that is by adding AI capabilities. Like being able to load Whisper onto a board and use it for transcribing mic input.

Because the bigger-faster-hungrier race is putting them in direct competition with x64 boards, where you then ask yourself that for a couple of watts more you'll be able to get a real PCI slot or two to plug in whatever you want, and use the RAM you want.

nosebear• 3 years ago

This thing would be great for a low-power NAS, but no mainline kernel support, no buy :/

squarefoot3• 3 years ago

These links might be of interest.

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/33306-trying-to-use-opi5plus...

https://www.armbian.com/orangepi-5/

Havoc4• 3 years ago

I couldn’t get armbian to boot on mine

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Yeah, well, I do mention near the end that I would like a couple of SATA ports for it. I suppose one could stick a controller into the NVMe or Wi-Fi slot...

cedws2• 3 years ago

Damn, that's a shame. Why are these hardware companies too lazy to upstream?

roughly3• 3 years ago

The idle power draw at 5W is a little surprising to me, actually - the M1 mac mini draws ~7 idle. The max is a whole lot higher, but I'd also suspect the max performance you're getting is a whole lot higher, too.

I really like the pi zeros for low power budget computing, but I think once you're getting into this kind of power envelope, you're kicking into "real computer" territory and I'm not sure how much benefit the SBCs are giving you.

eropple7• 3 years ago

You can bring it down to around 3W with a few config tweaks. Mine averages about that. (edit: wrong board! I was thinking of my OPi5, not the Plus. My OPi5+ looks like it's around the same as the author.)

An M1 Mac is more powerful for sure, but for my use cases (my OPi5+ is being used as a video capture relay with its onboard HDMI capture and my two OPi5's are k8s nodes running Github Actions jobs) it would also be a lot more expensive.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Did you change the CPU governor, or were there any more tweaks? I did measure this off the wall and there's always a bit more overhead in that situation, but I'm curious.

roughly3• 3 years ago

I'm curious how much more expensive, though - the low-end mini is $600. I don't know how much each of the OPis is once you've added all the accessories to make them functional, but it wouldn't surprise me if all of performance/$, performance/watt, and actual total cost winds up being better with the mini once you've got more than one or two of the OPis running.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Hi, author here. I live inside a Mac mini M2 Pro, and love the fact that it only draws around 21W while running Windows on ARM inside a VM with a Teams call, so yes, there is that. But they are different animals altogether.

johnchristopher• 3 years ago

I live inside a Mac mini M2 Pro

How cozy is it :) ?

squarefoot3• 3 years ago

Before someone starts the usual yadda yadda about the RPi biger community, the OS not having long time support etc. I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards. Just go to Armbian or DietPi pages and you'll almost certainly find one or more images that work on your board and forums to discuss about them with very knowledgeable people.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Those projects are well worth a contribution, as they don't have a giant like Broadcom behind them.

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Yep. That is why I went with Armbian (even though I did test the OrangePi images while I waited for my NVMe). Can't wait for them to ship kernel 6.x support for this board.

hrldcpr• 3 years ago

Mind elaborating on this? I've always used Raspbian and am interested in hearing about the downsides.

bemusedthrow755• 3 years ago

Not to mention that if you really want to tinker you can use pi-gen to customise builds from a desktop without all that much difficulty:

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Worth a play.

squarefoot3• 3 years ago

I was referring to other boards, not the Raspberries which have a well supported OS, apologies for not being clear about that. Other board manufacturers often publish distros which have been cobbled together with old kernels and proprietary blobs, then they abandon them when the board is declared obsolete. This is not the case of the Raspberry Pi of course, but for other boards I would check first the above mentioned distros before installing anything by the vendors.

qwertox5• 3 years ago

Armbian is great. Without it I would have never again bought non-Raspi SBCs.

Board vendors believe that it is OK to host their images on dubious download sites, with zero information on what the image is built with.

qchris• 3 years ago

Just adding in a link to their Donation page at https://www.armbian.com/donate/

I'm not affiliated with them or anything, but also appreciate their efforts and have a small recurring donation set up in the hopes of seeing it continue. Especially for groups like this that have image hosting and hardware costs, even a few dollars can make the maintainers' load lighter and help them continue doing this kind of quiet, important work.

bemusedthrow755• 3 years ago

Why not rely on them if they do the job? What is the objection?

Or why not take advantage of the absolutely trivial deployment that the Raspberry Pi Imager offers?

This is like the place the 3D printing world has been in for the last two or three years. Why is it not OK to want to just do stuff and not think about performance-tuning the hardware before you do stuff?

Some of us just want to make stuff, not tinker with the tools.

ThatPlayer2• 3 years ago

I agree they're worth a contribution, but sometimes I just want a device to work and even Armbian isn't as well supported as Raspberry Pi OS. For example 2 days ago I tried to get my Orange Pi 4 working. It turns out Armbian's Orange Pi 4 builds have had broken HDMI for months. There's value in having something just work.

There's already a post about this issue on the forums, and a fix: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp... . But the precompiled version offered isn't for my board (I have the non-LTS version), so I'll have to compile it myself.

dima552• 3 years ago

Why wouldn't you just use stock Debian? The first rpi used a weird CPU, which didn't map well to the CPUs supported by the stock OSs, but that hasn't been true since that very first one.

beebeepka3• 3 years ago

heh, because normal linux distros are finally somewhat usable with the rpi 5, let alone the older versions. neat little headless servers? sure. capable desktops, not quite there yet.

justin663• 3 years ago

I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards

It's not valid, it's not even an argument.

qwertox5• 3 years ago

Which reminds me to mention that the Radxa ZERO 3E [0], which was announced last November, is now for sale [1] (since last week).

It's basically a Raspberry Pi Zero with the difference that it has a gigabit ethernet port instead of WiFi+Bluetooth.

This is not an ad, I've ordered two because my OpenVPN server which runs on a Raspberry Pi B+ (1st gen, 9 MBit/s throughput on Bookworm) needs upgraded hardware.

In that context, it's remarkable that Bookworm still runs on an device as old and weak as the 1st-gen Raspi.

[0] https://radxa.com/products/zeros/zero3e/

[1] https://arace.tech/products/radxa-zero-3e

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

I got one for review in December. Had a few initial issues with it (this was way before release), hope to be able to test it fully soon.

qwertox5• 3 years ago

What does one have to do to get such review devices?

bicebird• 3 years ago

Can't remember the exact name but I remember seeing a similar pi0 sized board with POE ethernet and an m.2 slot for wifi, and thinking it'd be perfect for a WAP.

Unfortunately it was a industrial vendor so don't think you can buy it in low quantities and the price is probably way too high for what it is.

I feel like there must be a market for something like that tough, a board with the bare essentials to make it cheap enough to have a few around the house / office and leave it up to the customer to find a wireless card that could be upgraded down the line.

doublepg233• 3 years ago

Perhaps you have reasons for avoiding it, but have you considered researching Wireguard for your VPN? It's pretty night and day the throughput you can get out of it -compared to OpenVPN.

It's also really amazing when it's used in mesh VPNs like Tailscale.

qwertox5• 3 years ago

It's a legacy setup and it's working. I did some tests last year with Wireguard and among the problems I encountered were the lack of reconnection upon IP address change. I tested it with a couple of VPS and devices in the LAN, and for some reason it failed to work reliably, like for weeks and surviving reboots of random machines.

My setup bridges two home networks into one with two different subnets.

Long term I definitely want to use Wireguard, but for I'll continue using what works reliably.

Regarding Tailscale, I don't want to use 3rd party services for this.

fisian• 3 years ago

I was interested in this board because of the HDMI input. However, I couldn't find anyone reviewing/testing that (last searched a few weeks ago).

I have another board (Khadas Vim4) with HDMI input. But the HDMI input only recently got support in their vendor provided Linux image and is finnicky. In the Armbian image I couldn't get it to work for more than a few frames of input video (tried with gstreamer and ffmpeg).

Additionally, I couldn't find any information on HDMI input in Linux (seems like everyone uses USB capture cards that use uvc with v4l2).

rcarmo21• 3 years ago

Hi, author here. That is something I intend to test. I know it works under Android (which I've yet to test), and under Linux I can see the audio part of it using lshw:

  *-sound:3
       description: rockchiphdmiin
       physical id: 6
       logical name: card3
       logical name: /dev/snd/controlC3
       logical name: /dev/snd/pcmC3D0c

I can't see anything interesting in the USB bus:

    $ lsusb -t
    /:  Bus 06.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci-hcd/1p, 5000M
        |__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 5000M
    /:  Bus 05.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci-hcd/1p, 480M
        |__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 480M
    /:  Bus 04.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ohci-platform/1p, 12M
    /:  Bus 03.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ohci-platform/1p, 12M
    /:  Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ehci-platform/1p, 480M
    /:  Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ehci-platform/1p, 480M

(other than the ludicrous bandwidth available, that is)

...but I am using the Armbian 5.x image, so maybe I am missing some driver or ARM DTD.

chazeon• 3 years ago

Can I use a regular m.2 PC Wi-Fi card on these ARM SBCs? Suppose the SBC's CPU is mainline supported / armbian supported, and the PC Wi-Fi card works on x86 machines under Linux.

ThatPlayer2• 3 years ago

Generally yes. M.2 wifi cards are just PCI-E (except for Intel CNVi). Jeff Geerling tried a bunch of different PCI-E cards with the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module which does expose the PCI-E interface: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/

bemusedthrow755• 3 years ago

People who think the Raspberry Pi 5 is underwhelming

a) don't understand the market or its needs particularly well

b) aren't really paying attention to the underlying trends from the foundation or the trading company

c) are willing to write off any absurdly arcane, poorly-documented things they had to do to get a competing board to offer a stable, supported alternative to the Pi 5.

But the most interesting thing about the Pi 5 is what it tells you about what is coming.

Look at the (astonishingly) successful RP2040, and then look at the Pi 5's RP1 Southbridge, and then scratch your chin and think for a bit.

It's not really incremental. Something quite big has happened here, we just don't see the product of it yet.

hackernudes• 3 years ago

Care to share your opinion more clearly? PCIE is eating the world? More modular computing systems? None of that seems "big" to me so I am probably missing your point.

542458• 3 years ago

Both the 2040 and the Pi5 south bridge are in-house custom silicon, and fairly good at that. I think the parent post is alluding to the Pi foundation eventually building their own processors, and in the process hopefully shrugging off many of the pi’s longstanding limitations.

SeasonalEnnui• 3 years ago

I agree with what the parent is alluding to; the introduction of the RP1 is very understated but perhaps it's more interesting to SBC engineers rather than the end users.

In other words: 1. The RP1 (implemented on TSMC 40LP) contains all the power hungry/high bandwidth IO that is difficult to do on smaller process nodes. This allows the main processor to be moved to smaller nodes or even a different vendor/architecture in future boards. Easier to target better power efficiency in the future. 2. Going forwards, the IO feature set will now be consistent and reliable, by reusing RP1. It is no longer a requirement to try to get these peripherals on the main processor.

TheChaplain• 3 years ago

I always found it odd that many seem to belittle the RPi and/or say it's lacking in power or features.

As I understood it since the beginning, the RPi is a teaching and learning tool, not your 32gb home server running git, nextcloud, plex, portainer and 15 other services. So faulting it for something it was never intended to be seems a bit unfair?

NikkiA2• 3 years ago

The RK3588 is great, but I really want a Dimensity 9300 SBC

FL33TW00D• 3 years ago

Wow this chip does look good - when can we get our hands on it?

NikkiA2• 3 years ago

ISTR seeing that a couple of phones with it released in china just before christmas, so it's probably already available, here's one of them (albeit pretty meh apart from the CPU):

https://www.gsmarena.com/vivo_x100_pro-12694.php

Havoc4• 3 years ago

there is going to be a 32GB version as well

I've got two in my k3s cluster so very much a thing already

cedws2• 3 years ago

Anyone know if the CPU is fast enough to saturate those 2.5GbE ports?

Havoc4• 3 years ago

Saturate probably. Switching fw style over the two ports not so sure

theodric3• 3 years ago

in general, right now Rockchip images are mostly kernel 5.x based

No, they're mystery meat-based, merely pretending to be 5.x, like most of those Chinese SoCs. I'll care when it can run mainline and not Armbian.

apatheticonion2• 3 years ago

I just want something with sata ports and 10G ethernet so I can make a cheap, power efficient home NAS.

Right now I'm using an old office PC that costs $7/m to run. Using the USB port on my router is too slow (maybe I need more expensive HDD enclosures) and can't RAID

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

ODROID-H3/H3+ has 2 sata ports, emmc and an m.2 but you have to be willing to do a tiny bit of hacking to get 10gbe out of it. Supports a fair bit of ram (64GB) but no ECC which is a dealbreaker for some.

The "hacks" with these are to use the m.2 port with an m.2 to PCIE adapter to get 10gbe or several more SATA ports.

NAS's are tricky to spec because people have such a wide range of requirements. For example, a lot of people want their NAS to be able to do video transcoding which wouldn't work well on this hardware.

apatheticonion2• 3 years ago

I just need a fast file host.

The idea of video transcoding is pretty strange to me. What happened to the days where the client had the necessary codecs to play a video?

Even if you store the video in the destination format, adding subtitles immediately requires Plex (and similar) to transcode, rendering the subtitles into the video.

Personally, I have VLC installed on my Chromecast and, while it's not as pretty or convenient as Plex, the format of my files is irrelevant.

xchip• 3 years ago

Warning, suspiciously the article doesn't mention the USB ports are only 2.0.

Was this a coincidence or was the article biased?

The Orange Pi 5 Plus

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