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The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet
- brian_herman 4y agoI wish Raspberry Pi 4 were in stock at msrp prices...
- jeffrallen 4y agoAvailability is the Raspberry Pi killer. I bought a Rock 4 because I needed it now, not when I win the Raspberry Pi lottery someday.
- hirundo 4y ago> It's still half as slow as modern ARM desktops like Apple's M1 mini Wouldn't half as slow be twice as fast?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- agloeregrets 4y agoI don't know what their value of 'half' is but this isn't the more commonly defined definition of 50%. This: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11836399 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11836399 M1: https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/mac-mini-late-2020 https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/mac-mini-late-2020
- rzzzt 4y agoParent is meditating over the questionable choice of words in combination. The board could be half as fast or twice as slow when compared to the M1 Mini, but if it is half as _slow_, how fast is it actually?
- agloeregrets 4y agoI know, but I was noting that it isn't even any definition of half here.
- geerlingguy 4y agoThis comment thread is half as interesting as I thought it would be ;)
- sliken 4y agoHalf as fast would make much more sense. I've seen things like "I'm 40 years young" or a laptop is 10mm thin instead of thick. Half as fast takes it so far though and doesn't make sense.
- aliqot 4y agoJust has to be in stock then it wins by default.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- noncoml 4y ago> The Linux images are built with a set of Rockchip patches that are based on older Linux releases. That’s a hard no from me. Otherwise I’d be all over it, as the specs look great!
- TeddyDD 4y agoThis. If it's not ARM System Ready, you will be stuck with some outdated kernels provided by the vendor. Unfortunately, it seems that most SBC are no certified.
- Legogris 4y agoI find it curious that Jeff doesn't even mention Armbian here and it'd be interesting to see if results differ. Apart from necessary board-specific patches, dev trees, and some defaults that make sense for typical SBC workloads, it's close to vanilla Debian and can run better than vendor dists. Arch Linux on ARM has also come a long way in the past few years.
- mindslight 4y agoThis is my only requirement for a Raspberry Pi killer - to work out of the box with stock kernels and distributions rather than needing some hacky device-tailored distribution that will eventually go unsupported, or worse some hacked up kernel that will stagnate from the day it's released. 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.
- rcarmo 4y agoWhat kind of AMD motherboards are you using? I need to have ARM hardware (porting software, etc.) but am interested in getting something x64-based I can stack (3-5 units) and that doesn’t break the bank (also, something that doesn’t require individual PSUs would be great).
- mouse_ 4y agorant: I've learned, excluding microcontrollers such as the wonderful rp2040, every ARM & RISC-V SBC I've been interested in purchasing relies on some extremely proprietary and paranoid bits. If the device has a massive, undying following, like the Raspberry Pi, people will find a way to bring it into the future and keep it useful. If not, well, in as little as a year or so the manufacturer will likely simply tell you to buy the new one. 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.
- pmw 4y agoYes, this is a problem. ARM SystemReady certification program is aiming to solve it. Unfortunately the only boards that meet this certification are significantly more expensive. For example, Honeycomb LX2 (https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/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.
- phh 4y agoRockchip devices have stellar mainline (that chip rk3588 doesn't have it yet), for business reasons (radxa relies on it for industrial support, Chromebooks push mainline very heavily). I can't speak for this new one, but previous rockchip flagship (rk3399) have exactly one binary blob, which is used for display port over usb-c. Everything else is supported as open source, and mostly supported mainline (Linux and uboot and atf)
- rzzzt 4y agoI hear Rockchip, I am immediately reminded of the November 31st bug of the rk808: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f076ef44a44d02ed91543f820c14c2c7dff53716 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
- brianzelip 4y agoWhat about the Orange Pi? http://www.orangepi.org/ http://www.orangepi.org/
- mikae1 4y agoThere's a whole section about it in the linked post… > 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!
- rcarmo 4y agoAlso, IIRC, the placement of the SSD slot on the Orange Pi is ridiculous.
- lxe 4y agoA good take away about modern SBC landscape for hobbyists: you can get much better specced "mini" x86 PC at the cost of slightly more power consumption, but with benefits of much better OS and hardware compatibility at a similar price as an ARM SBC at this point.
- sliken 4y ago"you can get much better specced "mini" x86 PC at the cost of slightly more power consumption" ... if you buy used, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison. Generally even the mini PCs are much larger than the rk3588.
- oarsinsync 4y agoI think the used mini pc market is still better than the used arm sbc market right now
- sliken 4y agoDunno, I got a complete working rk3588 with 8GB ram for $139 in a nicely machined metal fanless case, that just needs a modest usb-c power supply. I could have gotten it caseless for $20 less. 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.
- squarefoot 4y agoI've bought recently a Minisforum N40 (Celeron N4020 CPU), and man, it's much faster than the Pi. Installing Manjaro Linux was a breeze, all peripheral supported out of the box. I bought used on ebay, but new is priced like €150, which competes directly with the Raspberry Pi 4, and this one comes with 64GB eMMC and 4GB RAM. No exposed GPIOs though, so it won't be the ideal choice for hardware hacking, but for media boxes or tiny desktops it beats the Pi hands down.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoGood summary. The RK3588 is great in that it raised the performance bar for the ARM space, but it's still a new platform with growing pains. 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.
- dragontamer 4y agoThe 5W space is perhaps the space I understand the least. 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). ----------- 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. ---------- 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? :-)
- chazeon 4y agoUbiquiti Wi-Fi 6 APs are requiring 20-ish watt PoE. I guess 15W SBC is not so much of issue for PoE?
- dragontamer 4y agoDo you have a link? My first search revealed: https://store.ui.com/products/u6-lite-us https://store.ui.com/products/u6-lite-us > Power method PoE, passive PoE (48V) > Max. power consumption 12W ------ > 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.
- VLM 4y agoThe market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. 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.
- mb7733 4y ago> The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. What is your definition of a dead market?
- dragontamer 4y agoNobody drives downtown anymore, the traffic is just too terrible!
- VLM 4y agoNot for new designs, milking .edu and .gov for all they can get, great specs but no delivery date, easier and more convenient to buy weed than their silicon ... it had a good run but it's just done now.
- dsr_ 4y agoI'm not sure I would call it "dead". "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.
- daneel_w 4y agoI'm surprised he had problems powering it up. USB PD will start at 5V as a safe default, and remain there if it cannot negotiate a higher voltage. My Rock5B runs fine at 5 volts from "regular" USB-C. When I fully load all 8 CPU cores the board wants about 1.6A (~8 watts). Perhaps Geerling's power adapter refused to provide anything without bilateral PD presence.
- dwobry 4y agoGenuinely curious about a comparison between Rock 5B and an Odroid H3/H3+.
- bri3d 4y agoI'm glad that the weird fad/craze of ARM SBCs used with full-size-class peripherals for Linux server/desktop workload tasks is finally winding down. 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.
- omnipath 4y agoExcuse me for presuming, but that seems to be a 1st world view of ARM SBCs usage. There are plenty of places in the world where this may be the only computer used until traveling aboard or higher education, so the ability to run actual 'desktop' applications, super cheap, plugged into peripherals, is still a worthy usage of a pi and its ilk.
- geerlingguy 4y agoAdditionally, many places have flaky or nonexistent power infrastructure. Having a computer that runs at 2-3W is a lot easier on small solar + battery than a computer running at 8-10W idle.
- bri3d 4y agoTo what extent are these used for this use case vs. very inexpensive laptop computers or Chromebooks? In most of my travels I've seen a lot more extremely cheap laptops than ARM SBCs. 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.
- mardifoufs 4y agoI have never seen anyone in my third world home country just carrying or even owning an SBC. Even the poorest people just buy a phone because it's wildly more useful and does not require a peripheral. Otherwise, they buy an older computer that can be had for cheaper than most SBCs. 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.
- squarefoot 4y agoWhy no mention about Armbian and DietPi? They both have a downloadable image for the Rock 5B. https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/download/202305/Armbian_23.02.0-trunk_Rock-5b_sid_edge_6.2.0-rc2_xfce_desktop.img.xz https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/download/20230... (https://github.com/armbian/community https://github.com/armbian/community) https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/DietPi_ROCK5B-ARMv8-Bullseye.7z https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/DietPi_ROCK5B-ARMv8-Bull... (https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download)
- geerlingguy 4y agoJust a week ago, when I was editing the video, the Rock 5 wasn't yet listed on Armbian's website (now it is: https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b/ https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b/). 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.
- rcarmo 4y agoYeah, I was wondering about that. I haven’t checked the Armbian reference kernels, but they might fix some of your build issues. 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 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.
- rektide 4y agoOrange Pi is a bit cheaper (starts under $100 for 4GB ram) but less slots. The hundred dollar barrier is where I start to balk at ARM sbc. 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.
- rcarmo 4y agoI’ve been using ARM SBCs for ages now (mostly Pis, but also Hardkernel and a few “alternatives”), and _all_ of them except the Pi have absolutely dismal software support. Armbian does a pretty good job on some alternatives, but until manufacturers ship with _at least as good_ software as the Pi their value proposition is essentially negative unless you have a lot of free time. 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).
- haberman 4y ago> I am extremely wary of their quality control I am curious to hear more about this. Do you have bad experiences to share?
- rcarmo 4y agoI have been monitoring Reddit threads for a few months ever since the 5900x and 6800/6900 APU variants started shipping. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any mainstream vendors in this space, so you’re essentially dealing with small Chinese companies with no support structure, who have… unusual concepts about board design and cooling, and who manufacture in small batches. The yields on those things are statistically not good in general.
- apple4ever 4y ago> _all_ of them except the Pi have absolutely dismal software support. That is exactly what I have found.