4 ms·

4GB memory sucks tho. Various RK3588 boards out there now have pretty good performance (better than RPi5), great I/O support, and up to 32GB RAM (good luck get

4GB memory sucks tho. Various RK3588 boards out there now have pretty good performance (better than RPi5), great I/O support, and up to 32GB RAM (good luck getting the 32GB tho). Orange Pi 5 Pro is one but the one I ordered is this: https://www.youyeetoo.com/products/friendlyelec-cm3588 https://www.youyeetoo.com/products/friendlyelec-cm3588 RK3588 + a carrier board with 4 x M.2 slots and 2.5Gb Ethernet. Just wish they'd made it in a mini-ITX form factor instead of their bespoke thing.

NewJazz 3y ago
OK but you're not going to get graphics on an rk3588 with mainline kernel and mesa.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Actually it seems that an open-source driver for the GPU of RK3588 will be soon available: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Panthor-DRM-Newer-Mali https://www.phoronix.com/news/Panthor-DRM-Newer-Mali Until then, the binary libraries provided by Arm can be used.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Agreed that the ram size is problematic. If there was a gen 3 m.2 slot I'd probably be ok living off zram. But this just seems too confined to be useful, in spite of having cores that should be better. I also looked around & it seems like an Intel n6000 just wallops it in most benchmarks. Disappointing.
nottorp 3y ago
> a carrier board with 4 x M.2 slots and 2.5Gb Ethernet. Does it have pcie? Or those hang off usb?
- rjsw 3y ago
  The RK3588 does have PCIe.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  RK3588 has 4 lanes of PCIe 3 and a variable number of PCIe 2 lanes (variable because they share pins with other interfaces). Most boards with RK3588 use the 4 PCIe 3 lanes for an SSD M.2 socket. A carrier for 4 SSDs could use a more expensive PCIe switch for high performance, or it could split the 4 lanes to the sockets for low cost. The main competitor of RK3588, Intel N100, is claimed to have up to 9 PCIe 3 lanes. Nevertheless, I believe that they must share pins with other interfaces, because all the computers that I have seen with Intel Alder Lake N are starved for PCIe lanes and in none of them the M.2 socket uses 4 lanes, but usually only 2, or even only 1, so their SSDs have reduced speed, lower than in most RK3588 computers (but the N100 Gracemont cores are significantly faster than the Cortex-A76 cores of RK3588).
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Yeah the board I ordered just splits them to 4 M.2 sockets. My intent is to fill them with SSDs and use it as a NAS & Plex server. Or at least trial that and see how it goes. Right now I'm using an old (2011) Mac Mini for this, and it's fine, but just one SSD drive, and I'm guessing the power consumption on this will be lower.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Oh… luxury!
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      They are nice. Like a small PC. There's even a company making an (overpriced) mini-ITX compatible PC style motherboard with it. They even have an onboard neural network accelerator. Though I perused the "documentation" for it and the SDK and I can't see how a person who doesn't read Chinese could make use of it. If you look at people's Geekbench scores, they're actually really promising: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=RK3588 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q... In multicore performance it's almost as fast as my AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H based Thinkpad. Waaaay faster than an RPi5.
      - 3y ago

NewJazz 3y ago

OK but you're not going to get graphics on an rk3588 with mainline kernel and mesa.

adrian_b 3y ago
Actually it seems that an open-source driver for the GPU of RK3588 will be soon available: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Panthor-DRM-Newer-Mali https://www.phoronix.com/news/Panthor-DRM-Newer-Mali Until then, the binary libraries provided by Arm can be used.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Agreed that the ram size is problematic. If there was a gen 3 m.2 slot I'd probably be ok living off zram. But this just seems too confined to be useful, in spite of having cores that should be better. I also looked around & it seems like an Intel n6000 just wallops it in most benchmarks. Disappointing.

nottorp 3y ago

> a carrier board with 4 x M.2 slots and 2.5Gb Ethernet. Does it have pcie? Or those hang off usb?

rjsw 3y ago
The RK3588 does have PCIe.
adrian_b 3y ago
RK3588 has 4 lanes of PCIe 3 and a variable number of PCIe 2 lanes (variable because they share pins with other interfaces). Most boards with RK3588 use the 4 PCIe 3 lanes for an SSD M.2 socket. A carrier for 4 SSDs could use a more expensive PCIe switch for high performance, or it could split the 4 lanes to the sockets for low cost. The main competitor of RK3588, Intel N100, is claimed to have up to 9 PCIe 3 lanes. Nevertheless, I believe that they must share pins with other interfaces, because all the computers that I have seen with Intel Alder Lake N are starved for PCIe lanes and in none of them the M.2 socket uses 4 lanes, but usually only 2, or even only 1, so their SSDs have reduced speed, lower than in most RK3588 computers (but the N100 Gracemont cores are significantly faster than the Cortex-A76 cores of RK3588).
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Yeah the board I ordered just splits them to 4 M.2 sockets. My intent is to fill them with SSDs and use it as a NAS & Plex server. Or at least trial that and see how it goes. Right now I'm using an old (2011) Mac Mini for this, and it's fine, but just one SSD drive, and I'm guessing the power consumption on this will be lower.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Oh… luxury!
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    They are nice. Like a small PC. There's even a company making an (overpriced) mini-ITX compatible PC style motherboard with it. They even have an onboard neural network accelerator. Though I perused the "documentation" for it and the SDK and I can't see how a person who doesn't read Chinese could make use of it. If you look at people's Geekbench scores, they're actually really promising: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=RK3588 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q... In multicore performance it's almost as fast as my AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H based Thinkpad. Waaaay faster than an RPi5.
    - 3y ago