I love that OrangePi is making good hardware, but after my experience with the OrangePi 5 Max, I won’t be buying more hardware from them again. The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. This also happened with the MangoPi MQ-Pro. I’ll just stick with RPi. I may not get as much hardware for the money, but the software support is fantastic.
> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support.
I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be.
Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support.
The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
"none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be"
Going big-name doesn't even help you here. It's the same story with Nvidia's Jetson platforms; they show up, then within 2-3 years they're abandonware, trapped on an ancient kernel and EOL Ubuntu distro.
You can't build a product on this kind of support timeline.
For what it’s worth, Jetson at least has documentation, front ported / maintained patches, and some effort to upstream. It’s possible with only moderate effort and no extensive non-OEM source modification to have an Orin NX running an OpenEmbedded based system using the OE4T recipes and a modern kernel, for example, something that isn’t really possible on most random label SBCs.
Yup, I'm working a lot with Jetsons, and having the Orin NX on 22.04 is quite limiting sometimes, even with the most basic things. I got a random USB Wi-Fi dongle for it, and nope! Not supported in kernel 5.15, now have fun figuring out what to do with it.
> The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
If we take a step back, I think this is something to be saddened by. I, too, find boards without proper mainline support to be e-waste, and I am glad that we perhaps aren't producing quite as much of that anymore. But imagine if a good chunk of these boards did indeed have great mainline support. These incredibly cheap devices would be a perfect guarantor of democratized, unstoppable general compute in the face of the forces that many of us fear are rising. Even if that's not a fear you share, they'd make the perfect tinkering environment for children and adults not otherwise exposed to such things.
More like people try doing anything other than use the base OS, and realize the bottom-tier x86 mini-PCs are 3-4x faster for the same price, and can encode a basic video stream without bogging down.
If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting.
Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
Qualcomm has rebranded a Snapdragon with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores (and 4 small Cortex-A55), from the expensive smartphones of 2021, as "Dragonwing" QCM6490 and they now sell it for embedded devices.
There are at least 3 or 4 SBCs with it, in RPI sizes and prices.
Cortex-A78 is much faster than the Cortex-A76 from RK3588 or the latest RPI (e.g. at least 50% faster at the same clock frequency), and its speed at the same clock frequency does not differ much from that of recent medium-size cores like Cortex-A720 or Cortex-A725.
Cortex-A78 is the stage when Arm stopped making significant micro-architectural changes in medium-sized cores. The later improvements were in the bigger Cortex-X cores. The main disadvantage of the older Cortex-A78 is that it does not implement the SVE instruction set of the Armv9-A ISA.
While mini-PCs with Intel/AMD CPUs are usually preferable, for an ARM SBC I would no longer buy any model that has older cores than Cortex-A78.
Besides the Qualcomm Dragonwing based SBCs, there are also Cortex-A78 based SBCs with Mediatek or NVIDIA CPUs, but those are more expensive.
> So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
Raspberry Pi are excellent at being general-purpose, full-Linux boxes that consume very low power (some can idle at <1W). Perfect for ambient computing, cron-jobs, MQTT-related hackery, VPN gateways, ad-blocking DNS servers, or anything else that isn't CPU-bound, but benefits from being always available[1].
1. In my case, this ironically includes orchestrating higher-wattage computers via Wake-on-Lan and powering them down when not needed
Since the introduction of the OG Raspberry Pi, 14 years ago, there's been an ongoing cognitive problem wherein people look at the price of a brand new, never used SBC that can purchased from a reliable retail company.
Then they also look at the price of a used corpo PC (that is bigger, and noisier) that some rando in Iowa is selling on eBay.
And then they boldly compare the prices of the two things as if these details just don't exist.
But the details do exist. The details show that the two things are not the same. They can never be the same.
One is a shiny fresh apple that is free of blemishes, and the other is a bruised old grapefruit that someone has already started eating. They're both fruit, but they're very different things.
I've used them for mostly dedicated tasks, at least the RPi3 and older. I've used the RPi3 as CUPS servers at a couple of sites, for a few printers. Been running for many years now 24/7 with no issues. As I could buy those SBCs for the original low price and the installation was a total no-brainer, I would never consider using any kind of mini PC for that.
I have a couple of RPi4 with 8GB and 4GB RAM respectively, these I have been using as kind-of general computers (they're running off SSDs instead of SD cards). I've had no reason so far to replace them with anything Intel/AMD. On the other hand they can't replace my laptop computer - though I wish they could, as I use the laptop computer with an external display and external keyboard 100% of the time, so its form factor is just in the way. But there's way too little RAM on the SBCs. It's bad enough on the laptop computer, with its measly 16GB.
I built a nice little cyberdeck around an RPi 5 but it's turned out to be very disappointing. I was counting on classic X11's virtual display stuff to enable a 1080x480 screen to be usable with panning (virtual 720p or something, just a cool vertical pan). Problem is, the X11 support sucks, and so there's almost no 2D acceleration, so this simple thing that used to work great on a 486 with an ATI SVGA doesn't work very well at all on a machine a thousand times faster. Wayland has of course no support for a feature like this one, so I'm stuck with a screen too narrow to use, and performance for everything else that's pretty sub-par.
Aah, I had totally forgotten about that X11 feature, I did use it for something very many years ago.
I have only used the default setup (which is presumably Wayland) on the Pi, looks good but I don't actually use display features much.
Yeah Raspi even sells a keyboard formfactor and there was a Raspi laptop made from 3D printable casing and basic peripherals (screen, keyboard with mouse nub) for it. A cheap quasi-open source laptop at the time.
People do all manner of wacky stuff with Pis that could be more easily done with traditional machines. Kubernetes clusters and emulation boxes are the more common use cases; the former can be done with VMs on a desktop and the latter is easily accomplished via a used SFF machine off of eBay. I've also heard multiple anecdotes of people building Pi clusters to run agentic development workflows in parallel.
I think in all cases it's the sheer novelty of doing something with a different ISA and form factor. Having built and racked my share of servers I see no reason to build a miniature datacenter in my home but, hey, to each their own.
I concur with this. The novelty of the Pi is getting a computer somewhere that you normally wouldn't due to the size and complexity. GPIO is a very nice addition, but it looks like conventional USB to GPIO is a thing so it's not really a huge driver to use a Pi.
> device is largely useless due to a lack of software support.
Came looking for this. It's the pitfall of 99% of hardware projects. They get a great team of hardware engineer, they go through the maddening of actually producing a thing (which is crazy complex) at scale, economically viable (hopefully), logistic hurdles including tax worldwide, tariffs, etc... only to have only people on their team be able to build and run a Hello World example.
To be fair even big player, e.g. NVIDIA, sucks at that too. Sure they have their GPU and CUDA but if you look at the "small" things like Jetson everybody I met told me the same thing, great hardware, unusable because the stack worked once when shipped then wasn't maintained.
I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Maybe it used to be in the beginning compared to other chips and boards, but right now it's a bit above average: they ignore many things which is out of their control/can't debug and fix (as in Wi-Fi chip firmware).
The main issue was that they forked UBoot and did not release their modifications, making it hard to run anything other than their Armbian fork. They forked Armbian a long time ago and kind of hacked things together rather than adding support for their HW to Armbian. After a while I gave up running anothing other than their releases, I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 3 and 5.
But it's really uncool that they don't release their UBoot build! Lame!
Their WiFi chip (Dragon something brand), had a bug where the WiFI beacon frames had incorrect element orderings, causing inconsistent results with some clients. Overall their Wifi was pure garbage. But apart from the Wifi it's robust stuff.
Every time there's a new discussion of some arm board, I compare the price / features / power use with the geekom n100 SBC I picked up awhile back.
As far as I can tell, the OrangePi 6 remains distinctly uncompetitive with SBCs based on low-end intel chips.
- Orange pi consumes much more power (despite being an arm CPU)
- A bit faster on some benchmarks, a bit slower on others
- Intel SBC is about 60% the price, and comes with case + storage
- Intel SBC runs mainline linux and everything has working drivers
I was planning to build a NAS from OPi 5 to minimise power consumption, but ended up going for a Zen 3 Ryzen CPU and having zero regrets. The savings are miniscule and would not justify the costs.
On a related note: I pulled my pinebook pro out of a drawer this week, and spent an hour or so trying to figure out why the factory os couldn’t pull updates.
I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely. The options are armbian (probably the pragmatic choice, but fsck systemd), or openbsd (no video acceleration because the drivers are gpl for some dumb reason).
This sort of thing is less likely to happen to rpi, but it’s also getting pretty frustrating at this point.
You have to go in with your eyes open wth SBCs. If you have a specific task for it and you can see that it either already supports it or all the required software is there and it just needs to be gathered, then they can be great gadgets.
Often they can go their entire lifespan without some hardware feature being usable because of lack of software.
The blunt truth is that someone has to make that software, and you can't expect someone to make it for you. They may make it for you, and that's great, but really if you want a feature supported, it either has to already be supported, or you have to make the support.
It will be interesting to see if AI gets to the point that more people are capable of developing their own resources. It's a hard task and a lot of devices means the hackers are spread thin. It would be nice to see more people able to meaningfully contribute.
It should be noted that the CIX P1(this board's SoC) has ongoing efforts to be upstreamed. Last I checked, the GPU drivers were still not available(due to them not supporting ACPI? I may be wrong on this) and power draw being weird and stuck at 10-15ish watts. It seems like this blog confirms nothing has changed on those 2 points.
With that being said, CIX and their main board partner, Radxa, have been open with the UEFI.
I am not an expert in low-level environments such as the kernel or the UEFI, but if these tidbits sound interesting I would encourage anyone who is to look further into the CIX P1. To my untrained eyes, CIX looks like a company that is working towards a desktop/laptop chip with real UEFI/ACPI support. I look forward to the day it is polished up a bit.
But I just don't get... everything, I don't get the org, I don't get the users on hn, I'm like skinner in the 'no the kids are wrong' meme.
It's a lambda. It's a cheap, plug in, ssh, forget. And it's bloody wonderful.
If you buy a 1 or 2 off ebay, ok maybe a 3.
After that? Get a damn computer.
Want more bandwidth on the rj45? Get a computer.
Want faster usb? Get a computer.
Want ssd? Get a computer
Want a retro computing device? Get a computer.
Want a computer experience?
Etc etc etc, i don't need to labour this.
Want something that will sit there, have ssh and run python scripts for years without a reboot? Spend 20 quid on ebay.
People demanded faster horses. And the raspi org, for some, damn fool, reason, tried to give them.
There are people bemoaning the fact that raspberry pi's aren't able to run LLM's. And will then, without irony, complain that the prices are too high. For the love of God, raspi org, stop listening to dickheads on the Internet. Stop paying youtubers to shill. Stop and focus.
> lspci is a bit more revealing, especially because you get to see where the dual 5GbE setup and Wi-Fi controller are placed–each seems to get its own PCI bridge:
That's how PCIe works. A PCIe port - both upstream and downstream - is a "PCI bridge". The link is one bus. A switch chip's "interior" is another bus. The next links are each their own bus again. One per port. There's no switch here, bus 0 ( / 30 / 60)is "in" the CPU, each port is it's own bus.
The more interesting thing is the PCI domain, the first 4 digits:
This generally (caveat emptor) means the ports aren't handled in some common PCIe subsystem, rather each port is independently connected to the CPU crossbar. The ports may also not be able to access each other, or non-transparent mapping rules apply.
Doesn't have to, though; it might be due to some technicality, driver bug, misunderstanding, whatever else.
Looks like the SoC (CIX P1) has Cortex-A720/A520 cores which are Armv9.2, nice.
I've still been on the hunt for a cheap Arm board with a Armv8.3+ or Arvm9.0+ SoC for OSDev stuff, but it's hard to find them in hobbyist price range (this board included, $700-900 USD from what I see).
The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos looked good but unfortunately SWD/JTAG is disabled unless you pay for the $2k model...
I bought a NanoPi R6C in the past in the hope that it's going to be a nice mini pc to run all my containers with super low power usage or router. But the software was bad, really bad. I found https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/ , it was godsend but still had some shortcomings. after 2 years, it's bit stable but I just keep it around as a backup route to access my homelab incase the main machines go down.
Unfortunately only available atm for extremely high prices. I'd like to pick some up to create a ceph cluster (with 1x 18tb hdd osd per node in an 8 node cluster with 4+2 erasure coding)
This seems to be an overkill for most of my workloads that require an SBC.
I would choose Jetson for anything computationally intensive, as Orange Pi 6 Plus's NPU is not even utilized due to lack of software support.
For other workloads, this one seems a bit too large in terms of formfactor and power consumption, and older RK3588 should still be sufficient
and you end up diving far more into boot chains, vendor GPU blobs and inference runtimes than you ever intended.
Yep, I'll pass. I'm done dealing with that kind of crap that is spread like a nasty STD through the ARM world. I'm sticking with x64 unless/until ARM gets this crap together.
Excellent! There is an OrangePi Zero 3W. That means my radxa zero tv-computer now has some competition. It is sad that rasspberry pi abandoned the small, zero computer. Will keep the OrangePi Zero 3W in mind next time I need to cobble together a new tv computer.
Disappointing on the NPU. I have found it's a point where industry wide improvement is necessary. People talk tokens/sec, model sizes, what formats are supported... But I rarely see an objective accuracy comparison. I repeatedly see that AI models are resilient to errors and reduced precision which is what allows the 1 bit quantization and whatnot.
But at a certain point I guess it just breaks? And they need an objective "I gave these tokens, I got out those tokens". But I guess that would need an objective gold standard ground truth that's maybe hard to come by.
194 comments
> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support.
I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be.
Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support.
The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
Going big-name doesn't even help you here. It's the same story with Nvidia's Jetson platforms; they show up, then within 2-3 years they're abandonware, trapped on an ancient kernel and EOL Ubuntu distro.
You can't build a product on this kind of support timeline.
> The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
If we take a step back, I think this is something to be saddened by. I, too, find boards without proper mainline support to be e-waste, and I am glad that we perhaps aren't producing quite as much of that anymore. But imagine if a good chunk of these boards did indeed have great mainline support. These incredibly cheap devices would be a perfect guarantor of democratized, unstoppable general compute in the face of the forces that many of us fear are rising. Even if that's not a fear you share, they'd make the perfect tinkering environment for children and adults not otherwise exposed to such things.
> The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining,
Were people actually doing that?
If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting.
Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
There are at least 3 or 4 SBCs with it, in RPI sizes and prices.
Cortex-A78 is much faster than the Cortex-A76 from RK3588 or the latest RPI (e.g. at least 50% faster at the same clock frequency), and its speed at the same clock frequency does not differ much from that of recent medium-size cores like Cortex-A720 or Cortex-A725.
Cortex-A78 is the stage when Arm stopped making significant micro-architectural changes in medium-sized cores. The later improvements were in the bigger Cortex-X cores. The main disadvantage of the older Cortex-A78 is that it does not implement the SVE instruction set of the Armv9-A ISA.
While mini-PCs with Intel/AMD CPUs are usually preferable, for an ARM SBC I would no longer buy any model that has older cores than Cortex-A78.
Besides the Qualcomm Dragonwing based SBCs, there are also Cortex-A78 based SBCs with Mediatek or NVIDIA CPUs, but those are more expensive.
> So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
Raspberry Pi are excellent at being general-purpose, full-Linux boxes that consume very low power (some can idle at <1W). Perfect for ambient computing, cron-jobs, MQTT-related hackery, VPN gateways, ad-blocking DNS servers, or anything else that isn't CPU-bound, but benefits from being always available[1].
1. In my case, this ironically includes orchestrating higher-wattage computers via Wake-on-Lan and powering them down when not needed
Since the introduction of the OG Raspberry Pi, 14 years ago, there's been an ongoing cognitive problem wherein people look at the price of a brand new, never used SBC that can purchased from a reliable retail company.
Then they also look at the price of a used corpo PC (that is bigger, and noisier) that some rando in Iowa is selling on eBay.
And then they boldly compare the prices of the two things as if these details just don't exist.
But the details do exist. The details show that the two things are not the same. They can never be the same.
One is a shiny fresh apple that is free of blemishes, and the other is a bruised old grapefruit that someone has already started eating. They're both fruit, but they're very different things.
I have a couple of RPi4 with 8GB and 4GB RAM respectively, these I have been using as kind-of general computers (they're running off SSDs instead of SD cards). I've had no reason so far to replace them with anything Intel/AMD. On the other hand they can't replace my laptop computer - though I wish they could, as I use the laptop computer with an external display and external keyboard 100% of the time, so its form factor is just in the way. But there's way too little RAM on the SBCs. It's bad enough on the laptop computer, with its measly 16GB.
I wouldn't wish it upon an enemy, but it's a thing.
I think in all cases it's the sheer novelty of doing something with a different ISA and form factor. Having built and racked my share of servers I see no reason to build a miniature datacenter in my home but, hey, to each their own.
> Even the Raspberry Pi 5 [...] is still getting trickles of mainline support.
I thought raspberry pi could basically run a mainline kernel these days -- are there unsupported peripherals besides Broadcom's GPU?
It's now way easier to write drivers/libraries etc whereas before, smaller hardware wasn't worth dedicating developer cycles.
> device is largely useless due to a lack of software support.
Came looking for this. It's the pitfall of 99% of hardware projects. They get a great team of hardware engineer, they go through the maddening of actually producing a thing (which is crazy complex) at scale, economically viable (hopefully), logistic hurdles including tax worldwide, tariffs, etc... only to have only people on their team be able to build and run a Hello World example.
To be fair even big player, e.g. NVIDIA, sucks at that too. Sure they have their GPU and CUDA but if you look at the "small" things like Jetson everybody I met told me the same thing, great hardware, unusable because the stack worked once when shipped then wasn't maintained.
>software support is fantastic.
Unreliable USB: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3259
Unreliable Wi-Fi:
* https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7092
* https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7111
* https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7272
I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Maybe it used to be in the beginning compared to other chips and boards, but right now it's a bit above average: they ignore many things which is out of their control/can't debug and fix (as in Wi-Fi chip firmware).
https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong
There's a reason people just default to RaspberryPi even though better _hardware_ exists. RPi at least gets drivers and software support consistently.
As far as I can tell, the OrangePi 6 remains distinctly uncompetitive with SBCs based on low-end intel chips.
- Orange pi consumes much more power (despite being an arm CPU) - A bit faster on some benchmarks, a bit slower on others - Intel SBC is about 60% the price, and comes with case + storage - Intel SBC runs mainline linux and everything has working drivers
>The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support.
It's pretty hacky for sure but wouldn't classify it as useless. e.g. I managed to get some LLMs to run on the NPU of an Orange pi 5 a while back
I see there is now even a NPU compatible llama.cpp fork though haven't tried it
> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support.
This is the problem with every SBC that is not a Pi. I don't understand how they just ignore the software problem. I guess people keep buying them?
I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely. The options are armbian (probably the pragmatic choice, but fsck systemd), or openbsd (no video acceleration because the drivers are gpl for some dumb reason).
This sort of thing is less likely to happen to rpi, but it’s also getting pretty frustrating at this point.
Often they can go their entire lifespan without some hardware feature being usable because of lack of software.
The blunt truth is that someone has to make that software, and you can't expect someone to make it for you. They may make it for you, and that's great, but really if you want a feature supported, it either has to already be supported, or you have to make the support.
It will be interesting to see if AI gets to the point that more people are capable of developing their own resources. It's a hard task and a lot of devices means the hackers are spread thin. It would be nice to see more people able to meaningfully contribute.
Right?
Can also plug in a power bank. https://us.ugreen.com/collections/power-bank?sort_by=price-d...
The advantage is that if the machine breaks or is upgraded, the dock and pb can be retained. Would also distribute the price.
The dock and pb can also be kept away to lower heat to avoid a fan in the housing, ideally.
Better hardware should end up leading to better software - its main problem right now.
This 10-in-1 dock even has an SSD enclosure for $80 https://us.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-10-in-1-usb-c-hub-ssd (no affiliation) (no drivers required)
I'd have another dock/power/screen combo for traveling and portable use.
With that being said, CIX and their main board partner, Radxa, have been open with the UEFI.
I am not an expert in low-level environments such as the kernel or the UEFI, but if these tidbits sound interesting I would encourage anyone who is to look further into the CIX P1. To my untrained eyes, CIX looks like a company that is working towards a desktop/laptop chip with real UEFI/ACPI support. I look forward to the day it is polished up a bit.
``
alias findpi='sudo nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24 | awk '\''/^Nmap/{ip=$NF}/B8:27:EB|DC:A6:32|E4:5F:01|28:CD:C1/{print ip}'\'''`On every
But I just don't get... everything, I don't get the org, I don't get the users on hn, I'm like skinner in the 'no the kids are wrong' meme.
It's a lambda. It's a cheap, plug in, ssh, forget. And it's bloody wonderful.
If you buy a 1 or 2 off ebay, ok maybe a 3.
After that? Get a damn computer.
Want more bandwidth on the rj45? Get a computer.
Want faster usb? Get a computer.
Want ssd? Get a computer
Want a retro computing device? Get a computer.
Want a computer experience? Etc etc etc, i don't need to labour this.
Want something that will sit there, have ssh and run python scripts for years without a reboot? Spend 20 quid on ebay.
People demanded faster horses. And the raspi org, for some, damn fool, reason, tried to give them.
There are people bemoaning the fact that raspberry pi's aren't able to run LLM's. And will then, without irony, complain that the prices are too high. For the love of God, raspi org, stop listening to dickheads on the Internet. Stop paying youtubers to shill. Stop and focus.
You won't win this game
> lspci is a bit more revealing, especially because you get to see where the dual 5GbE setup and Wi-Fi controller are placed–each seems to get its own PCI bridge:
That's how PCIe works. A PCIe port - both upstream and downstream - is a "PCI bridge". The link is one bus. A switch chip's "interior" is another bus. The next links are each their own bus again. One per port. There's no switch here, bus 0 ( / 30 / 60)is "in" the CPU, each port is it's own bus.
The more interesting thing is the PCI domain, the first 4 digits:
This generally (caveat emptor) means the ports aren't handled in some common PCIe subsystem, rather each port is independently connected to the CPU crossbar. The ports may also not be able to access each other, or non-transparent mapping rules apply.Doesn't have to, though; it might be due to some technicality, driver bug, misunderstanding, whatever else.
I've still been on the hunt for a cheap Arm board with a Armv8.3+ or Arvm9.0+ SoC for OSDev stuff, but it's hard to find them in hobbyist price range (this board included, $700-900 USD from what I see).
The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos looked good but unfortunately SWD/JTAG is disabled unless you pay for the $2k model...
>
and you end up diving far more into boot chains, vendor GPU blobs and inference runtimes than you ever intended.Yep, I'll pass. I'm done dealing with that kind of crap that is spread like a nasty STD through the ARM world. I'm sticking with x64 unless/until ARM gets this crap together.
But at a certain point I guess it just breaks? And they need an objective "I gave these tokens, I got out those tokens". But I guess that would need an objective gold standard ground truth that's maybe hard to come by.
Massively simplified, 2.5G is 1G sped up while 5G is 10G slowed down. It makes no sense and the market agrees. The ladder of popularity goes:
1000base-T,, 10Gbase-T, 2.5Gbase-T, , 5Gbase-T. (Depends on context ofc, 2.5G is quite popular on APs for example.)
And note a lot of 10Gbase-T hardware is not Nbase-T compatible, and there are chips that do only 1G, 2.5G and 10G - no 5G.
I guess if your design doesn't work at 10GbT you try with 5? Ugh.