Orange Pi 5 Is a Great and Fast Alternative to the Raspberry Pi 4
I&#x27;m so glad to see <i>something</i> accessible from ARM that is <i>vaguely</i> performant &amp; somewhat affordable. I bought one, pre-ordered it! Still untouched, still not running Debian, but delighted to see, excited to have this. Phones have sick incredible ARM cores but general availability of ARM chips is crazy shit, A72 (2015) or A73 processors have been the best one could hope for on a reasonable priced SBC, and the RK3588 here&#x27;s A76 (2018) is vastly more modern, albeit still half a decade old.<p>Still. This is not a fair comparison, but the used&#x2F;refurb&#x2F;old-stock PC market is just so ridiculously more capable. A HP EliteDesk G2 has i5-6500T (2015), 8GB ram, and 250GB SATA drive is $140 on amazon. It&#x27;s a higher powered machine, 9W versus ~3W idle (shame on this review for having <i>no</i> power consumption figures at all), and much higher full-open power (I think my last kernel compile was &lt;35W which is the TDP of the chip alone). And the OrangePi is significantly smaller form factor. There&#x27;s cases where the OrangePi is a better fit. But for most general use, the x86 market has far far better value, does so much more, has so much more bandwidth (often 8x USB3.0 hosts, plus significant internal pcie).<p>There&#x27;s periodic articles on repurposing thin-client computer hardware. But again there&#x27;s just such a mismatched value proposition. Not the same shakeout: they have hot, old, low-end chips, but sometimes very cheap on secondary markets. But there&#x27;s typically much better mini-PCs with vastly more performance for not that much more, that will idle at least as well if not greatly better. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33791069" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33791069</a><p>It&#x27;s just so weird how few ARM chips are available. There had been a little more variety in who one could buy an SBC from. But now... Rockchip is the main company making purchaseable chips. Allwinner had some pretty fine offerings but has gotten sparse. MediaTek is doing excellent things in many spaces, but has almost no presence in accessible SBCs. There&#x27;s tons of other chips but most of the market is invisible, is utterly uninterested in selling SBC type boards. There&#x27;s a parallel x86 market, but Ryzen embedded systems tend to start at $400 for very sparse models. It&#x27;s frustrating how deliberately unserved the low end is. That commodity x86 hardware dominates so savagely, by so many country-miles keeps feeling unfortunate. That ARM has such small niches it plays competitively in, and everywhere else it&#x27;s broadly unavailable &amp; unaffordable is a weird market dynamic, while these normally very expensive x86 cpus become available &amp; affordable systems is such a strong &amp; visible counter-trend.<p>Also see: &quot;Unpopular Opinion: Don&#x27;t use an RPI for that&quot; on these mini-PCs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35260322" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35260322</a>