Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
As many have pointed out, price wise it's not competitive. But more than that, the main feature of the Pi is its software support. I buy a Pi not because it's got the top specs but because I know I can load a rock solid OS with security support and I won't have to think about it. This is a problem for every Pi competitor.
You can get a Ryzen minipc for under $200 now.
Where at? Not finding any that low on Amazon
I would assume aliexpress
For this price, just get an Intel NUC (one with like an i5 or better). They're cheaper than this is on ebay.
They might not have 32GB of memory, but I'm honestly not sure why you'd need that much for a small PC like this.
Running multiple virtual machines might be one use for all that RAM. I completely agree about going with a NUC (or similar x86-64) unless power consumption is a concern. I stopped buying SBCs once Intel platforms started competing on the low end.
I googled a cheap Intel NUC and saw power consumption numbers of 15w to 40w. Thats quite a bit of juice (and heat) for small applications.
Perhaps the newer models consume that much (under load), but the older ones are very power efficient - back in the day they ran Windows 8 and only consumed 4.6W @ idle (this is actually the same one I have, except I run HA on it which is probably much more power efficient than Windows 8 would be).
Realistically, for something like this, you probably don't want to exclusively use the full load numbers to calculate power consumption, rather you want to use the idle+load numbers for your specific use case. Home Assistant barely uses any power even over time (I unfortunately misplaced my kill-a-watt or I'd measure it for you), and the NUC barely feels warm.
Nonetheless, you can disable a bunch of the GPU stuff in the BIOS if you're concerned about power consumption. The article I linked above explains the settings a bit. These were meant to be the middle ground between a thin client and full PC, so it wouldn't be surprising if their maximum wattage & TDP was much higher than a Pi; but that doesn't necessarily mean a higher power bill or more heat.
Lastly, I mostly meant that this would be a good alternative to the device in the article, which would need a beefier power supply than the NUC. This shop listing says that its TDP is 60W, so just looking at raw numbers the NUC runs much cooler.
There's other RK3588 boards in the $60-$70 range (notably Orange Pi 5). What makes this one different?
Funny how 20 chrome tabs is being compared to 4K video playback.
i reallly wish that google had the same incentive to improve battery life and memory usage that apple has with safari
I don’t know if it’s still the case but kernel support and related was nearly always an issue when I tested Raspi alternatives for building homebrew robots. OS updates were a gamble and support and documentation was not good to say the least. Raspi also has every HAT you can imagine to extend their capabilities too.
Best way for pi alternatives I've found is to see which one is the most popular for the project / community I'm working with.
It isn't always the latest and greatest but at least there will be plenty of support.
Some one on the comment section said that
"There's no innovation here; it uses a Rockchip processor, which is from a Chinese company. Assembling a board with Chinese components isn't a big deal. I know people who could make an even better board. Innovation would have been if the processor was designed by an Indian company and made entirely in India. But that's not the case."
Lol, changing the country of origin doesn't constitute innovation from a consumer standpoint...
Now if this was using 5nm or chiplit or any of the other buzzwords of the day it could be marketed as innovative in the modern sense of the word.
Realistically there is no innovation left for ARM platforms. They all use the same core schematics. They only control data flow and peripheral IP as a manufacturer, unless they feel like building their own core from the spec (nobody really does that anymore as ARM has been desperately trying to standardize everything). The most "innovation" I've seen has come from stubbornness around keeping legacy bus architecture around instead of adopting AXI (even when all the IP they are trying to use already uses AXI and they keep having to make translation hardware).
It's not a rival. It is in a different sector. And it will rise or fall with the availability of software and support.
How much is it?