Comment by eleventyseven
24 days ago
The review shows ARM64 software support is still painful vs x86. For $200 for the 16gb model, this is the price point where you could just get an Intel N150 mini PC in the same form factor. And those usually come with cases. They also tend to pull 5-8w at idle, while this is 15w. Cool if you really want ARM64, but at this end of the performance spectrum, why not stick with the x86 stack where everything just works a lot easier?
From the article: "[...] the Linux support for various parts of the boards, not being upstreamed and mainlined, is very likely to be stuck on an older version. This is usually what causes headaches down the road [...]".
The problem isn't support for the ARM architecture in general, it's the support for this particular board.
Other boards like the Raspberry Pi and many boards based on Rockchip SoCs have most of the necessary support mainlined, so the experience is quite painless. Many are starting to get support for UEFI as well.
The exception (even those are questionable as running plain Debian did not work right on Pi 3B and others when I tried recently) proves the rule. You have to look really hard to find an x86 computer where things don't just basically work, the reverse is true for ARM. The power draw between the two is comparable these days, so I don't understand why anyone would bother with ARM when you've got something where you need more than minimally powerful hardware.
The Pi 3B doesn't have UEFI support, so it requires special support on the distro side for the boot process but for the 4 and newer you can flash (or it'll already be there, depending on luck and age of the device) the firmware on the board to support UEFI and USB boot, though installing is a bit of a pain since there's no easy images to do it with. https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi4
I believe some other distros also have UEFI booting/installers setup for PI4 and newer devices because of this, though there's a good chance you'll want some of the other libraries that come with Raspberry PI OS (aka Raspbian) still for some of the hardware specific features like CSI/DSI and some of the GPIO features that might not be fully upstreamed yet.
There's also a port of Proxmox called PXVirt (Formerly Proxmox Port) that exists to use a number of similar ARM systems now as a virtualization host with a nice ui and automation around it.
This. The issue is the culture inside many of these HW companies that is oppositional to upstreaming changes and developing in the open in general.
Often an outright mediocre software development culture generally, that sees software as a pure cost centre, in fact. The "product" is seem to be the chip, the software "just" a side show (or worse, a channel by which their IP could leak).
The Rockchip stuff is better, but still has similar problems.
These companies need to learn that their hardware will be adopted more aggressively for products if the experience of integrating with it isn't sub-par.
They exist in a strange space. They want to be a Linux host but they also want to be an embedded host. The two cultures are pretty different in terms of expectations around kernels. A Linux sysadmin will (rightly) balk at not having an upgrade path for the kernel while a lot of embedded stuff that just happens to use Linux, often has a single kernel released… ever.
I’m not saying one approach is better than the other but there is definitely a lot of art in each camp. I know the one I innately prefer but I’ve definitely had eyebrows raised at me in a professional setting when expressing that view; Some places value upgrading dependencies while others value extreme stability at the potential cost of security.
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My uninformed normie view of the ecosystem suggests that it's the support for almost every particular board, and that's exactly the issue. For some reason, ARM devices always have some custom OS or Android and can't run off-the-shelf Linux. Meanwhile you can just buy an x86/amd64 device and assume it will just work. I presume there is some fundamental reason why ARM devices are so bad about this? Like they're just missing standardization and every device requires some custom firmware to be loaded by the OS that's inevitably always packaged in a hacky way?
Its the kernel drivers, not firmware. There is no bios or acpi, so the kernel itself has to support a specifc board. In practice it means there is a dtb file that configures it and the actual drivers in the kernel.
Manufacturers hack it together, flash to device and publish the sources, but dont bother with upstreaming and move on.
Same story as android devices not having updates two years after release.
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It's the shape of the delivered artifact that's driven the way things are implemented in the ecosystem, not a really fundamental architecture difference.
The shape of historically delivered ARM artifacts has been embedded devices. Embedded devices usually work once in one specific configuration. The shape of historically delivered ARM Linux products is a Thing that boots and runs. This only requires a kernel that works on one single device in one single configuration.
The shape of historically delivered x86 artifacts is socketed processors that plug into a variety of motherboards with a variety of downstream hardware, and the shape of historically delivered x86 operating systems is floppies, CDs, or install media that is expected to work on any x86 machine.
As ARM moves out of this historical system, things improve; I believe that for example you could run the same aarch64 Linux kernel on Pi 2B 1.2+, 3, and 4, with either UEFI/ACPI or just different DTBs for each device, because the drivers for these devices are mainline-quality and capable of discovering the environment in which they are running at runtime.
People commonly point to ACPI+UEFI vs DeviceTree as causes for these differences, but I think this is wrong; these are symptoms, not causes, and are broadly Not The Problem. With properly constructed drivers you could load a different DTB for each device and achieve similar results as ACPI; it's just different formats (and different levels of complexity + dynamic behavior). In some ways ACPI is "superior" since it enables runtime dynamism (ie - power events or even keystrokes can trigger behavior changes) without driver knowledge, but in some ways it's worse since it's a complex bytecode system and usually full of weird bugs and edge cases, versus DTB where what you see is what you get.
This has often been the case in the past but the situation is much improved now.
For example I have an Orange Pi 5 Plus running the totally generic aarch64 image of Home Assistant OS [0]. Zero customization was needed, it just works with mainline everything.
There's even UEFI [1].
Granted this isn't the case for all boards but Rockchip at least seems to have great upstream support.
[0]: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases
[1]: https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588
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Maybe this was the case a few years ago, but I would argue the landscape has changed a lot since then - with many more distro options for Arm64 devices.
So, I agree but less than I did a few months ago. I purchased an Orange Pi 5 Ultra and was put off by the pre-built image and custom kernel. The “patch“ for the provided kernel was inscrutable as well. Now I’m running a vanilla 6.18 kernel on a vanilla uboot firmware (still a binary blob required to build that though) with a vanilla install of Debian. That support includes the NPU, GPU, 2.5G Ethernet and NVMe root/boot. I don’t have performance numbers but it’s definitely fast enough for what I use it for.
Interesting, where did you get an image with a 6.18 kernel that has NPU support?
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No it's definitely a problem with the ARM architecture, specifically that it's standard to make black box SoCs that nobody can write drivers for and the manufacturer gives you one binary version and then fucks off forever. It's a problem with the ARM ecosystem as a whole for literally every board (except Raspberry Pi), likely stemming from the bulk of ARM being throwaway smartphones with proprietary designs.
If ARM cannot outdo x86 on power draw anymore then it really is entirely pointless to use it because you're trading off a lot, and it's basically guaranteed that the board will be a useless brick a few years down the line.
There's also a risk of your DeviceTree getting pruned from the kernel in X years when it's decided that "no one uses that board anymore", which is something that's happened to several boards I bought in the 2010's, but not something that's happened to any PC I've ever owned.
It’s weirded me out for a long time that we’ve gone from ‘we will probe the hardware in a standard way and automatically load the appropriate drivers at boot’ ideal we seemed to have settled on for computers in the 2000s - and still use on x86 - back to ‘we’ll write a specific description file for every configuration of hardware’ for ARM.
Isn't this one of the benefits of ACPI? That the kernel asks the motherboard for the hardware information that on ARM SoCs is stored in the device tree?
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That makes sense, as the Pi is as easy as x86 at this point. I almost never have to compile from scratch.
I'm not a compiler expert... But it seems each ARM64 board needs its own custom kernel support, but once that is done, it can support anything compiled to ARM64 as a general target? Or will we still need to have separate builds for RPi, for this board, etc?
Little bit of both. Pi still uses a sort of unique boot sequence due to it’s heritage. Most devices will have the CPU load the bootloader and then have the OS bring up the GPU. Pi sort of inverts this, having the GPU leading the charge with the CPU held at reset until after the GPU has finished it’s boot sequence.
Once you get into the CPU though the Aarch64 registers become more standardized. You still have drivers and such to worry about and differing memory offsets for the peripherals - but since you have the kernel running it’s easier to kind of poke around until you find it. Pi 5 added someone complexity to this with the RP1 South Bridge which adds another layer of abstraction.
Hopefully that all makes sense. Basically the Pi itself is backwards while everything else should conform. It’s not Arm specific, but how the Pi does things.
Apart from very rare cases, this will run any linux-arm64 binary.
Fot the Pi you have to rely on the manufacturer's image too. It does not run a vanilla arm64 distro
With this board the SoC is the main problem. CIX is working on mainlining that stuff for over a year and we still dont have gpu and npu support in mainline
I still have to run my own build of kernel on Opi5+, so that unfortunately tracks. At least I dont have to write the drivers this decade
Why? I'm running an Orange Pi 5+ with a fully generic aarch64 image of Home Assistant OS and it works great. Is there some particular feature that doesn't work on mainline?
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> The problem isn't support for the ARM architecture in general,
Of course it is not. That's why almost every ARM board comes with it's own distro, sometimes bootloader and kernel version. Because "it is supported". /s
I was soured on ARM SBCs by the Orange Pi 5, which does not have an option to ignore its SD card during boot. Something trivial on basically every x86 platform I had been taking for granted.
With RAM it will be costing notably more, with 4 cores instead of 12. I'd expect this to run circles around an N150 for single-threaded perf too.
They are not in the same class, which is reflected in the power envelope.
BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread? Y'all Intel shareholders or something? I run both but not to the exclusion of everything else. There is nothing I've failed to run successfully on my ARM ones and the only thing I haven't tried is gaming.
> I'd expect this to run circles around an N150 for single-threaded perf too
It has basically the same single-core performance as an N150 box
Random N150 result: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10992465
> BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread?
At this point I expect a lot of people have been enticed by niche SBCs and then discovered that driver support is a nightmare, as this article shows. So in time, everyone discovers that cheap x86-64 boxes accomplish their generic computing goals easier than these niche SBCs, even if the multi-core performance isn't the same.
Being able to install a mainline OS and common drivers and just get to work is valuable.
> BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread?
Because they have a great watt/performance ratio along with a GPU that is very well supported by a wide range of devices and mainline kernel support. In other words a great general purpose SBC.
Meanwhile people are using ARM SBCs, with SoCs designed for embedded or mobile devices, as general purpose computers.
I will admit with RAM and SSD prices sky rocketing these ARM SBC look more attractive.
Because most ARM SBCs are still limited to whatever linux distro they added support to. Intel SBCs might underperform but you can be sure it will run anything built for x86-64.
Are you sure you don't have single-threaded and multi-threaded backwards?
Why would the A720 at 2.8 GHz run circles around the N150 that boosts up to 3.6 GHz in single-threaded workloads, while the 12-core chip would wouldn't beat the 4-core chip in multithreaded workloads?
Obviously, the Intel chip wins in single-threaded performance while losing in multi-threaded: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6304vs6617/Intel-N150-v...
I can't speak to why other people bring up the N150 in ARM SBC threads any more than "AMD doesn't compete in the ~$200 SBC segment".
FWIW, as far as SBC/NUCs go, I've had a Pi 4, an RK3399 board, an RK3568 board, an N100 NUC from GMKTec, and a N150 NUC from Geekom, and the N150 has by far been my favorite out of those for real-world workloads rather than tinkering. The gap between the x86 software ecosystem and the ARM software ecosystem is no joke.
P.S. Stay away from GMKTec. Even if you don't get burned, your SODIMM cards will. There are stoves, ovens, and hot plates with better heat dissipation and thermals than GMKTec NUCs.
ARM SBCs that cost over $90 are totally not worth it considering those Nxxx options exist
Many of the NXXX options are, sadly, going up in price a lot right now due to the RAM shortages.
> BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread?
For 90% of use cases, ARM SBCs are not appropriate and will not meet expectations over time.
People expect them to be little PCs, and intend to use them that way, but they are not. Mini PCs, on the other hand, are literally little PCs and will meet the expectations users have when dealing with PCs.
x86 based small computers are just so much easier to work with than most second- and third-string ARM vendors. The x86 scene has had standards in place for a long time, like PCIe and the PC BIOS (now UEFI) for hardware initialization and mapping, that make it a doddle to just boot a kernel and let it get the hardware working. ARM boards don't have that yet, requiring per-board support in the kernel which board manufacturers famously drag their feet on implementing openly let alone upstreaming. Raspberry Pi has its own setup, which means kernel support for the Pi series is pretty good, but it doesn't generalize to other boards, which means users and integrators may be stuck with whatever last version of Ubuntu or Android the vendor thought to ship. Which means if you want a little network appliance like a router, firewall, Jellyfin server, etc. it often makes more sense to go with an N150 bitty box than an ARM SBC because the former is going to be price- and power-draw-competitive with the latter while being able to draw on the OS support of the well-tested PC ecosystem.
ARM actually has a spec in place called SystemReady that standardizes on UEFI, which should make bringup of ARM systems much less jank. But few have implemented it yet. I keep saying, the first cheap Chinese vendor that ships a SystemReady-compliant SBC is gonna make a killing.
> I keep saying, the first cheap Chinese vendor that ships a SystemReady-compliant SBC is gonna make a killing.
Agree. When ARM announced the initiative, I thought that the raspberry pi people would be quick but they haven't even announced a plan to eventually support it. I don't know what the hold up is! Is it really that difficult to implement?
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1. Wow, never thought I'd need to do an investment disclosure for an HN comment. But sure thing: I'm sure Intel is somewhere in my 401K's index funds, but also probably Qualcomm. But I'm not a corporate shill, thank you very much for the good faith. Just a hobbyist looking to not get seduced by the lastest trend. If I were an ARM developer that'd be different, I get that.
2. The review says single core Geekbench performance is 1290, same as i5-10500 which is also similar to N150, which is 1235.
3. You can still get N150s with 16gb ram in a case for $200 all in.
> review says single core Geekbench performance is 1290, same as i5-10500 which is also similar to N150, which is 1235.
Single core, yes. Multi core score is much higher for this SBC vs the N150.
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No idea - the ryzen based ones are better!
Depends on what you need - for pure performance regardless of power usage and 3D use cases like gaming, agreed. For performance per watt under load and video transcoding use cases, the 12th-gen E-core CPUs ala the N100 are _really_ hard to beat.
Yes x86 will win for convenience on about every metric (at least for now), but this SoC's CPU is much faster than a mere Intel N150 (especially for multicore use cases).
I've got i3 and i5 systems that do 15W or better idle, and I don't have to worry about the absolute clusterfuck of ARM hardware (and those systems used can be had for less and will probably long outlive mystery meat ARM SBCs).
One of my Arm systems idles at leas than 1W and has a max TDP less than your idle draw (10W). I also have an N200 box, and a 16-core workstation with an obscene power draw - each platform has its pros and cons.
I noticed nuance is the first thing discarded in the recurring x86 vs Arm flame wars, with each side minimizing the strength of the "opposing" platform. Pick the right tool for the right job, there are use-cases where the Orange Pi 6 is the right choice.
Agreed, at least for a likely "home use" case, such as a TV box, router, or general purpose file server or Docker host, I don't see how this board is better than something like a Beelink mini PC. The Orange Pi does not even come with a case, power supply or cooler. Contrast that with a Beelink that has a built-in power supply (no external brick) and of course a case and cooler.
This OrangePi 6 Plus board comes with cooling and a power supply (usb-c). No case, though.
Fair enough, but I suppose it does not come which storage (NVME). Typically ready to use NUCs that retail for around $200 do. That's often only about 0.5GB, so not a use amount of storage, but more than enough for a streaming box or retro console, say.
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It allows you to build for what is coming. In a couple of years arm hardware this powerful will cheap and common.
I feel like SBC stuff hasn't been worth it over x86 boxes like that for awhile now. Other than the GPIO being useful in certain use cases.
N100 boxes are cheap and use so little power, while having normal OS support and boot setup.
I've got two RK3588 boards here doing Linux-y things around my place (Jellyfin, Forgejo builders, Immich, etc) and ... I don't think I've run into pain? They're running various debian and just ... work? I can't think of a single package that I couldn't get for ARM64.
Likewise my VPS @ Hetzner is running Aarch64. No drama. Only pain is how brutal the Rust cross-compile is from my x86 machine.
I mean, here's Geerling running a bunch of Steam games flawlessly on a Aarch64 NVIDIA GB10 machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjRKvKC4ntw
(Those things are expensive, but I just ordered one [the ASUS variant] for myself.)
Meanwhile Apple is pushing the ARM64 architecture hard, and Windows is apparently actually quite viable now?
Personally... it's totally irrational, but I have always had a grudge against x86 since it "won" in the early 90s and I had to switch from 68k. I want diversity in ISAs. RISC-V would be nice, but I'll settle for ARM for now.
the high end of the performance is impressive and this has idle power similar to the processors in it's performance range(AMD Ryzen 7 4800H idles at 45W). This is certainly not meant for lower power computing.
i use the rpi zero 2 for the IO pins
4b / 5 for the camera stuff.
i don’t think using these boards for just compute makes a lot of sense unless it’s for toy stuff like an ssh shell or pihole