Discussion

The Orange Pi 6 Plus

BirAdam: 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.

daymanstep: Yeah that's the problem with ARM devices. Better just buy a N100

simlevesque: The N100 is way larger than a OrangePi 5 Max.

Neywiny: 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.

geerlingguy: The even more confounding factor is there are specific builds provided by every vendor of these Cix P1 systems: Radxa, Orange Pi, Minisforum, now MetaComputing... it is painful to try to sort it out, as someone who knows where to look.I couldn't imagine recommending any of these boards to people who aren't already SBC tinkerers.

cyanydeez: just try to find some benchmark top_k, temp, etc parameters for llama.cpp. There's no consistent framing of any of these things. Temp should be effectively 0 so it's atleast deterministic in it's random probabilities.

andai: >Temp should be effectively 0 so it's atleast deterministic in it's random probabilities.Is this a thing? I read an article about how due to some implementation detail of GPUs, you don't actually get deterministic outputs even with temp 0.But I don't understand that, and haven't experimented with it myself.

geerlingguy: Also about half as efficient, if that matters, and 1.5-2x higher idle power consumption (again, if that matters).Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.

james-clef: Something in me wants to buy every SBC and/or microcontroller that is advertised to me.

hypercube33: Yeah I have this problem (?) too. They are just so neat. I also really like tiny laptops and recreations of classic computers.

jonpalmisc: 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...

Aurornis: > 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.

3abiton: Even though all can be replaced by a decent mini pc with beefy memory, with lots of VMs.

junon: Clockwork Pi if you haven't seen it. Beautiful little constructions.

zzzoom: At some point SBCs that require a custom linux image will become unacceptable, right?Right?

Aurornis: Using vendor kernels is standard in embedded development. Upstreaming takes a long time so even among well-supported boards you either have to wait many years for everything to get upstreamed or find a board where the upstreamed kernel supports enough peripherals that you're not missing anything you need.I think it's a good thing that people are realizing that these SBCs are better used as development tools for people who understand embedded dev instead of as general purpose PCs. For years now you can find comments under every Raspberry Pi or other SBC thread informing everyone that a mini PC is a better idea for general purpose compute unless you really need something an SBC offers, like specific interfaces or low power.