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Raspberry Pi Alternative Banana Pi Reveals Powerful New Board
Raspberry Pi Alternative Banana Pi Reveals Powerful New Board:
Banana Pi has revealed a new board in its BPI-R2 Pro category. In the style of the Raspberry PiCompute Module 3 the new board requires a carrier board to break out all of the ports on offer. The compute module comes with a powerful eight-core processor, up to 8GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC, while the carrier board includes some interesting breakout options.
At the core of the Banana Pi board is a Rockchip RK3588 SoC. This brings together four Arm Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.6 GHz with four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz in Arm's new DynamIQ configuration - essentially big.LITTLE in a single fully integrated cluster. It uses an 8nm process.
The board is accompanied by an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 Odin GPU with support for OpenGLES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.2, and Vulkan1.2. There's a 2D graphics engine supporting resolutions up to 8K too, with four separate displays catered for (one of which can be 8K 30FPS), and up to 8GB of RAM, though the SoC supports up to 32GB. Built-in storage is catered for by up to 128GB of eMMC flash. It offers 8K 30fps video encoding in the H.265, VP9, AVS2 and (at 30fps) H.264 codecs.
Firefly is Working on a Rockchip RK3588 Mini-ITX Motherboard (ITX3588J)
Firefly is working on a Rockchip RK3588 Mini-ITX motherboard (ITX3588J)
After Radxa ROCK5 Pico-ITX SBC and Banana Pi RK3588 SoM and devkit, Firefly ITX3588J mini-ITX motherboard is the third hardware platform we've seen with Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor.
The board will be interesting to people wanting an Arm PC or workstation as the mini-ITX form factor will allow the board to be fitted to a standard enclosure, and there's plenty of resources and I/Os with up to 32GB RAM, four SATA ports, multiple 8K/4K video outputs and inputs, dual Gigabit Ethernet, WiFI 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, and more.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Monday March 07 2022, @03:28AM (5 children)
I did buy a BananaPi a few years ago, but quickly passed it on to someone else. The official Linux "images" at the time were incredibly hacky, and the board itself was not stable for the use case I needed (external SATA drive). Hopefully they've matured since then. It's always nice to have options in this space. I've had a pretty good experience with the Rock64 boards I have (and we use at $work), though the RPi4 has supplanted them for the moment.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday March 07 2022, @05:22AM (2 children)
I'd rather have blueberry, French silk, or lemon meringue.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @05:33AM (1 child)
Oh, grate! Giving me the Raspberry, or the Banana! Subtle sexual overtones, no? Just keep making SOC's that can't run Windows, and I will be happy. I would hate to see what happened to netbooks happen to the Raspberry Pi, or even to anyone's banana. Now, if only there were non-proprietary boot systems for these small wonders? I can haz?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @05:36AM
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @05:40AM (1 child)
Rk3588 is brand new, so images will be raw whichever vendor you choose.
I guess with a handful of vendors releasing boards simultaneously, upstream might follow once features are cross-pollinated.
Maybe wait for the Pine64 one? They have a vested interest in making it work properly given their next (unannounced) Pinebook Pro will be based on it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @04:45PM
Pine having a vested interest in making things work, does not, unfortunately, mean that things from Pine will work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @07:58AM (6 children)
These modules and "motherboards" seem cool and all, but by the time you buy everything for that price you can get a much more supported and powerful laptop off ebay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @09:23AM (2 children)
I tend to agree, I'm rocking a used 8yo Core i5 laptop with 8GB that cost less than an Rpi4, once I pay the international markup and sales tax.
A used laptop, however, won't support all the latest AV codecs, wifi, bluetooth, and Vulkan.
So there will be a cross-over point where raw CPU matters less over modern standards.
Arguably one then just buys a newer 2nd hand laptop (i.e. all these machines becoming obsoleted by Windows 11).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 07 2022, @11:16AM (1 child)
The Firefly Mini-ITX board looks more interesting than the smaller Pi-like boards. You aren't getting 5 display outputs and HDMI-In on a laptop.
Too bad RK3588 turned out to not support SO-DIMM. I wonder how much it will cost with 32 GiB.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday March 07 2022, @02:22PM
Yes indeed. My home-server runs on a Odroid H2+ board and the Firefly board looks like an ideal upgrade, except for the RAM issue. That and software support. I especially like the 4 SATA ports which as it seems can be driven from onboard power.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday March 07 2022, @11:51AM (2 children)
Indubitably.
However, I am looking for a board (well, actually board plus proper boxed enclosure) with dual Gigabit Ethernet that can actually run a firewall and routing and traffic shaping at full Gigabit speeds (minimum packet size, maximum packet rate*) while passively cooled (no fan - not even the supposedly 'silent' ones). Doesn't exist. Right now, the ARM SBC space doesn't really cater for this. I'm probably going to have to wait for another year or so, or buy an industrial mini-PC with an Intel x86 processor.
*In Gigabit Ethernet, the maximum packet rate is 1,488,095 packets per second (unidirectional). Given a configuration with two GigE ports, say LAN and WAN, you can have 1.4 Mpps inbound on LAN-Rx, 1.4 Mpps outbound on WAN-Tx; and in the other direction 1.4 mpps inbound on WAN-Rx, and 1.4 Mpps outbound on LAN-Tx, so for non-blocking thoughput, you need to process 5,952,380 pps. You will almost certainly need to spread the network interface interrupts around several cores, and you'll need a high clock rate to have enough processor instructions left to do anything sensible with the packets. This is why higher-end routers have optimised silicon to do packet shuffling and filtering in hardware rather than sending stuff through a general purpose CPU.
(Score: 3, Informative) by EETech1 on Thursday March 10 2022, @11:34PM (1 child)
I've had good luck with these.
https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mv1000/ [gl-inet.com]
Openwrt or Ubuntu!
I haven't tested them with 2 sustained 1Gbps connections, but I know the chip supports 2.5Gbps Ethernet as well, and it has hardware to handle the packets.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday March 11 2022, @09:05AM
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it is sold out at the manufacturer and Amazon.
I can't find any throughout tests for it. The hardware looks reasonably capable:
Even though the SoC might be 2,5 Gigabit/s Ethernet capable, that doesn't tell you what throughput can be achieved. It could be a bit like a 10-lane motorway serviced by a single toll-booth.