[burmanm]

Can't help but I feel slightly disappointed. This is essentially a weaker version of RK3588 based SBCs, but lacks both smaller cores as well as NPU. And those boards are available with 16GB of memory. And we're talking about a very old core at this point, A76 really isn't new (~5 years old core).

That isn't to said it's useless, the Ampere Altra is using basically the same arch as this one and it's perfectly usable. But if I wanted a small machine, an Alder Lake-N is a lot faster and at the same price - and runs perfectly with upstream Linux. I feel like the only nice selling point is now the formfactor and hopeful future "neat-little-addons" to this one.

RK3588 can't use upstream and I assume this one will not either for now (Phoronix left that out of their article - curious). I would hope this gets better support than the RK3588, but when? And since this is actively cooled in any case, the ADL-N looks far more interesting as cheap computing/server solution.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Yeah, IMO this is kind of... boring? I mean, the PCI thing is nice, the performance is a nice bump, maybe they'll improve availability, but this seems like it's really just a Pi 4.1; I had hoped the Pi 5 would be RISC-V. Or at least UEFI[0], although I can't find confirmation at all about the firmware status so fingers crossed.

[0] Edit: Yes I know there are UEFI builds for Pis 3 and 4, but since there's no onboard memory to hold it you have to chain load it from an SD which undermines the usefulness of the thing IMO.