Listening to It's all about the Pentiums by Wierd Al Yankovic while obsessively researching the newest SBC releases of the year
RK3588 CPU has been picked up by Radxa, Orange Pi, and Firefly, and it pushes serious numbers on the CPU benchmarks, almost 4x better than the Raspberry Pi 4. Comes in 8GB and 16GB RAM flavors.
Follow
a user on the radxa discord quoted 18 Watts at the wall under 100% CPU stress. 4-5 watts at idle was a little bit of an underwhelming result, but it may be tune-able to get that figure lower.
I believe it has the same Heterogeneous Multiprocessing design from cell phones, a combination of low-power and high-power cores, which helps a lot in terms of power efficiency especially when the software can take advantage of it.
Anyways, it's happening. The meek little SBC has grown up, it's a Real Computer now. Yes, things like graphics drivers and virtualization support are surely lacking. And it's not $35 any more. But as an affordable server platform for linux-based apps and containers, these little boards just keep getting better and better.