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.
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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.