The Radxa Dragon Q8B is more than twice as fast, has twice the I/O, and is only a little bit larger than the Raspberry Pi 5. But it costs a smidge more, and can be hard to find. Links to things I mentioned in this video: - My SBC Reviews website: https://sbc-reviews.jeffgeerling.com - Radxa Dragon Q8B benchmark data: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/108 - I bought my 8GB model from ARACE: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-dragon-q8b None of those are affiliate links, and I purchased all the hardware used in this review :) Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/geerlingguy Sponsor me on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/geerlingguy Merch: https://www.redshirtjeff.com 2nd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GeerlingEngineering 3rd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Level2Jeff Contents: 00:00 - 2x everything except the price 01:11 - Picking an OS shouldn't be this hard 02:38 - First boot and usage 04:14 - Benchmarks and performance 06:37 - Hardware notes 07:15 - BIOS, UEFI, and Linux ISOs 08:14 - The big problem
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Did anyone else get his"taking it easy for medical reasons" video from 4 years ago recommended yesterday and be reminded how blessed we are to have him?
Every time I hear "until next time I'm Jeff geerling" I wonder what his name will be at the start of the next video.
Proper NVMe support is great; glad to see more options
"...it's supposed to run Windows 11 natively?" Yeah, but why would you want to?
I bought a 1GB Pi 5 recently, and for £42, it's not bad - for what I need it for. We forget that 1GB is a crazy large amount of memory. Pi's never used to be able running full desktop replacements. That said, I paid about £82.80 in 2023 for the 8GB model.
Once again, it seems like one of the most underrated features of Raspberry is its level of support (well, underrated except here). Definitely something I think about more than I used to when evaluating a purchase.
Add to that parts of the hardware with drivers that don't work and will never work!
Radxa has a looong way to go in the market. Their SDK is a mess, their docs are out of date (as you noted), and implementation is incomplete. I have a Radxa board and needed weeks of tinkering to get it 100%. No pcie driver so I had to add, no proper rebooting (lacking power control). I’ve been thru the same you went through. I submitted PRs and they were ignored.
UFS vs eMMC/NVMe stems from a different block size (so the image is actually laid out slightly differently)
I definitely wouldn't mind if Raspberry Pi introduced a "model C" board with a larger footprint, but with better I/O (e.g. 2280 m.2 slot, _full-size_ HDMI, a couple more USB ports, etc.)
Proper nvme support is great, glad to see more options
$209 and nearly impossible to get? Hardly a "Pi 5 killer"
I remember when a Pi was a $25 computer for learning programming and electronics. I'll admit it's good to use them for desktop apps as well but it was never the original purpose. The idea was always if you want performance buy a used Optiplex or a mini PC
You know what'd make for an interesting SBC SOC? Something like the Apple A20 Pro. Incredibly power efficient, plenty of RAM, all the hardware acceleration support you could possibly want, very powerful performance not just for CPU but also GPU and even a very fast NPU. I'm sure you could frankenstein it to support ethernet in addition to or instead of wifi, since the modem and wifi is still seperate from the SOC. The real disadvantage would be cost, I guess. And that Apple will never ever cooperate with such a project.
hey! you should try the (community maintained) Armbian images for the Q8B. From my experience (I built custom images for the Cubie A7A), they have been much more stable and have up-to-date software and kernel.
Feel better Jeff!
Qualcomm are not going to match the long-term hardware and software support that the Raspberry Pi Foundation provides for commercial use. And commercial use is RaspberryPi's bread and butter. They are still manufacturing the PI3...
I just wish it were a compute module so that i could use the pcie lanes for 1x10GbE instead of 2x2.5GbE. And also add PoE so I just plug a single cable into a switch. Armv9(.2-A) chips would also be great instead of the a78 spam from last decade :) Btw I got a 16GB model delivered a week ago :) Edit: It seems Radxa has announced the rCore-Q8280, with the q8b SoC as a BGA SoM, with all 9 PCIe Gen3 lanes (so you can do 4+4+1, x4 for 10GbE, x4 for full speed Gen3 nvme ssd and a single lane for a SATA controller so you can attach a hard drive) exposed. Unforunately no price yet, and much harder to use than socketed SoMs
Qualcomm is basically hostile to open source. No go.
Heads up for Radxas images, at least when I ran my RocPi 4C+ the image was shipped with host ssh keys set. So all three of mine had the same identity, from a ssh point of view.