I much prefer the Rock3b format than pseudo Pi format but would really like to get a single native sata so that with a JMB585 the total of x6 ports offer more RAID options than just x5 which really is a x4 with the symmetrical raid types.
Also a molex for a sata power chain would be even better but guess with a few cable hacks that can be done anyway.
When I looked at the Rockchip RK356x SoCs I thought they had some extremely strong unique features of NAS and Router specific configs and was quite confused at the release of a general purpose board in a Pi like format.
Given the CPU performance of RK3568 is not really a lot slower (like 10% at most?) than Pi 4, I am really interested in a Rock 3B as well, in addition to the Rock 5B. And if possible, making it accepting DDR4 SO-DIMM would be great
You can make some comparisons using geekbench results. Pi4 (depending on clock speed) is rated at about 250/650 (1500Mhz) and up to 310/810 (2200Mhz). Best scores for Rock3A are those at 168/533 (and most are 130/450). This is 80% of performance and 70% for those lower scores, and up to 50% compared to overclocked pi. Of course it’s just benchmark and I don’t expect all results is directly comparable, but You can get some idea how big cores compares to little.
The real strength of RK3568 lay somewhere else - it’s newer&faster i/o with pcie 3.0.
I don’t think sodimm are ok here, it’s just better and cheaper to put onboard memory. Please note that RK3568 supports up to 8GB and You will not get anything better than rock3a with it’s memory (which is $75 for 8GB version)
You do realize you can just put another controller for 2x or more additional SATA ports or, if you absolutely insist on single native SATA port, use this cheap board in m.2 b-key 2242 that has both PCIe & SATA wired to it?
No you can not as the pcie lanes are already used with the 1st so all bandwidth is taken even if you could find a m.2 splitter as there is a single pcie3.0 x2 .
Or go to all the expense of a splitter and pcie bifurcation to get 0.5 x bandwidth whilst a single on board would mean x6 @ full speed.
The other m.2 is a+e https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003839974544.htm
It was just a bad choice of format and i/o for that SoC if you look at alternative devices built on that SoC that are almost all either router or nas devices.
By the times you have hacked in extender boards and convertors it becomes massively less cost effective the compute modules where more like it should of been but even then still some curious choices and even less cost effective.
I am not going to do anything as I didn’t purchase one or would as don’t think it makes a great SBC at that price for what it offers.
@stuartiannaylor JMB585 will indeed occupy lower m.2 m key slot with PCIe 3.0 x2, but you still have PCIe 2.1 x1 muxed with SATA in upper m.2 b key slot, and can choose to use either. How is it bad? You can just put this without any adapters in upper slot, instead of messing with A E card you linked. Or a 4-port Marvell controller, again without riser or adapter. And again, for single SATA you can use this.
The upper pcie2 is a+e and no I can not use one of those cards as said, I am not going to do anything as I didn’t purchase one or would as don’t think it makes a great SBC at that price for what it offers.
If you check the update from @hipboi, the upper PCIe2 on Rock 3B will be B key, not E key.
That’s entirely up to you. I just pointed out that you are wrong about SBC capabilities, and provided examples how you could solve the problem described in your earlier post.
Its more feedback than anything as usually give whatever Radxa is offering a go but always felt the rk356x SoCs where extremely application focussed whilst the big dog rk3588 is the general purpose desktop.
I prob could use if b key thought it was a+e but still undecided as that port would be sataII as opposed to the others being sataIII which guess all would drop to the lower port speed or at least be queing and waiting for it.
I just don’t like the idea or the Pi like format.
you’re right, forgotten that it has 8GB max, better to have onboard RAM
just did a quick search on Geekbench, the best scores I can find are approximately that
Pi3+ r1.3 @1.4GHz = 120/350 (80%/78%)
RK3568 @2GHz = 150/450 (100%/100%)
Pi4 r1.1 @1.5GHz = 230/680 (153%/151%) <-- have it running 1.8GHz passively cooled
Pi4 r1.4 @1.8GHz = 270/740 (180%/164%)
RK3399 @1.4GHz = 270/750 (180%/167%)
RK3588 @1.8GHz = 500/2000 (333%/444%)
Seems like Pi is quite a tad faster, though it has no crypto engine; currently Pi 4 4GB is around US$100, and I think Rock 3 with 4GB RAM only should be quite a bit cheaper…
Not sure that QSGMII can be used for 2x2.5GbE at all… normally it is used for 4xGbE, but I doubt Rock 3B would have that.
I am not very sure if you really know how benchmarking works…
Anyway, variation happens when one use a different OS, hw rev, config / DTS, and sometimes even connected devices. Typical benchmarking requires a CONTROLLED environment, and I don’t think it is easy to come by, like a temperature / humidity controlled room.
Back to the “comment”, the result I used are based on Android 12, while the one you stated is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, that’s why. And why 1.8GHz for RK3588? you may go check it out yourself.
While Geekbench is that stupid to rely on some sysfs entries that claim certain clockspeeds. And the 1800 MHz you were fooled by is due to Geekbench presenting the clockspeed of cpu0 which on ARM is usually a little core. Geekbench just generates some funny numbers and its target audience usually doesn’t give a sh*t but blindly trusts into these numbers.
Then maybe you should better look at my sbc-bench than this Geekbench garbage…
sbc-bench tries to generate insights and not just numbers. See these two Rock 3A results:
How is that possible? Fortunately sbc-bench results also contain the answers. It’s not just silicon variation (the RK3568 on the 2nd test clocks severly lower than 2000 MHz) but it’s broken thermal trip points AKA bad settings.
Sure, if you have the time to go into all these, it is good for you; I used to play with benchmarking when I was in college (yep they have class for that too), but that was so many years ago and I don’t have time to “study all these” anymore.
And of course Geekbench does not care… how would they support a SoC is beyond me, but there are so many SoCs and SBCs in the world, I don’t think it is economical for them to “support everything”. Perhaps the best way to benchmark is to make it work like memtest86, that the system only runs what it intended to (benchmarking), and no more.
Obviously Geekbench is targeting a much wider audience than SBC, so can you tell how a Rock 5 using a cheap PCIe x4 SSD fair against a M2 Macbook Air? or just some old tablet that runs Intel Z8350 dual booting Windows 10 and Android? with your benchmark? Different benchmark serves different purposes, so I won’t just call them crap, unless they deliberately lie.
There is no need to ‘support’ a SoC. It’s due diligence when generating these numbers. And Geekbench sucks here big time.
They don’t give a sh*t about a sane benchmarking environment and deliberately upload garbage numbers to their website even if those are just numbers without meaning.
It is not hard to
measure CPU clockspeeds instead of trusting into some (often faked) sysfs entry. An ‘amateur’ like me uses @willy’s mhz utility for this in sbc-bench. Geekbench clockspeed reporting is pure BS. They report 2700MHz or 4000MHz for the same Core i7 in my old MacBook Pro depending on whether the benchmark runs on Windows or Linux. ARM’s big.LITTLE is there for a decade now but Geekbench doesn’t care. They (try to) measure single-threaded performance on a big core but report the little core’s sysfs clockspeed. Stupid isn’t it?
check background activity. It’s easy to spot this and to refuse to upload crappy numbers if this happened
check throttling or thermals in general. It’s easy to spot this and to refuse to upload crappy numbers if this happened
get the CPU’s cluster details and report them correctly and also test cores of all clusters individually. If ‘amateurs’ like me are able to do this in sbc-bench those Geekbench guys should be able to do this as well. At least benchmarking is their only job
Use case first! Always!
Which use case does Geekbench represent other than… none? I asked this many times various people and never got an answer. Which f*cking use case do these Geekbench combined scores represent?
With a ‘use case first’ approach it’s easy: I need macOS for my main computer so regardless of any performance considerations it’s the MacBook.
Then if the use case is ‘use this thing as desktop computer’ the important stuff is
high random I/O performance of the boot drive (the drive the OS is installed on)
as much graphics acceleration possible (both GPU and VPU)
sufficient amount of RAM since today’s software is a sh*tload of complexity (crappy software stacking layers of complexity one over another) needing tons of RAM. Once the machine starts to pageout/swap especially on storage with low random I/O performance it’s game over
What will Geekbench tell you about this? Nothing since it only focusses on (multi-threaded) CPU performance which is something for totally different use cases. The target audience is consumers not willing/able to think about what’s important but just interested in numbers/graphs and the ‘less is better’ or ‘more is better’ lable so they can compare $whatever without using their brain.
When talking about an M2 MacBook… why don’t you talk about an M1 MacBook Air?
You can get them less expensive (secondhand/refurbished) compared to the recent M2 model. Geekbench will tell you that there’s only a minor difference in ‘performance’ but if your use case is video editing and you’re stuck to the Apple ecosystem then there’s a massive performance difference since M2 has an Apple ProRes encoder/decoder ‘in hardware’.
It’s not my benchmark. sbc-bench is just a primitive tool that executes a small number of well established benchmarks in a controlled environment to be able to trash all those results that are garbage. It’s designed to get some real insights and not just numbers/graphs. IMHO developing a new benchmark is almost as stupid as developing cryptography if you’re not an absolute expert like @NicoD
Benchmarking is part of my day job and honestly +95% of all my benchmarking results need to be trashed since something went wrong (some detail you overlooked, some strange background activity, something you need to take into account since you learned something important on the way and so on). Compare with Geekbench or the Phoronix crap: both generate a cemetery of broken numbers. But this is part of their business model so why should this change?
As long as users are happy swallowing these BS numbers it works for them…
I have to agree with @tkaiser here. Geekbench is widely known for reporting random numbers that depend on the OS, its version, geekbench’s version, plenty of other variables nobody knows about, and probably the user’s mood and expectations, and all this without accurately reporting the execution conditions. Over the year we’ve read so many garbage values that its metric is not even a reliable one to validate how geekbench itself would perform on this or that machine in the unlikely case that your target use case would only be to run geekbench on the machine. As to how this translates to real world use cases… Honestly dickbench is only useful to compare one’s to others and claim “mine is bigger”.
And indeed, benchmark serves to provide a figure. The most important part of a benchmark is that it is reproducible. There’s no problem if reproducing it requires 10 pages of setup, provided that at the end you get the same results again, as it proves you’ve got the model right. That definitely requires eliminating all background noise or at least limiting it to a known level. Your indications seem extremely far from this at the moment, with only random elements being extracted to characterize the environment, with the most important one (CPU frequency) being reported wrong on a machine when it can vary 6-fold.
As a hint, a benchmark that only returns one value is garbage and totally useless. You need to find multiple dimensions and figure which one best matches your use case (i.e. mostly I/O, mostly CPU, mostly RAM, mostly GPU etc), and make sure about the condition they were executed in.
You don’t need to create a new benchmark, running a specific application that matches your use case can be a perfectly valid benchmark for your use case. You just need to limit undesired variations. For example I’m interested in compilation times and for this I’m keeping an old tar.gz of some software relevant to me, and build it with a binary build of the compiler I used on all benchmarks. That doesn’t prevent me from testing other combinations but at least I can compare the machines’ performance on this specific test, knowing that there are limits (e.g. number of cores etc).
@willy@tkaiser - everything You complain about GB it’s true and it’s easy to find out that produced result are not super reliable. It’s easy to get much lower scores as well as there are sometimes manipulated score uploaded to GB browser (like 80k results from cellphones, much better than big&hungry amd epyc).
Right now best scores are flooded with some AMD eng. samples with 192 cores. It’s that something real or yet again some fun from developers or bored users? We also know nothing about any other result, was cpu overclocked, was and how it was cooled? All those are unknown (as well as many other things that are very important) and this can alter result.
We all know that GB is also outdated and not precise about “core”. Right now we have little.big cores including newest intel cpus. Software (system and kernel) also can limit some numbers and it’s not clear if You don’t have some feature or if it’s just turned off/configuration is wrong. Probably it’s just easier to get lower scores than too high.
So what You expect from this benchmark? Should it just split from “single/multi core” to something like “single small, single big, all cores”? Some results depends on storage, so maybe it should also benchmark this? And what about kernel and system? I think that You will never have precise number that represents those resources. Also I think that if it’s worth to change method no, sooner or later there should be something like geekbench6.
I saw discussion at sbc-bench for result web-interface. Even when most of tests will not use full cpu or have some bottlenecks those represents some state. For same reason GB scores are somehow useful plus it’s easy to view, save, compare etc. Probably it’s easier to get to low score than too high. One number alone means almost nothing if You can’t compare that to something else like other SBC, other OS, other components. The real advantage is when You find that You setup perform much slower than most others, You can get some idea that there is something that limits your score and maybe fix that (or not if You find out that it’s not Your specific usage). The more recorded result the higher probability that You have same setup.
So GB score is not perfect and I don’t expect it to be. It gives some overview, something to compare wisely. Like pi-benchmarks for storage gives some idea what You can get with some sd cards or m.2 via adapters. Original topic was about rock3a 4x small cores vs older big cores from pi4 and that can be checked there via some results, some day maybe something like cortex A59 small cores would be better and much more energy efficient than those from pi4.
For now I said that rk3568 is rather slower than pi4 and that is visible in results. You could get two boards, perform any task to You want (like @willy tar.gz) measure time and be sure. Also You can ask for those files and .sh script and find out yourself, but I think there is something similar inside GB subtasks, and You can compare this task alone. It’s just easier to browse results than looking for someone who have that board/computer etc.
