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Hardware Technology

Raspberry Pi Alternative Banana Pi Reveals Powerful New Board (tomshardware.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the computer-on-a-module dept.
Banana Pi has revealed a new board resembling the Raspberry Pi Computer Module 3. According to Tom's Hardware, it features a powerful eight-core processor, up to 8GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC. Additional features like ports will require you to connect it to a carrier board. From the report: At the core of the Banana Pi board is a Rockchip RK3588 SoC. This brings together four Arm Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.6 GHz with four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz in Arm's new DynamIQ configuration - essentially big.LITTLE in a single fully integrated cluster. It uses an 8nm process. The board is accompanied by an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 Odin GPU with support for OpenGLES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.2, and Vulkan1.2. There's a 2D graphics engine supporting resolutions up to 8K too, with four separate displays catered for (one of which can be 8K 30FPS), and up to 8GB of RAM, though the SoC supports up to 32GB. Built-in storage is catered for by up to 128GB of eMMC flash. It offers 8K 30fps video encoding in the H.265, VP9, AVS2 and (at 30fps) H.264 codecs.

That carrier board is a monster, with ports along every edge. It looks to be about four times the area of the compute board, though no official measurements have been given. You get three HDMIs (the GPU supports version 2.1), two gigabit Ethernet, two SATA, three USB Type-A (two 2.0 and one 3) one USB Type-C, micro SD, 3.5mm headphones, ribbon connectors, and what looks very like a PCIe 3.0 x4 micro slot. The PCIe slot seems to breakout horizontally, an awkward angle if you are intending to house the board in a case. Software options include Android and Linux.
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Raspberry Pi Alternative Banana Pi Reveals Powerful New Board More

Raspberry Pi Alternative Banana Pi Reveals Powerful New Board

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 04, 2022 @06:29AM (#62325159)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Do the world a favour and look up the manufacturers of these boards, then send them a message explaining just that.

      I usually do so with no or a fake return email stuffed in an "send us an email" form, because I don't want the mealy-mouthed customer disservice "engineer" expressing insincerities in my inbox. I just want to tell them, and that's it. If they pick up on it, good for them. If not, their loss.

    • Rockchip seems to have picked up on this problem as well because they helped get the code mainlined for RK3566/RK3568 chips. https://www.cnx-software.com/2... [cnx-software.com]
      They maintain open source versions of their software and work to get it mainlined in various projects (e.g. uboot): https://github.com/rockchip-li... [github.com]
      They also have open source library for harnessing hardware accelerated codec encoding/decoding: https://github.com/rockchip-li... [github.com]

      They had a wiki with all the details but it looks like it got breached or so

      • One more thing. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )

        One more bit of news, the GPU (Mali) is developed by ARM, so the official driver is a closed source binary BUT it's the same thing used on the PI. As a result of being widely used, it's been reverse engineered and was mainlined back in 2019 under the name "Panfrost". Then ARM was like "well fuck it" and actually started helping ensure the Panfrost driver worked by providing developers with proper documentation. [cnx-software.com]

      • I just realized I wrote the wrong chip numbers... but good news, RK35xx is still supported! [itsfoss.com]

        That said, the RK3588 SoC is especially sophisticated, so you aren't going to get complete support for a while.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Slayer ( 6656 )

        I am curious, how this will pan out over time. I bought the Banana Pi M2 back then in hopes to get a decently powered board, only to discover the extreme lack of software support for this thing. As far as I remember I never got graphics to work. Compare this to Raspberry PI 4, which runs Ubuntu with XFCE.

        Another downside of this board are the 8GB RAM upper limit. That Raspberry PI 4 runs nicely, but the 8GB are a tad short of running Firefox with 10-15 tabs open plus telegram. The thing keeps swapping, and

      • Re:Good news, everyone! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by djgl ( 6202552 ) on Friday March 04, 2022 @09:42AM (#62325471)

        The situation is not as good as you make it sound.

        Rockchip does not use the mainline kernel for their internal development. Every few years they pick an Android kernel to work on. Their stable kernel for current chips is v4.19.219. They have a development branch for v5.10.66 but they did non yet dare to declare it stable. For the RK3568 only a few drivers have been mainlined. More complex drivers like GPU and video codecs are done by (most likely unpaid) volunteers outside of Rockchip. Also the RK3588 differs in many aspects from the RK3566 and RK3568.

        Rockchip made 71 commits on the 4.19 branch and 188 on the 5.10 branch in February. Compare this to the tiny number of patches upstreamed in that time frame. I don't think Rockchip cares about the mainline kernel.

        For U-Boot they have deviated heavily from the mainline version. Their current development branch stacks 6621 commits on top of v2017.09. Only very few of them are backported commits from newer U-Boot versions.

        If you don't like closed source software, you not only have to worry about the GPU driver (although support in Mesa looks promising), but also about the bootloaders. Rockchip releases the DDR initialization code, BL31, and BL32 (OP-TEE) only as binary blobs.

    • I second that. Stick to Raspberry Pi's if you can, for the support form other users.

      Banana Pi's are not supported by the manufacturers once they are not new anymore and are only a tenth as well supported by the community.

    • I'd love to know why the distros can't use the same code that kodi uses for performance. I hate how limited kodi is but they have $100 ARM boards that play 4k video at 60hz. Do you think any of that stuff works in the full Linux distros? Fuck no, none of it does. You can install Ubuntu and have a desktop but can't use any of the hardware decoding features. VLC does GPU decoding great on x64 but not on any ARM boards

    • Generally I'll just go with x86-64 unless I really need an extremely small footprint or power draw. If you don't have power limitations, and are just running off a wall plug anyway, then it doesn't make sense to go with a Raspberry Pi. Pick up a refurb USFF PC on eBay and you'll have quite a bit more power than you get on the rapsberry pi, for not a lot more money. The problem with the Raspberry Pi is that is has always been focused on hitting some impossibly low price point. So you end up with a board, but

    • going for anything other than Raspberry Pis or Intel-based devices. .

      Unless you meant X86, should I assume that in your world AMD is already dead and buried?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      Come on over to the Armbian project and help us provide modern kernels to these boards.

      Join us! armbian.com [armbian.com]

    • Raspberries don't amaze with their hardware, but they're well supported on the software side of things and well documented as well.

      They also have, AFAIK, a much better/bigger supporting community of users. That alone would be enough to pick them over the "better" alternatives.

      • They also seem to plan the lifecycle well, at least stating their intentions as to when they plan to stop manufacturing each item

    • A couple years ago I bought several of the Raspberry Pi alternative boards to play with. This was before the Pi 4 so they all boasted more compute power or memory than the Pi 3. All of them are sitting in a fucking drawer and I reuse my pile of Pis for projects. Getting them to boot and run is just so much more of a hassle than a Pi. For these types of boards built-in eMMC is a nice feature on paper but in practice a pain in the ass. My goal with little boards is to make a fun or cool project, not spend my

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      It's not a mainlined kernel that's the important part. It's the community support and the support they give.

      Too many of these boards - the companies release them then forget about them. They release one version of software and provide basically no support.

      Raspberry Pis are not popular because they're cheap. Or that they're the most powerful chip out there, as demonstrated by all these SBC providers.

      Raspberry Pi is popular because of the community - the community along with the RPi Foundation help keep the b

  • What is the price? It's not a raspberry pi competitor if it doesn't cost the same or less. The whole point of the raspberry pi is to be low cost. It must be expensive because they aren't touting the price anywhere, they are not proud of it.

    • What is the price? It's not a raspberry pi competitor if it doesn't cost the same or less.

      So... the price for the Banana Pi needs to be appealing. :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The price will depend on the carrier board you use. The module itself doesn't do much, it hasn't even got power connectors. The carrier they have shown looks expensive.

    • " You get three HDMIs (the GPU supports version 2.1), two gigabit Ethernet, two SATA, three USB Type-A (two 2.0 and one 3) one USB Type-C, micro SD, 3.5mm headphones, ribbon connectors, and what looks very like a PCIe 3.0 x4 micro slot." All I want is a board for projects like building a robot buggy, or a camera to watch for wildlife, or maybe a bit of emulator gaming. These features don't add anything to the concept of Raspberry Pi except for cost.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I'm curious to know what kinds of carriers are available. I've seen some multi-slot carriers that weren't very impressive

        Pretty much this.

        I'd love to see a carrier for these devices where you can just put a bunch in a box. If the carrier had an ethernet switch on board and a single port for e.g. 8 devices and a nice fat DC in that would be sweet. Even gig-e would be fine.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Huh that's disappointing. Looks like it's under pre-order or development or something. It's also... I dunno a bit overkill for what I want. It does look like it's designed for a sort of self-contained cluster (one device with SATA, two PCIe, ATX power). All I want is ethernet and some nice 12V screw terminals.

            and it really doesn't have a lot that, say, the budgetest budget Intel or AMD single-CPU consumer motherboard wouldn't have.

            What I'd love to do is to be able to stack a bunch into a rack and have a f

  • cant fucking buy it, so who cares?

    • They're selling it on ali express [aliexpress.com]. When that is your only sales avenue though - with the long shipping delays and communication issues associated with alibaba - it is still somewhat open to question how real the product is. Hopefully someone gets one as a physical product soon to verify it to match the specs as it does sound promising.

    • You pretty much can't buy an 8GB pi either - they're on constant back-order due to supply issues :-(

    • It seems to have that much in common with RPi - went looking for one a short while back and evidently there's a global shortage of 'em. Scalpers have them up to $200 on eBay and Amazon. They were more reasonable in Europe but just barely.

    • I can't buy the RPi 4 either, not unless I want to pay 5-10x the MSRP on ebay.

  • I love that there are alternatives to Raspberry Pi. The more choice, the better.

    But "{Fruit} Pi" just seems so unimaginative, and bordering on trademark infringement! Could they not have come up with their own name?

    • But "{Fruit} Pi" just seems so unimaginative, and bordering on trademark infringement! Could they not have come up with their own name?

      Agreed. I like that they want to be associated with it - it is mostly a SoC setup - but I do worry it could cause some confusion as well. RPi has quite a bit of market penetration; I'd be concerned that people might here of this and think it would be a direct swap - which it is not (unless you count replacing the entire system including the case as a "direct swap").

      • "But "{Fruit} Pi" just seems so unimaginative, and bordering on trademark infringement! Could they not have come up with their own name?"

        "Raspberry Cake" then ?

    • That does smell like like of imagination and awareness that "bananas" is not great in English. And an attempt to resemble Raspberry Pi.

      StrawberryPi, KiwiPi at least but instead they went bananas! (I suppose ApplePi would not work)

  • Have they heard of the mini-ITX standard?

    • Have they heard of the mini-ITX standard?

      This! Putting connectors on all sides of the board shows a disconnect between the engineer doing the layout and people who might actually use the board.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        No, it doesn't. It shows that you are not the person who might actually use the board.

        It's a development kit. It's for building prototypes before you design your own carrier board for whatever product you're developing.

    • Why would a development board use the mini-ITX standard? That seems stupid and pointless.
      Why would a core module that is a fraction of the size of the mini-ITX standard use the mini-ITX standard? That seems stupid and pointless.

      Why did you look at a development kit and think it was a final product?

  • This will cost more than a RPi, especially with a breakout board being required.

    However the CPU configuration is similar to what I am hoping for the RPi5, perhaps even faster, being 8nm (I'm expecting 12nm for the next RPi SoC).

    The issue is that a lot of the RPi value comes from the ecosystem around it, not the hardware itself. If this board doesn't have all the features working on an out-of-the-box Linux kernel, or at least a distro with recent kernel and drivers, then it's not going to be that great.

    • This will cost more than a RPi, especially with a breakout board being required.

      They all do, the question is what are the capabilities. Also the RPi CM3+ which this is competing with also requires a breakout board.

      The issue is that a lot of the RPi value comes from the ecosystem around it, not the hardware itself.

      This can't be stated enough. All these "competitors" seem to not understand what it is which makes the RPi a compelling product. Single board computers are dime a dozen. Single board computers with thousands of example projects, wiring schematics, ready to bake single purpose Linux distributions, addons, and peripherals supported by the aforementioned distributions are rare.

  • -The last part of the name
    -It is ARM based
    -It does not implement any standardized form factor

    Things that are (presumably different)
    -Not a SBC
    -Probably a higher price class
    -Significantly larger footprint (the fact the board without IO ports is small doesn't matter, the size of the carrier boards is what matters.

    I do however appreciate the concept of compute board distinct from carrier board. On the one hand it means there are two boards to manufacture, which incurs cost overhead, but that cost may be offset

  • Their support is useless and their forums are full of serious but unanswered questions.

    They lie about Diet Pi support.

    They do not compare to Raspberry Pi.

    Avoid.

  • It looks pretty yummy.

  • I can get an Rpi today and I know what the price is, if I have to submit a request for quote, I won't buy.

  • The risks of being dependent on components from evil dictatorships is no longer theoretical. Our company has been slowly replacing sources and moving production out of China for a few years.

  • I got into this stuff a while back and have been farting around with the various ESP32 boards (ESP32, the c3, 8266, etc..) and I wonder if people know many of the projects they buy a rpi for could be done with a tiny ass little chip a fraction the size, highly available, and considerably cheaper.

    My most recent (failed, sadly) attempt was OctoPrint. I can't find a fucking rpi4 so I was going to try to run Octoprint in a docker and connect serial over TCP/IP to an ESP32 I hooked up the UART on my Qidi x-plus.

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