I think it’s notable that the chip powering the RP5 is built on a 16nm process. (The RP4 was on 26nm).
This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!
Orange Pi 5, "plus" version also has 2gen 1-lane pci-e (M.2 wifi), and 3gen 4-lane pci-e (M.2 SSD) and 2x2.5Gbit ethernet.
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
How is the software support? That’s the main thing keeping me on rPi. I tried Pine64 and it was terrible. Never could get my PineBook Pro to boot reliably.
There are always little things. As far as I know, desktop works pretty well and there are people running PS2 emulation on it, which has always been super heavy.
arm64 has come a long way for that use case.
It's been solid as the VM host so far. I wrote an Armbian SD card and it just worked. Once a VM is booted though, many things become irrelevant outside of arm64 support.
I haven't tried again since February, so there's a decent chance my issues are fixed, but ZFS wouldn't build and VLAN support was disabled for the NIC. Not blockers, but it did make me rethink some ideas I had.
Alder Lake N (N95, N100, etc) is built on a 7nm class process. Many of those systems could be considered SBCs (SoC/RAM/Storage is often all on a single board). Those CPUs are low end for x86, but much higher end than a typical ARM based SBC.
The N100 is quite good all things considered. It generally beats an i5-6500t in pretty much anything while having very low power draw and all the newest media engine encoders.
Side note, lowering the process means smaller wires and more susceptibility to ESD. I've never vacuumed a Pi 4, but also haven't lost any to it in countless sketchy mounting points. That might change on the 5, GPUs built on 10 nm and lower just die if you touch them wrong.
process node only matters that much when you are dealing with the latest system architecture. whether you compare with rockpi's offering or with apple, A76 is a design from 2018.
This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!