AleBerna

As a CS student who cannot afford to buy new ARM boards, I would love to tinker with one and have many projects planned for it. First, I would run benchmarks to compare it against my current Intel Celeron 4105 in terms of performance and efficiency. These Intel low-powered x86 chips are the main competitors to these powerful SoCs (at least when considering NAS/homelab projects, although x86 SBCs and compute modules do exist). I would also try out the RK3588 VPU. With this being a fairly recent chip with good support thanks to the rockchip-ffmpeg project, it would be really cool to run benchmarks and see how well it stacks up in quality compared to my Celeron’s QuickSync (Whiskey Lake) and my 1660s Turing NVENC. I would do this by running quality assessment tests like VMAF on the encoded videos. The RK3588 also features an NPU, which is a really cool piece of hardware. There are endless projects that can make use of it thanks to recent AI developments. Additionally, I could compare it to my old OrangePi 0+, even though that’s an almost pointless comparison. The Banana Pi surely surpasses it with its newer and more expensive SoC and stellar I/O speeds. After publishing a review with all these tests, I’d transform it into a dedicated router. The dual 2.5G ethernet ports make this board perfect for that. If I find its performance good enough, I’d also move my entire home server to it; it surely has more than enough RAM, and the power consumption would be significantly lower.