NicoD

Thank you. I'll try that. For now I've got everything I need working in Bionic. 
I'll let the RockPiX do another build. It is slow, but steady
@Werner I'm on 5.9.15 Bionic and can confirm analog audio not working. HDMI sound works fine.
I'm using a 1080p display so can't test that resolution.

Just FYI that, the board is now functioning correctly with the ROMs updated last weekend ;-)

Today I had the pleasure of benchmarking an ARM64 server.
This server has been made available for Armbian to test native ARM64 image building.
I knew nothing about the server. Nobody told me any details.
So everything was an adventure for me to find out. I got SSH access, so my research began.

A lscpu informed me it had 32-cores all clocked at 3.3Ghz. 
 
cat /proc/cpuinfo confirmed these 32-cores
 
Checking on what kernel we're on. Ubuntu Focal 5.4.0-52-generic. 
And how much memory. 128GB RAM.

So first thing I wanted to know, how does one core perform with 7-zip benchmark?
The record I had seen until now was from the A73 cores from the Odroid N2+ clocked at 2.4Ghz. 2504MIPS decompression.
So :
taskset -c 31 7z b
 
This beats the Odroid N2+ its A73 cores clocked at 2.4Ghz. 2763 vs 2504MIPS decompression. 
This also tells me these cores do not perform as good per clock as a high performance core. 
While doing the single core benchmark I checked the sensors to know the wattage and temperature.
 
CPU power is about 20W for a single core tasks. 
Without a load the CPU consumes between 10W-15W. So in total it consumes a bit more than 20W in idle.
Temperature never went under 49C even after +5 minutes in idle. 
 
Of course, the next thing to do is an all-core 7zip benchmark. 
This gives an amazing result. Way higher than anything I had ever seen on ARM.
 
85975MIPS decompression. This is amazing.
Best I had seen was 11000MIPS of the Odroid N2+. So this server does 8 x better than the N2+. 
Tho, I must say. 7zip does bad with unequal clusers. The N2+ has a great difference in cluster frequencies. So it performs worse then expected here. 

The wattage went a lot higher, up to 110W. And the temperature rose quickly up to 75C in seconds.
 
To test the internet connection I downloaded an Armbian image multiple times. Sometimes it was as low as 3MB/s. 
Highest average speed I've seen was 12.5MB/s
 
Next test. BMW Blender render benchmark. 
Here the fastest I had ever seen was by the Khadas VIM3. That did it in 42m51s.
I haven't done this yet with the N2+ in Armbian. In Odroid's Ubuntu it was a little slower. I expect it to be a little faster than the VIM3 in Armbian Bionic. 
This is a tile based test. So every core gets its own task, until all tiles are done. 

Well, this ARM64 server did this in 8m27s. 
5 x faster compared to the Khadas VIM3. 

For this the wattage didn't go over 85W. But the temperature did rise to 83C. So it started to throttle. 

@lanefu already had done SBC-Bench on it when it was free. So this I didn't have to do myself.
http://ix.io/2Dcc
Here we see a lot. For example the CPUMiner did : 81.0kH/s 
The Odroid N2+                                                         : 14 kH/s         5.7 x less 
RK3399 does a maximum of                                     : 10.23kH/s     8 x less
Odroid C2 clocked at 1.75Ghz                                   : 4.65kH/s       17 x less

So this server clearly can move a lot of bits around. 
Now, what is this server? Ask google if nobody else tells me. "32 core ARM server 3.3Ghz"
First answer : https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/18/ampere_shipping/
That looks like it is this CPU. But still I can't find the exact name. 
2nd answer : https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-32-core-64-bit-arm-chip-x-gene-3-ip/
So this is the Ampere 32-core 64-bit from X-Gene 3 IP.

Here the wikichip : https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/apm/x-gene/apm883832-x3?fbclid=IwAR0ljCQ61DY8Zwh_VyZd0fQH43dmPUTJA-CGLiQKYqU2fWwszFm1CPjH6Zo

This supports up to 1TB RAM. 8 channels @ 2666Mhz. With a maximum memory bandwidth of 158.95 GiB/s.
42 lanes of PCIe Gen 3, with 8 controllers
– x16 or two x8/x4
– x16 or two x8/x4
– x8 or two x4
– Two x1

4 x SATA Gen 3 ports, 2 x USB2. And a TDP of 125W TDP.

For me this is just an awesome thing to behold. I use ARM for almost everything.
The NanoPi M4V2 is my main desktop computer.
It isn't as powerful as my PC, but does the task for 10 x less power consumption, while being completely silent.

But when I need a big CPU, it isn't enough.
Even the more powerful Odroid N2+ isn't powerful enough to render long, +20minutes 1440p video's for example for my Youtube channel.
So then i need to use my x86/amd64 PC. 

Today I have seen and tasted the future. 
While this doesn't use the most modern Cortex/clusters. And it is only 16nm.
So there is still a lot of room for improvements in performance and lower power consumption. 

ARM for desktop is possible, and ARM servers for big datacenters is possible(AWS). I have seen the future, I loved every second of it. 

Here benchmarks compared to my SBCs

 

Greetings, NicoD

I've gotten it from Firefly. Didn't need to pay income taxes or shipping. That's a game of chance. Many times I need to pay for income taxes, sometimes not.
For this I wanted to take my chances. I could use a 2nd RK3399 with 4GB ram. Ideal for running mainline while my M4V2 runs legacy.
It does run too hot for having such a case(85c at 2/1.5Ghz). I'll see to improve that. I suspect thermal pads that I'll replace with copper shims. Done that on my M4V2 and the difference is huge.

Wow. Does your family know what Armbian is?
Cool family if so. Nobody in my family knows what Linux is, and wouldn't understand if I told them. And I make videos about it.
I hope they are happy with their gifts. Armbian all the way  

I build Bionic legacy today and didn't boot, no led on. Why didn't I check here  
Took my poor RockPiX 5 hours and 30 minutes to build. I'll try again tomorrow. Now the build should go faster. Thanks.

I never know what to get anyone.  If I'm being honest I have more than a little disdain for how commercialized the holidays have become nowadays.  We were not raised in a materialistic way growing up.  A lot of gifts were socks and other actually useful things like that (which I only appreciate now as I get older ).  Anyway...
 
So when some of the guys shared some pictures of themselves with some Armbian swag in IRC a while back, a little light bulb went off in my head. 
 
So this morning, I went nuts and spent > 400 USD sending everyone in my family some Armbian swag.    I figure, it's a good way to get the word out there to friends and family about a project I care a lot about, while supporting the project a bit financially at the same time.
 
   
 
I don't expect anyone else to spend that sort of money, in fact I am a tight wad and rarely do, myself.  But a coffee mug or something might be nice?
 
I also don't like to rush people (because I don't like to be rushed, myself), however if you are going for delivery before the holidays I would place your order ASAP, maybe even today.
 
One final gotcha, their credit card processor apparently only allow 2 orders per day.  Luckily I had sent orders to other family first, because my third order was denied.  I called their customer support and they confirmed this issue and told me to try again after 24 hours.  So the stuff that is coming here for us I will place that order (again) tomorrow.  I just wanted to give everyone a heads up about that though.

I've gotten my Station P1. 
It looks great. I love the metal case. 
There seems to be PCIe GPIO's. Also RTC battery. 

It is sweet. Thank you for informing me about this. 

 

Both Station P1 and M1 support Armbian OS.
 

Or is it the other way around?

I've gotten my Station P1. 
It looks great. I love the metal case. 
There seems to be PCIe GPIO's. Also RTC battery. 

It is sweet. Thank you for informing me about this. 

 

I've gotten my Station P1. 
It looks great. I love the metal case. 
There seems to be PCIe GPIO's. Also RTC battery. 

It is sweet. Thank you for informing me about this. 

 

Donations reached the goal. 
To everybody who helped. Big thank you. This will be well used. I've seen the server and it's a monster.

Next goal maybe different desktop implementations, with GPU and maybe VPU if possible. Who could we hire? What cost?
 
But before that there's already enough new things coming soon. And the server will be in good use or that.

From the whole team. Thank you.
NicoD

All images for a certain board share the same kernel.  After all, a desktop image is just a server image in which you install Xfce and the rest of the desktop apps.
 
However, panfrost should not give any trouble if you are not using any graphical application. But if you want to disable it anyway, just add a line like this:
blacklist panfrost to a newly created file
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-panfrost.conf  

Odroid HC4 would feature 2x SATA but no USB3. USB2 only
What about NanoPi M4V2 with 4x SATA hat? Powerful but more expensive

Excellent work @NicoD, does that mean one can now create a PR to improve this and submit to the Armbian repo?

Update : It was a mesa bug that produced the crashes. 
RK3399 is now back stable with latest updates. Even at 2Ghz and ondemand governor. 
But not all problems are fixed yet with mesa/panfrost. The errors in dmesg are still there. And some things that use panfrost will not work. 
Mesa has had a major update to version 20.2.4. So if you need panfrost, best to use mesa 20.2.3. https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/20.2.4.html
You can also download the old version of Armbian Reforged with mesa 20.2.3. But be sure not to upgrade for the moment. 
 

Update : It was a mesa bug that produced the crashes. 
RK3399 is now back stable with latest updates. Even at 2Ghz and ondemand governor. 
But not all problems are fixed yet with mesa/panfrost. The errors in dmesg are still there. And some things that use panfrost will not work. 
Mesa has had a major update to version 20.2.4. So if you need panfrost, best to use mesa 20.2.3. https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/20.2.4.html
You can also download the old version of Armbian Reforged with mesa 20.2.3. But be sure not to upgrade for the moment. 
 

Yes.

I only now see this post. 
Indeed as @TRS-80 said my favorite for desktop tasks is the NanoPi M4V2 with Armbian Bionic legacy and @JMCC his media script. Now also possible in Buster.
For me watching video, mostly Youtube is very important. And I've got a 4k display, so I rather have a higher display resolution than 1080p.
The RK3399 from the NanoPi M4V2 does 1440p without a problem. And it then plays 1080p video perfect with VPU acceleration. 

Its I/O is just amazing. 2x fast USB3 controllers for each 2 ports, left and right. (every 1 controller is faster/better than the only 1 controller on N2+)
Has PCIe GPIO's what fits an NVMe hat/SATA hat, USB3 hat.
I've got a 256GB NVMe on it. Doing initial boot from eMMC, and full boot from NVMe. I must say that the RockPi4 has a faster NVMe drive(4x PCIe vs 2x PCIe on M4V2), but I like the metal case from the M4V2 a lot more. And not the bandwith is most important using NVMe, but latency. And that's the same.
Also a big swap file of 8GB on NVMe so I never get out of memory. Works great, but does decrease the lifespan of an NVMe drive. I replace it every year just to be safe and then use the used NVMe as external USB3 device.

I also have an sd-card with a Armbian mainline focal image for playing games on it. I just need to push that sd-card in and reboot to get to my 2nd image. 

For a few months google account didn't work on the VPU accelerated Chromium on the RK3399. So then I used Vivaldi browser for watching Youtube. But that could only do 1080p video with 1080p display resolution.
So I switched my M4V2 with the Odroid N2+ for a while. That one is able to play 1080p video at 1440p display resolution. Tho not perfectly as the RK3399. Some dropped frames, some screen tearing.

I do like the extra CPU performance of the N2+. But in desktop tasks I rarely need a lot of CPU power. 
All I do is browsing, answering on this forum and on others, watching youtube, writing textfiles, downloading images and writing them to media, record audio, ...

All tasks that do not need much CPU. So RK3399 is more than powerful enough. 

If not for the media script from JMCC I'd take the Odroid N2+ before my M4V2. But having VPU driver is so nice that my N2+ is playing 2nd fidel.
Future wise the N2+ might become the better one if GPU and VPU drivers are availabe for it. It can do a lot with its CPU alone. 

Only for video editing and rendering I use my PC. And a few games that don't work on my M4V2. But these days even gaming on it is just awesome.
 
Good choice. Do know that the RockPi4 is a bit fidly to put together with the NVMe hat, and its heatsink is a little less potent. 
The NVMe then can go upwards of 1GB/s vs 750MB/s on the M4V2. 
Greetings.
 

The current status last I read seemed to me that people are currently testing and looking for a solution.  I think it's a regression introduced by newer kernel or something like that.  You can find more info in this other thread which is about desktop however there seems to be a lot of RK3399 specific discussion starting at the post I linked.
 
Best thing you could do at this point is familiarize yourself with the discussion / issue, perhaps try and modify dtb and other things if you are capable, if not just follow along and give additional testing when more advanced users eventually post their solutions.  Because the evidence becomes much stronger if testing has been done by multiple people to confirm results (instead of jut one person).
 
Also, if you don't own a UART yet, you probably should to get one (or more) on their way to you in the mail.  They are only couple bucks apiece, and IMO anyone who play with SBC should own at least one!
 
EDIT: NicoD advice a few posts up (use legacy kernel) or Pedro Lamas' may be best in this case.  I did not read it until after posting.  Understand that as a Mod I read almost everything that is posted, so I end up with shallow (therefore sometimes wrong) understanding on a wide variety of topics.  lol  Don't mind me, carry on.  Some of general ideas in my post still apply, however, so I leave those.  Cheers.

I only now see this post. 
Indeed as @TRS-80 said my favorite for desktop tasks is the NanoPi M4V2 with Armbian Bionic legacy and @JMCC his media script. Now also possible in Buster.
For me watching video, mostly Youtube is very important. And I've got a 4k display, so I rather have a higher display resolution than 1080p.
The RK3399 from the NanoPi M4V2 does 1440p without a problem. And it then plays 1080p video perfect with VPU acceleration. 

Its I/O is just amazing. 2x fast USB3 controllers for each 2 ports, left and right. (every 1 controller is faster/better than the only 1 controller on N2+)
Has PCIe GPIO's what fits an NVMe hat/SATA hat, USB3 hat.
I've got a 256GB NVMe on it. Doing initial boot from eMMC, and full boot from NVMe. I must say that the RockPi4 has a faster NVMe drive(4x PCIe vs 2x PCIe on M4V2), but I like the metal case from the M4V2 a lot more. And not the bandwith is most important using NVMe, but latency. And that's the same.
Also a big swap file of 8GB on NVMe so I never get out of memory. Works great, but does decrease the lifespan of an NVMe drive. I replace it every year just to be safe and then use the used NVMe as external USB3 device.

I also have an sd-card with a Armbian mainline focal image for playing games on it. I just need to push that sd-card in and reboot to get to my 2nd image. 

For a few months google account didn't work on the VPU accelerated Chromium on the RK3399. So then I used Vivaldi browser for watching Youtube. But that could only do 1080p video with 1080p display resolution.
So I switched my M4V2 with the Odroid N2+ for a while. That one is able to play 1080p video at 1440p display resolution. Tho not perfectly as the RK3399. Some dropped frames, some screen tearing.

I do like the extra CPU performance of the N2+. But in desktop tasks I rarely need a lot of CPU power. 
All I do is browsing, answering on this forum and on others, watching youtube, writing textfiles, downloading images and writing them to media, record audio, ...

All tasks that do not need much CPU. So RK3399 is more than powerful enough. 

If not for the media script from JMCC I'd take the Odroid N2+ before my M4V2. But having VPU driver is so nice that my N2+ is playing 2nd fidel.
Future wise the N2+ might become the better one if GPU and VPU drivers are availabe for it. It can do a lot with its CPU alone. 

Only for video editing and rendering I use my PC. And a few games that don't work on my M4V2. But these days even gaming on it is just awesome.
 
Good choice. Do know that the RockPi4 is a bit fidly to put together with the NVMe hat, and its heatsink is a little less potent. 
The NVMe then can go upwards of 1GB/s vs 750MB/s on the M4V2. 
Greetings.
 

You know, I take a lot of notes, but not always.  So I am not 100% sure of following, however if I am recalling correctly, in one of NicoD videos where he goes through all his boards, the Odroid N2+ he says is very powerful (maybe even the most powerful?). but limited on I/O.  And maybe that's what you were hinting to about USB, @lanefu?
 
And this is what I mean by "little gotchas."  Also I want to make the point that there probably is no clear "best" as it depends a lot on your application, etc.
 
Also just now looking up the above video to get URL I came across another video (which I don't think I watched yet) called Comparison NanoPi M4 - RockPi4 - Odroid N2 - Khadas VIM3 which is perhaps even more directly applicable to this conversation.

I am guessing you mean for "desktop" usage (many of us, including myself, primarily only use Armbian for "server/headless" usage).
 
@NicoD has some great video reviews on his YouTube channel, I want to say (if I am recalling correctly) his favorite right now for desktop usage is... NanoPi M4 V2(?) but check his channel to be sure (and check it anyway, lots of good info on there).
 
@lanefu was reporting really good results with a PineBook (Pro?) the other night in IRC, but that might be WIP/dev stuff, so not sure it's public/available yet or not.  But in general, a lot of work has been done lately on "desktop" branch and should be getting released Soon(TM).
 
Many of these boards are compelling, however the best advice I can probably give you is to do your homework, as there are potentially little gotchas with any particular board.  The more time you spend up front researching, the less hassle down the line.
 
A good starting point is usually always the Supported Devices List, but for "desktop" you are probably looking for one of the RK3399 based boards these days.  Until you know the board families by heart, the home page of forums makes a handy cross reference (note which boards are listed for which family sub-forums). 
 
Good luck, let us know how the search goes / what you pick, and don't be a stranger. 

Just tried focal nightly. https://minio.k-space.ee/armbian/dl/nanopim4/nightly/Armbian_21.02.0-trunk.8_Nanopim4_focal_current_5.9.12.img.xz
After installing the desktop it also crashed. Always the same crash. Black display, no flashing led. Dim led still on. 
I'll try an older image.

Update. Focal 5.8.6 is the same. Even with governor set to performance.