SBC market opinion

[constantius]

Recently, nothing is happening on the SBC market. Libre Computer seems to be in a bad financial condition after having failed with La frite and the kickstarter campaign. Projects on SBC on cpu amlogic S912 and S922 are dead and it is not known if they will see the light of day. Pine is busy with its smartphone and probably nothing new will not be released yet. Xunlong who lives not from sales but from subsidies from the Chinese government is also silent. Expected allwinner processors from the new A100, A200 series are just under design. Only khadas released VIM3L from the S905X3 cpu. They even have a linux image already on this board. It can be downloaded from the khadas website. How do you assess the market situation? Nobody has prepared sbc with Amlogic S905X2. Is there a lack of support for gpu Mali -G31? Do you know anything that someone would work on SBC with Amlogic S905X2 or S905X3 cpu?

[Igor]

1 hour ago, constantius said:

Recently, nothing is happening on the SBC market.

Hardware design and sales market? There are "me too" projects, upgrades, some new exotics, fine tuning and some adventures like Pinephone. Software side of this market still has years to fix all half working stuff that is already on the market. Some features waits for years (power management on H3 for example, video acceleration on Allwinner is not implemented yet, opensource mali drivers are not there yet ...) From our POW its busy like hell while financing software support anyway goes mainly from other sources or is not paid at all ... since board makers claim to operate below or at zero profit. Cash raised with Kickstarter is not near enough to fund such projects, but its a nice add-on.

 

1 hour ago, constantius said:

linux image already on this board

Yes, it looks that way. Probably not much difference from S905X3 with older chips which are well supported by now.

[constantius]

Regarding exotic Bananapi M4 projects. Orangepi gets state subsidies but they only have to use soc from China. Only allwiner and rockchip come into play. Bananpi finances Foxconn. They got the condition to use soc Mediatek or Realtek because it is from Taiwan and not from China. Politics came into play here. Bananapi incurs large losses on its products. Bananapi M4 sold only 60 pieces on aliexpress. W2 is supposed to be a NAS server and has no PCI-e support. Utility sell without drivers. Complete flap. In addition, they incurred the costs of designing the bananapi F2 and S64 and did not put them on sale. Bananapi will be funded until Foxconn cancels them because of the costs involved, with no sales success. And the famous Cubietech basically went bankrupt.

[NicoD]

We just had the H6's (still work in progress), the S922X on the N2. The VIM3 with A311D. And all the RK3399's, and the NVIDIA Jetson Nano(just got it this week). 
I don't think we can complain. I did just order a TV-Box with the S905X3. It's sales on the ChinaExpress, so why not... 30euro for quad A55 32GB eMMC and 4GB ram. 

There's new SoC's comming. Very impressive SoC's. But I actually rather see Panfrost and Lima mature. Then the old boards will be great boards.
Now I'm working with the Jetson Nano, I see how much graphics drivers can do. The CPU is a bit underpowered, but it makes that up with its GPU. I've even been playing games in 4k on it. Amazing thing.

If/when good graphics drivers are available for RK3399(already has good VPU drivers) and the Amlogic SoC's. Then also those will be amazing boards.
I'm lucky that most of my tasks only need CPU power. And for every task I've got an SBC that's good at it. Desktop use/Video playback is my RK3399's the best. Plays even better Youtube than Jetson Nano. For video editing I use the Odroid N2 since 4GB ram and great performance. While the rendering I do on the VIM3. Only 2GB ram, too slow with swap on USB3-ssd to edit. But the fastest in rendering.

We might want it all, but we can't have it all.
I also do notice a little less interest in SBC's lately. The Raspberry Pi4 didn't have such a big impact (since it kinda sucks). And the lack of good graphics drivers on other boards have put of most mainstream users.
Too bad, because it's with them the market must grow.

Rockchip has a few great SoC's comming. Both power efficient SoC's for small boards that don't need extra cooling. And high performance SoC's that will blow away the RK3399's.
And all the small boards that have come out for light server use, and network boards. I wouldn't want to review them all. There's now also many NXP boards comming with RPi form factor.

And it isn't bad at all to still use older well supported SoC's than a new unsupported SoC. 

It might be a bit calmer than the beginning of the year when the new boards were quickly comming out. But the future does look good.(if only Panfrost and Lima mature, it always seems "another few months", but great work from the devs of course)

[p-i-u.de]

Personally as I'm using SoC for industrial purposes I'm glad that there is not coming anything new all the time, because we need stable, good software support and

I have to test everything and support everything. I'm using RockPI 4A and I really hope, that I'll get longterm access to this product as it's fits perfect my needs.

 

 

[constantius]

15 hours ago, NicoD said:

did just order a TV-Box with the S905X3. It's sales on the ChinaExpress, so why not... 30euro for quad A55 32GB eMMC and 4GB ram. 

Hi Which one you ordered? Vontar X96 Air , Wechip V9 or Beelink GT1 mini 2 ? Or somone else? Vontar is  the cheapest. 

Maybe I could buy one too. The same. Then you could think of armbian on it and support for this model.

[NicoD]

46 minutes ago, constantius said:

Hi Which one you ordered? Vontar X96 Air , Wechip V9 or Beelink GT1 mini 2 ? Or somone else? Vontar is  the cheapest. 

 

Answer

46 minutes ago, constantius said:

Vontar X96 Air

I don't know about armbian support for this chip. Could be @balbes150 has images that support it. I didn't check it. I just want to know how the S905X3 performs. And I can do someone a favor with it after testing.
 

[constantius]

55 minutes ago, NicoD said:

And I can do someone a favor with it after testing.

For S905X3 Performance can be high. I have a ZTE smartphone on an Unisoc SC9863A chip octa core cortex-A55 1.6Ghz. The performance is amazing. I don't play games. The Amlogic S905X3 has four cores less. It depends if androidTV how it is optimized and whether it is loaded in 64 bit. And most often with companies like Vontar, Wechip Mecool it is poorly done or not at all, and is not Google certified. Beelink and Minix provide certification, support and upgrade ...

[sfx2000]

On 11/11/2019 at 6:58 AM, constantius said:

Recently, nothing is happening on the SBC market. Libre Computer seems to be in a bad financial condition after having failed with La frite and the kickstarter campaign. Projects on SBC on cpu amlogic S912 and S922 are dead and it is not known if they will see the light of day. Pine is busy with its smartphone and probably nothing new will not be released yet. Xunlong who lives not from sales but from subsidies from the Chinese government is also silent.

 

I the market is maturing, and as such, the dynamics are changing these days. The race to the bottom has weeded out the weaker players, and I think we've seen the end of the really cheap boards for the most part.

 

Amlogic is focusing on their market sectors, and there, they've found a fair amount of success, I would say the same for Rockchip and AllWinner as they also start to focus on which OEM's are important to their bottom line.

 

There will be those that run at cost/below cost, such as Xunlong, but Orange Pi emits boards that are sometimes unsustainable outside of the BSP that they support.

 

It costs a fair amount to develop and build a board at scale - I did this as a scoping experiment myself, looking for a niche play with a quality board, but numbers did not work, even if I did production in Shenzen vs. other location, at a price point folks would be willing to pay.