Most powerful board and fastest SD card port

[pbies]

Hello All!

 

I am considering to change my Banana Pi to most powerful board (but with sense of cost), so I have question: what is currently mass produced board that is best in CPU performance and also supports Armbian?

 

Other question about SD port: does these powerful boards support fastest SD cards which have R/W capability at 200MB/s? Which board supports these cards?

 

Thank you

[Igor_K]

 

`cpuminer` is a typical benchmark tool here this simple fact is able to improve your search results dramatically. 

[tkaiser]

1 hour ago, pbies said:

Other question about SD port: does these powerful boards support fastest SD cards which have R/W capability at 200MB/s?

 

Most boards only support DDR50 mode, some also SDR104: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/5864-librecomputer-renegade-rk3328/?do=findComment&comment=58319 (you won't exceed 80 MB/s, for more you need boards with fast eMMC interfaces: ODROIDs for example or RK3399 boards).

 

'Powerful' is a bit meaningless. Are you searching for 'CPU performance', for fast IO, for GPU acceleration? Do you keep in mind that some use cases require also certain amounts of RAM?

 

[pbies]

Thanks for your responses.

 

@tkaiser Mostly I am interested in CPU performance and 2GB of RAM is enough for me, but could be more. But still I want this board to be ARM capable. GPU and ports does not matter that much. It should be board for www traffic, an investment for few next years. Maybe some new boards are coming to the market?

[tkaiser]

12 minutes ago, pbies said:

It should be board for www traffic, an investment for few next years

 

Still don't get the use case but anyway... it's rather easy.

 

There are slow ARM cores (A5, A7 and A53), fast ones (A15, A17 and A72) and something in between: A9 (i.MX6 boards and Clearfogs). The majority of boards Armbian supports has slow cores, there are just a few exceptions:

• ODROID-XU4 (big.LITTLE with 4xA7 and 4xA15)
• Tinkerboard and MiQi (4xA17)
• some RK3399 boards soon (2xA72 and 4xA53)

The RK3399 boards are all rather expensive, the Tinkerboard is a bizarre fail, no idea whether you can buy a MiQi any more but maybe 8 slow cores for 35 bucks are the right thing for you: NanoPi Fire3

[pbies]

@tkaiser thank you very much. That helped me a lot.

 

After some small research I can see that in Europe there are not many boards available to buy. Or they are not compatible. The last selection I will make from these:

https://cenowarka.pl/?cmp=1362513&cmp=1557200&cmp=1557163

 

I see lack of USB 3.0 (not a must), M3 seems to be old but has 8 cores and I am not sure if it will accept 64GB SD card?

 

I am also not sure about A64 - I understand that this is 64 bit - are there Armbian compilation for 64-bit CPU? Other OS?

 

And M3 lacks some onboard stuff which have the other two.

[tkaiser]

12 minutes ago, pbies said:

https://cenowarka.pl/?cmp=1362513&cmp=1557200&cmp=1557163

 

None of these boards is supported by Armbian (for a reason -- they're all listed as 'CSC' --> community supported configurations without any support). Just use the Google Site Search link above and search for each, you'll find reviews and a lot of information here.

[pbies]

Yes, much negative info about Banana Pi's. Is it a marketing move?

 

I've selected and ordered Raspberry Pi 3 model B+.

 

It should be not much better, but will be enough for some time.

[vlad59]

That's why the use case is very important and you have to be specific : if I/O (disk or network) is the most important for you, then RPi3 can be worse than an old Banana Pi. If your main problem is CPU then Rpi3 will be better.

 

i.e. :

 * you run static website (hugo for example) -> disk I/O is not that important as most of your files will be cached

 * you run many Wordpress / MySQL databases -> Disk I/O is important

 * You serve very big files -> More than 1Go of RAM can be great and Gigabit ethernet is mandatory .....

 

[richardk]

Perhaps the MacchiatoBin from solidrun?  Quad 2GHz Cortex A72, 4GB RAM, $369USD.

 

https://www.solid-run.com/product-tag/macchiatobin-double-shot/

 

No Armbian, though.  Shame.

 

The Hikey 970?  (Up to) 2.3GHz quad A73 and 6GB RAM.   $299USD on Amazon.com.  Still no Armbian.

 

[pbies]

@vlad59 @richardk Well, these are too expensive and the main thing is CPU, so I'll stay with my selection. Also such a great hardware is not needed. I would go for Orange Pi as it is much better, but I wasn't able to find any to buy.

[tkaiser]

54 minutes ago, pbies said:

I would go for Orange Pi as it is much better, but I wasn't able to find any to buy.

 

https://pl.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-PC-Plus-ubuntu-linux-and-android-mini-PC-Beyond-Raspberry-Pi-2/1553371_32668618847.html

[pbies]

@tkaiser thank you. It would take long time to receive item from aliexpress. Well, I will have to stay with the ordered item. Which Orange Pi's are the most powerful?

[tkaiser]

9 minutes ago, pbies said:

It would take long time to receive item from aliexpress.

 

Everything I ordered from Xunlong's Aliexpress store so far arrived within less than 2 weeks. 'Powerful' is relative as already explained. It's about the use case and then the SoC in question (and the specific board design -- an Orange Pi Lite 2 for example has a pretty fast CPU/GPU combination but of course networking sucks somehow since only Wi-Fi on the board)

[chwe]

1 hour ago, pbies said:

@tkaiser thank you. It would take long time to receive item from aliexpress. Well, I will have to stay with the ordered item. Which Orange Pi's are the most powerful?

is most powerful a need or a wish?  

 

19 hours ago, pbies said:

I've selected and ordered Raspberry Pi 3 model B+.

1GB ram, a more or less standard slow arm.. There you go powerful board..

 

22 hours ago, pbies said:

It should be board for www traffic, an investment for few next years.

what does www traffic mean?  use it as a desktop replacement to watch cat content in the browser? or have a small webserver for random stuff? For the first, I'm not sure if you're happy with 1GB ram, for the second hmm there's often not that much power needed.. 

 

On 7/19/2018 at 12:10 PM, pbies said:

Other question about SD port: does these powerful boards support fastest SD cards which have R/W capability at 200MB/s? Which board supports these cards?

The same here.. The RPi is for sure not one of the faster ones (e.g. when we talk about sequential speed - which IMO mostly doesn't matter, it's mostly randomIO which matters and there it's a combination of SD-Card and board). 

 

I suggest that you describe your use-case better. This would make it easier to 'find' a board which fulfills your needs.   

[pbies]

@tkaiser Next one after RPi will be Orange Pi RK3399 or better.

 

@chwe That was the best available in Europe. Www traffic means web server. Mostly. But not only. 1GB RAM for it will surely be enough. More RAM I wanted to do some other stuff on this board, with few apps processing at the same time. As previous posts there is no sensible board that supports fast SD cards, so at this point this makes no difference.

 

If I am asking for powerful board I mean:

• good CPU = more cores, faster clock
• much RAM = 1GB or more, best would be 2-4 GB
• Ethernet at 1Gbps
• fresh, maintained OS with support
• I said about sensible price, so $400 is too much

[tkaiser]

7 minutes ago, pbies said:

• good CPU = more cores, faster clock
• much RAM = 1GB or more, best would be 2-4 GB
• Ethernet at 1Gbps
• fresh, maintained OS with support
• I said about sensible price, so $400 is too much

 

Combining all of this I would end up buying a RK3328 device like Rock64 or Renegade. No idea why you need fast SD card modes since in combination with a JMS578 USB-to-SATA adapter and a SSD you have pretty fast storage: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/1925-some-storage-benchmarks-on-sbcs/?do=findComment&comment=51350 (even if USB based storage access is a lot faster compared to Allwinner A20 SATA as on Banana Pi).

 

More CPU horsepower and a bit more pricey? RK3399. But if it's only about serving some static or dynamic web pages I would also evaluate whether cheap Allwinner H5 based boards like NanoPi NEO2 or Orange Pi Zero Plus (with massive zram overcommitment) aren't worth a look.

 

[pbies]

@tkaiser SD card in this case will be the whole OS. I need it to be fast. I have pendrive capable 80 MB/s write (surely USB 3.0) and it does not work even at 30 MB/s but only about 20 MB/s, which is not acceptable. For external drive like SATA it would need additional power source and much more money investment into the drive itself which is also not acceptable.

 

I'll take a look at the boards you've proposed. Thanks once again.

[tkaiser]

8 minutes ago, pbies said:

SD card in this case will be the whole OS. I need it to be fast.

 

The two RK3328 boards I mentioned have both an eMMC slot. Rock64 numbers, Renegade numbers. I think with both boards settings still aren't optimal (so access could be faster) but as you might know the more important number when looking at 'OS performance' is random IO (IOPS) and not sequential transfer speeds (MB/s).

 

So if you choose a great performing A1 rated SD card like a SanDisk Extreme A1 even when the board is bottlenecked by DDR50 mode it will be way faster compared to using an average (AKA crappy) SD card since they all suffer from horribly low random write performance. See here for some details and especially follow the links there.

 

Random IO (write) performance is more important than anything else. Sequential transfer speeds are close to irrelevant.

[chwe]

13 minutes ago, pbies said:

• good CPU = more cores, faster clock
• much RAM = 1GB or more, best would be 2-4 GB
• Ethernet at 1Gbps
• fresh, maintained OS with support
• I said about sensible price, so $400 is too much

web-server for what? For 100ds of users simultaneously or just some dash-board stuff for monitoring your IoT stuff? In case the first, I've no idea.. in case the second, well my IoT stuff with web-frontend runs on el cheapo OPi Zeros (with Arm A7 and 512mb ram which is mostly not half used).  GbE is something you don't get with the RPi 3+... you get a bizarre mixture between GbE and fast Ethernet which seems to make more problems that it solves. Fresh and maintained with support is somehow... Well define support, some people need more some need less. If you think the RPi3 b+ is sufficient from 'horse power' I would go for the Rock64 (I don't have one but it's on my list). The support seems to be decent (mainline & bsp), the price is good (25$ for 1GB 35$ for 2GB ram) you get proper powering via barrel plug, you get an eMMC socket for reliable OS storage and in case you need more 'fast storage' USB3 with an attached SSD should perform ok-ish (no 'real SATA' but fast enough for most purposes IMO). And you get 'real GbE' not only 'GbE over USB2 shared with all available USBs'. 

 

RK3328 gets a decent mainline support, so chances are hight that those boards are supported for a longer time...  

 

4 minutes ago, pbies said:

@tkaiser SD card in this case will be the whole OS. I need it to be fast. I have pendrive capable 80 MB/s write (surely USB 3.0) and it does not work even at 30 MB/s but only about 20 MB/s, which is not acceptable.

For the OS, those 80MB/s don't matter.. It's all about randomIO. I suggest you read through @tkaisers various threads where he explains this in detail. The RPi had/has its use-cases but there aren't many anymore and for web-server like stuff there are IMO better boards in the same price-range.

 

Worth to read:

 

 

Some of the informations there are outdated, but to gain some background infos it's still worth a look.  

[marine1988]

im searching for a good one that run docker very well so i can run homeassistant influxdb grafana some web sites! what do you think I should buy in money/performance department ? Does de odroid xu5? or orangepi prime widh h5 and 2gb of ram? does the orange pi 1 plus with h6 be a good choise?