
Orange Pi 3 review: A Raspberry Pi rival that's a serious disappointment - Daviey
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/orange-pi-3-review-a-raspberry-pi-rival-thats-a-serious-disappointment/
======
DCKing
Linux SBCs are in a bit of a sad state. There was a rush to the market, which
has led to many boards being in a very sad state when it comes to software
support. Moreover, no interesting SoCs have come out for these things in just
about forever.

Software support for the Raspberry Pi is pretty good, but just about every
other hardware platform doesn't get enough support. This is because the vendor
doesn't want to, cannot cope with support, or the community isn't there. And
that makes them very difficult to use. As is the case for this board. How do
you release a board in 2019 for which the standard image is a three year old
release of Ubuntu?

I'd say Odroid's announced N2 [1] is probably the first interesting SBC to
come out in _long_ time, just because it has an SoC that should be a lot more
powerful and feature-rich than any other SBCs. 4x ARM Cortex A73 + dedicated
gigabit + 4 GiB DDR4 + a Vulkan capable GPU is a really compelling package for
$79 (or $63 for the 2GB model). But also for that it's a certainty that
software support will suck, at least initially. They already announced that
when running GNU/Linux the GPU will only support Wayland and not X11, and
their initial Android release will run a 32-bit userland on a 64-bit kernel
(how do these things happen??).

[1]:
[https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/](https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/)

~~~
sjcoles
The Odroid H2 is also a fantastic little bit of kit: x86, 4x PCI-e, SATA
connectors, 32Gb of ram max.

Great little low-power hypervisor for playing around on.

~~~
tracker1
I think a lot of this will come down to why x86 isn't going anywhere for a
while... the tooling that everyone uses from OSes, drivers, etc around it all.
Though once you've added a case, psu, ram, etc... I'm not sure you wouldn't be
better off with an ITX build. (though it's time for a new nano standard).

------
Matsta
The H6 processor it uses isn't well supported yet and is still reasonably new.
See support here: [https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort](https://linux-
sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort)

Armbian has only started to work on it, see here:
[https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-...](https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9368-orangepi-3-h6-allwiner-
chip/)

Orange Pi make some great boards, they just take a while for them to be well
supported. The Allwinner H2+/H3 which was originally released in 2014 has only
got really good software support over the last 2-3 years.

------
JeffRosenberg
Who is using a Raspberry Pi to browse the web and watch Youtube videos? That's
a crazy way to review an SBC.

~~~
2sk21
Unless you have a need for using the GPIO pins or the camera interface, I
really don't see a compelling use case for SBCs in general. I am happily using
a network of Raspberry Pis to control my model railroad and I have track
sensors connected to the GPIO pins. I have also used a Raspberry to acquire
data from a CO2 sensor via USB and upload to a server. I put a few of them
around my house and discovered that some rooms had disconcertingly high
levels. What I have _not_ done with Raspberry Pi is to surf the web!

~~~
dleslie
They're pretty much the cheapest general purpose PC one can purchase. The
market for cheap PCs is _enormous_.

And the RPi can output composite video, making it accessible to just about
anyone with television.

~~~
2sk21
It's not bad except that video playback in the browser is not really up to the
mark. Wouldn't a Chrome book be a cheaper and better solution for people who
need to a general web browsing system?

------
sneakernets
The main sticking point for Raspberry Pi (at least for me) is the community,
and the constant optimization and stability improvements on the
software/kernel side for the sub-par hardware. Of course you can buy a device
that would run circles around the latest Pi models, but that's missing the
point, imo.

~~~
ldiracdelta
Exactly. You gotta stay with the crowd on Arm SBC's or you'll vastly increase
the risk of being the first person who is doing something with the non-Pi
platform and then hitting bugs and configuration issues. I hope pi teams will
eventually upgrade their hardware platform.

------
dleslie
There's a substantial audience for SBCs as Multimedia PCs, Emulation consoles,
and even as a primary desktop. The RPi interface has effectively become a
peripheral standard for all the different case/input/etc hats it can wear.
(RetroFlag makes great use of this). With a low price point and reasonably
decent performance, why wouldn't they have such an audience?

So yes, that the Orange Pi struggles to watch YouTube videos, scroll through
web pages, et al is an important concern. It sounds like driver support just
isn't there for the hardware it provides.

I'd hazard to say, on HN no less, that SBCs as tinker boards for robotics and
cybernetics projects are the minority use-case.

~~~
fooblat
While the Orange Pi 3 may have driver issues, the older models work quite
well. Just as you suspect, I'm using an Orange Pi One combined with a usb
arcade board/stick to run RetroOrangePi[0] and for game emulation it works
great.

0\. [http://www.retrorangepi.org/](http://www.retrorangepi.org/)

edit: typos

------
fooblat
I can't speak for the Orange Pi 3, but I have an Orange Pi PC2, two Orange Pi
Ones, and an Orange Pi Zero and I'm very happy with all of them.

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elcritch
Interesting, while the OP might not find the boards interesting my interest is
piqued. Anyone know if the GPU could be capable of running OpenCL or similar?
Could be a hidden gem for cheap edge-AI on the edge. Though it sounds like GPU
support could be rudimentary at best.

~~~
fulafel
[https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-...](https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/10413/does-
mali-t720-support-for-opencl-why-allwinner-h6-doesn-t-provide-opencl-driver)

------
jamespo
I have one of these, currently you're limited to the 3.10 kernel from Android.

I bought one for the gbit ethernet & emmc. No intention to use it as a
desktop.

Once support is mainlined and armbian is working it'll be great. At the moment
though you can't even buy a case!

------
d1str0
This article has nothing substantial in it.

------
crististm
What kind of analysis is this?

"I'd normally include a range of benchmarks for the board but I had so much
trouble running them on the Orange Pi 3, only a few are worth reporting."

Then it goes on:

"Pi 3 recorded an average connection speed of 45.7Mbps via iPerf, a perfectly
reasonable result and comparable with the Raspberry Pi 3 boards and the Rock
Pi 4. It also racked up a score of 22 on the GLmark 2 GPU benchmark, slightly
above a reported score of 18 for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B on Ubuntu 16.04."

They'd better let numbers speak instead of letting emotional writing confirm a
weak hardware review.

~~~
peeters
It wasn't a hardware review though, it was a platform review. If the platform
has so many issues that you can't even test the hardware in an apples-to-
apples comparison, that's worth mentioning in a review.

~~~
crististm
What I understand is that they can write whatever they want and wave their
hand when it comes to benchmarks?

By the way, what part of the cited comparison where the "platforms" as you
want to call them, compare on equal foot let them off the hook for a
professional benchmarking in other areas?

