Big thanks for the review! After more than
2 years of waiting, it's exciting to finally see RK3588-based products coming to market! According to their original roadmaps:
"Mass production is expected for Q1 2020. "
I do wish there had been some performance tests, beyond boot speed and prime numbers. I think Phoronix Test Suite would be useful, here. However, even
stress-ng has some interest test cases, if you dig into it, a bit.
The key difference between the Edge 2 Pro and the VIM 4 is the CPU. Contained in the Rockchip RK3588S SoC is a quad core Arm Cortex A76 running at 2.25 GHz, and an Arm Cortex A55 running at 1.8 GHz. This isn’t a big difference from the VIM 4
Actually, the jump from A73 to A76 is
huge! At ISO-process/frequency, here are ARM's projections for the A73 vs A75 vs A76:
This page reports real-world results of about 2.1x, though it's not ISO-process/frequency:
www.anandtech.com
In that comparison, ARM presumes the A73 is an 16 nm, but Amlogic implemented it at 12 nm. They also presume the A76 is using 7 nm, but the RK3588 uses 8 nm. This goes some ways towards explaining why these two boards have much closer clock speeds than in ARM's comparison.
I honestly don't know why you didn't see a performance difference in the prime number test, but maybe that was an outlier. It could be memory-bottlenecked. It's also possible the frequency-scaling governor was behaving differently, on the two SoCs.
this tells us that the three boards have comparable power consumption despite the Khadas boards having four additional CPU cores.
The Pi is made on 28 nm, so its lower power-efficiency is expected.
for $299 we get a lot of board.
Compared with the ODROID N2+, it's not a fantastic value. I'm willing to pay
some price premium for the extra RAM and performance, but that's stretching it. It looks a fair bit better, when compared against Pi 4 and its current street prices.
If you are building digital signage or a home gaming / media consumption device, then the Edge 2 Pro running Android is a reliable power house.
Your media streaming tests suggest it's less than ideal for at least
some media consumption scenarios. Also, I didn't notice anything about how loud its fan gets, under load.
Other thoughts:
- It's disappointing not to see a M.2 slot for a SSD, even at just x2. Its PCIe x4 interface is one of the features that really sets apart this SoC.
- Boot time is rather disappointing.
- The framedrop issue is surprising, and points to a possible issue with the network stack or drivers. Thanks for re-testing with local storage.
- I really don't like to see there being no option for passive cooling.
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