Those are rather meager results if it's comparable to a Core2 or FX, even at 6W (which I can only assume is the base clock). My home server has a RK3588 and would most likely wipe the floor with this chip at 12W under full load.

I wonder what their targeted market for these is

why. bother. yeah i know why, but even so there are ARM processor of lower power that would mop the floor with these

tunejunky:

why. bother. yeah i know why, but even so there are ARM processor of lower power that would mop the floor with these

do they cost the same ? have same connectivity ? same video decoding hw ?

cucaulay malkin:

do they cost the same ? have same connectivity ? same video decoding hw ?

They're usually significantly cheaper. The Rock 5B platform I have was $150 including shipping. It gets closer to $200 if you get 16GB of RAM, which was overkill for my needs. 2.5Gbps ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, two HDMI ports with HDMI input, two M.2 slots (though I think only 3 total PCIe lanes), a bunch of GPIO, 3.5mm audio jack, etc. It supports most modern video decoders (though not AV1) and Vulkan 1.2. The only major downsides are the mediocre PCIe spec and you're locked to outdated kernels if you want to use the GPU. For my purposes, SATA 3 can still outpace 2.5Gbps ethernet and my system is headless, so neither of those matter to me personally. You could argue another downside is that Windows won't run on it, but... I don't think it'd be wise to run Windows on these Alder Lake entry level chips.

schmidtbag:

They're usually significantly cheaper. The Rock 5B platform I have was $150 including shipping. It gets closer to $200 if you get 16GB of RAM, which was overkill for my needs. 2.5Gbps ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, two HDMI ports with HDMI input, two M.2 slots (though I think only 3 total PCIe lanes), a bunch of GPIO, 3.5mm audio jack, etc. It supports most modern video decoders (though not AV1) and Vulkan 1.2. The only major downsides are the mediocre PCIe spec and you're locked to outdated kernels if you want to use the GPU. For my purposes, SATA 3 can still outpace 2.5Gbps ethernet and my system is headless, so neither of those matter to me personally. You could argue another downside is that Windows won't run on it, but... I don't think it'd be wise to run Windows on these Alder Lake entry level chips.

Does it run off a power brick or what ? What OS that isn't useless can it run ?

cucaulay malkin:

Does it run off a power brick or what ? What OS that isn't useless can it run ?

This particular board can run on a wide voltage range, I think from 9v to 20v, so I just snipped the end off an old 19v 3.5A Toshiba laptop power brick and soldered a USB-C header to it. Works fine. Most ARM SBCs aren't so flexible with their power input, but most can be reliably powered using a typical 5v 2A phone charger, at least if you're not powering anything like an external HDD. I don't know what you regard as a "useless OS", but even the original Raspberry Pi (a crappy 700MHz single-core 32-bit CPU and 256MB of RAM) can run a full Linux desktop, just very, very slowly. Bear in mind that Linux has much lower RAM requirements than Windows, and, processes built for ARM use substantially less memory too. So, where some might argue 12GB is the minimum they need to run a Windows desktop, 8GB is a sufficient minimum for Linux, and 6GB is sufficient for ARM. Anyway, nowadays, ARM chips support Vulkan, OpenCL, and OpenGL 4. There are many translation layers that allow you to run x86 software, which in turn means you can then run Wine to run Windows programs (not sure if anyone has bothered to do that but it is theoretically possible). Being open source, the vast majority of programs you'd typically run and install on Linux will work on an ARM board, so, it makes for a surprisingly good desktop OS. The only major downside I've encountered when using ARM + Linux for a desktop is the lack of web browsers built with DRM, which means certain media websites (Spotify, Netflix, certain Youtube videos, etc) won't play. There are ways around this, it's just difficult. Lastly, you can run stuff like Plex, Kodi, an Android on most of these boards, which gives you a wide variety of user-friendly options. Like I said though, I don't use these boards for a desktop OS. While I know for a fact an ARM chip could give me a good laptop experience, there just aren't any good Linux-friendly ARM laptops out there, and I don't really have a purpose for an ARM desktop. So, for many years I've been using these boards for my server or for robotics projects. For what it's worth, if you aren't already pretty experienced in Linux, I would strongly recommend to not use an ARM board to learn on. Many people find it hard enough to learn a new OS on a hardware platform they're already familiar with, but ARM has its own quirks that you might find frustrating. The biggest being that there's no BIOS, which means there's no installer, no automatic hardware detection, and no behaviors to tweak before you boot your OS. So long as you understand how it works and why it was designed the way it was, it's a great platform.

moo100times:

I wonder what their targeted market for these is

Point of sales machines, TV boxes, NAS and other similar stuff. Not saying it's a great platform for that, but that's the market I asume. It does come with VT-x, VT-d and EPT, so it's even usable for virtualization. So you could run a Windows on a NAS virtualized. Of course, not with great speed.