Orange Pi 5, "plus" version also has 2gen 1-lane pci-e (M.2 wifi), and 3gen 4-lane pci-e (M.2 SSD) and 2x2.5Gbit ethernet.
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
How is the software support? That’s the main thing keeping me on rPi. I tried Pine64 and it was terrible. Never could get my PineBook Pro to boot reliably.
There are always little things. As far as I know, desktop works pretty well and there are people running PS2 emulation on it, which has always been super heavy.
arm64 has come a long way for that use case.
It's been solid as the VM host so far. I wrote an Armbian SD card and it just worked. Once a VM is booted though, many things become irrelevant outside of arm64 support.
I haven't tried again since February, so there's a decent chance my issues are fixed, but ZFS wouldn't build and VLAN support was disabled for the NIC. Not blockers, but it did make me rethink some ideas I had.
Alder Lake N (N95, N100, etc) is built on a 7nm class process. Many of those systems could be considered SBCs (SoC/RAM/Storage is often all on a single board). Those CPUs are low end for x86, but much higher end than a typical ARM based SBC.
The N100 is quite good all things considered. It generally beats an i5-6500t in pretty much anything while having very low power draw and all the newest media engine encoders.
