sbc-bench

I think that the TH1520 in the Beagle-V and Lichee Pi 4A only has support for 5.10 kernel (curently) at least for access to most of the features of the SoC. If you do not mind loosing access to most features of the SoC, then you can run any kernel. An example what you would loose access to with any other kernel would be GUI support, and the ability for the VPU to encode/decode video. But there are many many more (For now, hopefully they will upstream support). Plug "site:lore.kernel.org TH1520" into your search engine of choice to see what hardware is in the process of being upstreamed to the bleeding edge Linux kernel-next. Which is probably about a year away from being in a longterm suported Linux kernel. ref: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result...

Well aside from the usual Wirth's law answer, the key is high abstraction on all levels, which brings bloat with it. Eventually that bloat will get optimized, as that chart interestingly shows iphone responsiveness being somewhat corelated with increasing years. Same with Windows, where there was a sizable abstraction jump with Vista, which then got slowly optimized over 7, 8 and 10. There's even abstraction in memory management now, with 64 bit virtual address mapping. I've recently stumbled upon these ARM benchmarks https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result... and was surprised that the Pi 4 runs 10-50% slower in 64 bit mode compared to 32 bit. I'd expect there was also a notable speed decrease when going from 8 to 16 and 32 bit systems, since there's twice as much address data to fetch and process.

I added some sorted table variants: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/result...

Visidata has no trouble importing the table: vd 'https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md'

> Using a 64-bit kernel (arm_64bit=1) just takes away 50MB of RAM, the worst choice is to combine 64-bit kernel and 64-bit userland since everything relevant get slower, same tasks require much more memory and the device will start to swap if low on memory or even kill processes due to out of memory. > As a rule of thumb you need almost twice as much RAM with a 64-bit userland compared to 32-bit with the same programs/services running. [1] [1]: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result...

Raspberry pi 4 compute module might be good for building your own router too. You can attach a pcie network extension or usb to Ethernet for local usage. All of that would cost under $70. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia... https://www.zahradnik.io/raspberry-pi-as-a-home-router Edit: You would be better served by other boards from this benchmark repo for vpn usage: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result...

Yet, you can have the same priced board that can do 200-800MB/s AES-128 encryption (per core), leaving much more time to the actual useful work, or idle (less power consumption). https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result... See PineH64 for example.