I can't take any of the benchmarks seriously when he is using very different hardware across the tests. I can somewhat understand comparing Orange Pi NVMe to the RPi 4 SATA because that's what ships out-of-the-box (but there's an NVMe hat available), even though it'll be rate-limited to USB 3.0 speeds. But I can't understand comparisons to the u59 micro that are actually run on an Intel machine and then not using an NVMe in the Intel for comparison.
This abounds across all tests, from the very first I/O tests that show the Orange Pi 5+ beating both Intel configurations to the OnnxStream test that shows Intel beating the Orange Pi 5+ even though the Intel unit has to load/stream the model from its paltry SATA disk while the Orange Pi 5+ is outfit with an NVMe drive.
Hi, author here. I tested with what I have, and with what I currently use to work and test with that is in the general price/performance range. If that isn't obvious, then I have to apologize and make an explicit note of that.
My u59 ships with SATA SSDs, as it happens.
I do have an Intel i7 13th Gen with PCIe 4.0 NVMes (and several modern Macs), but that would be so far off base (and so expensive) that it isn't even comparable. The i7-6700 is much closer in "value", if you will.
However, you are mis-reading the way the OnnxStream test works. It is still CPU-bound for the most part.
I did not understand your complaints, so I have searched the specifications of Beelink u59.
This is a small computer with the previous generation of Intel Atom CPUs (Jasper Lake) and it happens to support only SATA SSDs, so your suggestion of using a NVMe SSD would have been impossible.
Even with the current generation of cheap Intel CPUs, i.e. Alder Lake N, for instance N100, the CPUs have very few PCIe lanes and most cheap computers do not have an M.2 socket that works at the full PCIe 3 speed of 32 Gb/s like the SSD of the tested OrangePi computer, but they have sockets with only 2 lanes or only 1 lane, which work at half speed or at quarter speed.
Most computers with RK3588 have a full-speed M.2 type M SSD socket and this is one of their advantages over most other computers in this price range.
Since the OnnxStream performance depends both on SSD and on CPU performance, there is no surprise that an Intel Skylake CPU using AVX2 instructions is so much faster than Cortex-A76 with much lower clock frequency that it wins the benchmark despite the slower SSD.
The only benchmarks more informative than these would have included comparisons with a computer using the direct competitor of RK3588, i.e. Intel N100 (which is faster for CPU-limited tasks, but not necessarily for those involving I/O or video), but it appears that the author does not have such a newer computer.
You are 200% correct. I intended to use the N5105 for comparison, but it lacks the right instruction set--and I do end the article mentioning the N100 as something I'd like to compare with.
The RK3588 designs stood out to me as having a very nice PCIe layout (the RK3588s, for instance, doesn't), and that is one of the main reasons I wanted to test the Orange Pi 5+.
This abounds across all tests, from the very first I/O tests that show the Orange Pi 5+ beating both Intel configurations to the OnnxStream test that shows Intel beating the Orange Pi 5+ even though the Intel unit has to load/stream the model from its paltry SATA disk while the Orange Pi 5+ is outfit with an NVMe drive.