Likewise my VPS @ Hetzner is running Aarch64. No drama. Only pain is how brutal the Rust cross-compile is from my x86 machine.
I mean, here's Geerling running a bunch of Steam games flawlessly on a Aarch64 NVIDIA GB10 machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjRKvKC4ntw
(Those things are expensive, but I just ordered one [the ASUS variant] for myself.)
Meanwhile Apple is pushing the ARM64 architecture hard, and Windows is apparently actually quite viable now?
Personally... it's totally irrational, but I have always had a grudge against x86 since it "won" in the early 90s and I had to switch from 68k. I want diversity in ISAs. RISC-V would be nice, but I'll settle for ARM for now.
Why would the A720 at 2.8 GHz run circles around the N150 that boosts up to 3.6 GHz in single-threaded workloads, while the 12-core chip would wouldn't beat the 4-core chip in multithreaded workloads?
Obviously, the Intel chip wins in single-threaded performance while losing in multi-threaded: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6304vs6617/Intel-N150-v...
I can't speak to why other people bring up the N150 in ARM SBC threads any more than "AMD doesn't compete in the ~$200 SBC segment".
FWIW, as far as SBC/NUCs go, I've had a Pi 4, an RK3399 board, an RK3568 board, an N100 NUC from GMKTec, and a N150 NUC from Geekom, and the N150 has by far been my favorite out of those for real-world workloads rather than tinkering. The gap between the x86 software ecosystem and the ARM software ecosystem is no joke.
P.S. Stay away from GMKTec. Even if you don't get burned, your SODIMM cards will. There are stoves, ovens, and hot plates with better heat dissipation and thermals than GMKTec NUCs.
I've not found Neon to be fun or easy to use, and I frequently see devices ignoring the NPU and inferring on CPU because it's easier. Maybe you get lucky and someone has made a backend for something specific you want, but it's not common.
For example I have an Orange Pi 5 Plus running the totally generic aarch64 image of Home Assistant OS [0]. Zero customization was needed, it just works with mainline everything.
There's even UEFI [1].
Granted this isn't the case for all boards but Rockchip at least seems to have great upstream support.
[0]: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases
I believe some other distros also have UEFI booting/installers setup for PI4 and newer devices because of this, though there's a good chance you'll want some of the other libraries that come with Raspberry PI OS (aka Raspbian) still for some of the hardware specific features like CSI/DSI and some of the GPIO features that might not be fully upstreamed yet.
There's also a port of Proxmox called PXVirt (Formerly Proxmox Port) that exists to use a number of similar ARM systems now as a virtualization host with a nice ui and automation around it.
For what it's worth though the v5 did have Talos support, so you could just throw that on there, connect it to a cluster and have a decent arm node that is fanless and has 32gb
https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.12/platform-specific-in...
It has basically the same single-core performance as an N150 box
Random N150 result: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10992465
> BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread?
At this point I expect a lot of people have been enticed by niche SBCs and then discovered that driver support is a nightmare, as this article shows. So in time, everyone discovers that cheap x86-64 boxes accomplish their generic computing goals easier than these niche SBCs, even if the multi-core performance isn't the same.
Being able to install a mainline OS and common drivers and just get to work is valuable.
[0] https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250609031627.1605851-1-peter.chen@c...
In a nutshell, this new Orange Pi 6 Plus is much faster than Orange Pi 5 Ultra and anything that came before.
For power I don’t know about orange pi 5 but for many SBC power was a mixed bag. I had pretty bad luck with random SBC taking way more power for random reasons and not putting devices in idle mode. Even raspberry pi was pretty bad when it launched.
It’s frustrating because it’s hard to fix. With x64 you can often go into bios and enable power modes, but that’s not the case with arm. For example pcie4 can easily draw 2w+ when active. (The interface!)
See for example here:
https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/606
My n100 takes 6W and 8w (8 and 16gb). If pi5 takes 3w that’s not large enough to matter especially when it’s so inconsistent.
Now one place where I used to like rpi zero was gpio access. However I’m transitioning to rp2350 as it’s just better suited for that kind of work, easier to find and cheaper.
I never ran into that bug but I came to the Orange Pi 5 Plus in 2025, so there's a chance the issues were all worked out by the time I started using it.
Looking at a couple of reviews, the Orange Pi 5 Plus drew ~4W idle [0] while an N100 system drew ~10W [1].
1W over a year is 8.76kWh, which here costs ~$2. If those numbers hold (and I'm not saying they do necessarily but for the sake of argument) and with an estimated lifespan of 5 years, you might be looking at a TCO of $140 hardware + $40 power = $180 for an Orange Pi 5 vs. $140 hardware + $100 power = $240 for an N100. That would put an N100 at 33% more expensive. Even if it draws just 6W compared to 4W, that's $200 vs. $180, 11% more expensive.
I'm not saying the Orange Pi 5 Plus is clearly better but I don't think it's as simple as one might think.
[0]: https://magazinmehatronika.com/en/orange-pi-5-plus-review/
[1]: https://www.servethehome.com/fanless-intel-n100-firewall-and...