I caught Orange Pi doing misleading advertising earlier, trying to make people hear that the CPU has an NPU. Does this actually have any AI hardware or not?
That looks quite similar to what I read before. For me those performance figures don't necessarily suggest it being any faster than just running on CPU so I'm still suspicious.
Might research this a bit more. Of course even if there's no perf improvement but perf/watt is better, that be valid too. But sounds very marketing speaky
It's not faster than running on an x86 CPU, but it's faster than an unaccelerated RISC-V CPU.
The entire platform is more for development of RISC-V software, especially at the operating system level, than it is an end-user product. There's still a lot of development needed to get RISC-V perf/watt, even with acceleration, to match ARM and x86 systems. I would expect at least a couple of years until then. RISC-V microcontrollers are already getting there, competing well with M0, but that's an entirely different market.
