Step away from buying VIM3 - questions

VIM3
1

So I was planning to get RPI4 then found Odroid N2 yet digging more I got to VIM3 (thanks Aliexpress recommendations). So far I really like it, coming from Pi3B

Pros over N2:

  • slightly better performance at least on paper?
  • NPU (optional but good to have it)
  • WiFi onboard
  • bluetooth onboard
  • USB-C power supply and 5V
  • EMMC included (although cannot replace)

Pros over Pi4:

  • regular HDMI cable
  • (main) performance
  • NPU

so summing this up, it’s the best choice overall, ignoring the price of course and said I got my research good,

The only concern is I saw, the same with N2 basically - the GPU. After seeing Hardkernel is working on full Wayland support in N2 and it’s going pretty well already on 5.4 kernel for ubuntu 20.04.
I’ve read a lot of effort about it, does VIM3 has similar thing to offer in the near future? The board seems great overall but software wise Pi4 seems to be superior. VIM3 isn’t as popular it seems as Odroids, not sure how’s the software support here

  • Should I be concerned with VIM3 for GPU?
    I primarily target game emulation, so this is very important I can run at least PSX games and maybe some of the PSP ones. Also I got 2xPS3 pads so best if I could pair them with bluetooth but at last I think I can be fine with USB cable either.

  • Is there any distribution that is simple and easy to go with like raspbian? Or maybe I can simply go with manjaro and be happy that bleeding-edge kernel and packages will already include lima driver etc in upstream?

2

Yes a little but panfrost will be there for mali-G5x soon.
Currently it can handle software acceleration just fine as the cpu is very powerful.

I am the maintainer at Manjaro ARM for Khadas devices and we have most of the sbc from Hk to Pine64 and the most powerful is vim3 we compile most of our packages on vim3.

I think there is a lakka image for this which should have hw acc, but I am not sure @hyphop can help you if you’re into game emulation.

Bluetooth works fine.

If you’re into DE with emulators then Manjaro or Armbian but that will make you flash new images again and again. With Manjaro you keep getting the updates without the need of reflashing.

Yes we try to use Panfrost drivers but its not there yet for Mali-G5x as currently panfrost team is working on Mali-G3x and after that they will start work ln G5x.
Currently panfrost with Mesa llvmpipe is used which is software acc and as said above vim3 can handle it very well.

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3

Thanks a lot for reply, so this convinces me to actually get my own VIM3Pro and my concerns are cleared :smiley:
Looks promising, since it’s still a side device I can wait a bit. I will most likely install Manjaro as an user of it on my laptop already or check Lakka for emulation purely, I’ve actually liked RetroPie on my Pi3, but that shouldn’t be a game changer here.

I’ve also saw LibreELEC already running early versions of the driver, so this should be good choice regardless. Also the Khadas team member saying Ubuntu 20.04 to be released soon.

By the way, which kernel is used with Manjaro on VIM3?

Also N2 got it’s 5.4 kernel branch public, so just in case maybe it will help with ubuntu on VIM3.

4

I am using kernel from @balbes150 Git branch 5.7.0-rc3 will build rc6 tomorrow and test it.

5

ordered one :slight_smile: waiting for shipping

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