[sliken]

To give some idea my Rk3588 idles somewhere 1.75 to 2.2 watt range, ran it for 17 hours mostly idle except for some apt upgrade/installs on a kill-a-watt to accumulate 0.03 kwh.

Using geekbench 5 your J4105 gets 396 single-core and 1294 multi-core. The rk3588 gets 684 single-core and 2680 multi-core. So rk3588 is 1.7x the single core performance and 2.0x the multi-core performance at around half the power (2w vs 4w).

I've not found make problems with ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Large source code compiles like building rust/go just work, and so far I've found all the ubuntu packages I expected. Sure I'm sure there's some codes that don't like AArch64, but the situation does seem to be improving.

[BackBlast]

In my personal case, I need to be able to run couchdb. No arm arch package out of the box that I've been able to find. Last time I tried it on arm I gave up after several hours of chasing dependencies while trying to compile from source. Waste of time... Just works on x86. 2 minutes, done. Then I found proxmox, building portalable containers and VMs, and I'm just that much deeper in x86 land. Arm cloud support, while improving, is no where near x86 availability.

Benchmarks are fine and good, but immaterial. I don't really care about 50% more or less speed. It's a server. If I do my job right +/- a few 10s of ms for response time is immaterial. The speed delta between the EMMC and SATA M.2 may well make up for raw processor speed in my use cases which tend to use the I/O.

Your particular board is very niche. I mean, yeah, you have nice ethernet. But that's it. I need my M.2 slots. I need more ram. I could get an x86 board with everything for more $$$, nvme, 2.5-10GBE. It's a compromise.

The J4105 is like 1/3rd the price of the rk3588/rk3588s.

I could go on. To each his own. I'm glad you like your board :) Enjoy it.