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by reesul 1111 days ago
Yeah it’s performance vs cost is honestly nuts. 6 TOPS is a pretty solid NPU, but I don’t know what their software is like. Programming those accelerators is often difficult, especially if you’re a small time customer.

Curious if anyone can weigh in on their SW usability. A quick search for their user level tools showed examples/documentation in Chinese(?)
1 comments
grozzle 1111 days ago
Yeah it's the first under $100 system I've tried, (and I'm a fan of the genre) that's truly a desktop replacement in terms of being a snappy responsive desktop even with lots of browser tabs, etc.

I do know they have their own special sauce to talk to the NPU. I was discouraged from making the effort myself because their special sauce to talk to the VPU has barely any ffmpeg support, it p much only uses gstreamer, and I'm neither a masochist nor French so that's a non-starter.

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reesul 1111 days ago
Yeah I’m very surprised to see a single board computer at less than $100 for a processor like that. Hard to tell what their actual 1ku price is, but if the random Alibaba I found for $20 is right, then that price for the overall board is absurd.

By VPU are you talking about stuff like ISP, video encoder/decoder, or something else?

Among embedded processors I’ve seen touting vision acceleration, gstreamer support is fairly widespread. I bit the bullet to learn it because my role requires it. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome talking, but I’ve somehow grown to like gstreamer. The learning curve was awkward. I struggled with documentation and learned more by analyzing some examples and trial-and-error.

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grozzle 1111 days ago
By VPU, I meant the square on the board that eats h.265 hw_enc and hw_dec and things like that, yes. I've been told it's a separate square from the GPU, by someone who is full-time waist-deep on getting Arch running on that hardware, so I take it as fact.

Oh no. The prospect of gstreamer being the only way... Oh no.

Maybe there's a zsh plugin or smth that autocompletes sane defaults? AAAAAAAAHHHHHH there surely isn't, anyone merciful enough to make one would just use ffmpeg instead...

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