I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be.
Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support.
The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
Were people actually doing that?
If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting.
Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
Unless you strictly need the tiny form factor of an SBC you are so much better going with x86.
It's 127 x 127 x 508 mm. I think most mini N100 PCs are around that size.
The OrangePi 5 Max board is 89x57mm (it says 1.6mm "thickness" on the spec sheet but I think that is a typo - the ethernet port is more than that)
Add a few mm for a case and it's roughly 2/3 as long and half the width of the A40.
Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.
Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of performance per watt but it is already pretty far into the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.
It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
It's pretty hacky for sure but wouldn't classify it as useless. e.g. I managed to get some LLMs to run on the NPU of an Orange pi 5 a while back
I see there is now even a NPU compatible llama.cpp fork though haven't tried it