Main technical uncertainty is the MIPI DSI interface for the display. In Reform we currently use an internal HDMI to eDP adapter because only HDMI drivers were upstreamed so far. New DSI drivers for RK3588 are appearing on the ARM Linux kernel mailing list these days, still need to test.
This does not sound like RAM is your limitation. If you want to run emulators, then CPU speed is a more likely bottle neck for you i think. I have the A311D which makes 3.63 GB of RAM available to the OS (according to /proc/meminfo) and I have have applications open on 13 workspaces in sway, mostly terminals but also one instance of firefox (4688 tabs but of course most of them not loaded in). My wofi tells me that Iām also regularly using UltiMaker Cura, Inkscape, Gimp, LibreOffice, Transmission, Evince and Gthumb. For my main project (mmdebstrap) I regularly run its testsuite which will spawn over 300 Qemu virtual machines (in series, not in parallel). I do not experience issues with any of these workloads. I do all my development work (For the Reform, for Debian etc) on this machine (itās my only machine) and my save file says I played 40 hours of Stardew Valley already.
The one instance where this setup fails me is when I try to compile template-heavy C++ projects with too much parallelism. Attempting to do so will eat my memory for breakfast and the machine locks up. Thus, Iām careful to only run them -j 2.
I realize that other people have different needs but for how I am using a computer it turns out that 3.6 GB of RAM is fine. Sure, I have to use swap and sure I would indeed benefit from more RAM but for me and my personal use, there is not enough incentive to buy the RK3588. This is not to say that you should not buy the RK3588 of course. Please buy more hardware from MNT so that I can buy hardware from them in the future as well. 
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Would it be a stretch to say that 16GB of ram is more usually used for developer type things and that usually unless you do a lot of intense stuff, such as multiple VMS, 16GB of ram would be way more than enough?
In any case, RK3588 definitely has my interest. I also am pondering whether I want OpenBSD or some Debian based OS.
But I donāt know if any power saving tools exists for OpenBSD. Or OpenBSDās battery life on ARM64 as well.
That is similar to me, I donāt use Desktop Environments, I use JWM (window manager) and other lightweight processes, xsct for example (set color temperature) cbatticon (battery life icon) conky, jwmkit (its an addon for JWM window manager that makes many things way better) + the usual processes I mentioned more so above.
I mainly want the rk3588 for its cpu speed while still being lightweight electricity usage wise and its potential to be used with only libre software. I just didnāt know if I needed 16GB of ram or more.
Anywho thanks to you and mntmn for your thoughts.
I am also on, and highly enjoy the A311D. Helping stretch my RAM is zram/zswap/systemd ram generator. Basically it eats a chunk of RAM in a ram disk and compresses the swap memory pages in it:
$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3.7Gi 3.3Gi 91Mi 335Mi 739Mi 394Mi
Swap: 1.8Gi 1.1Gi 742Mi
$ swapon
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/zram0 partition 1.8G 1.1G 100
$ zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd 1.8G 1.1G 300.4M 309.1M 6 [SWAP]
$
The browser is using the most RAM.
I have purchased the new module, and in the 32GiB version, Iām looking forward to it.
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