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This is a low-cost learning and prototyping device, not an industrial grade system.

It fails even at that. Not just for the more complicated engineering reasons, but simple stuff like color coding the pins. On competing devices you find that frequently, yet the Raspberry Pi is still missing them, you just get 40 pins in all black. Not very beginner friendly.

The Raspberry Pi got lucky as it was the first in that line of computer and the community put a ton of support into it, but it's really the community support that makes the device, while the hardware itself is rather mediocre.

The pictured board is not the one being described. It is for comparison purposes. The board is a "SynQuacer E-Series 24-Core Arm PC Motherboard" -- some info can be found here.

If this new Banana Pi 24-core board is priced affordably, it could be quite interesting. They should be able to offer a much more affordable board then the referenced SynQuacer.

Microsoft is already giving away Windows for free or very cheaply on low-end computers, so the cost of it isn't an issue there. Chromebooks are winning in education despite the fact that they have little or no advantage in purchase price over a low end Windows laptop. They do have advantages in administration cost, and that's a big force that is driving sales.

There are multiple tiers of entry level devices; the highest level for notebook computers as of 2017 called for a "low-end CPU" (term not defined, but probably applies to anything less powerful than an i3), 4GB or less RAM, a screen size of 14.1" or less, and eMMC storage of 32GB or less. (Reference: https://www.cnx-software.com/2... ) Those requirements have ratcheted up a few times since Microsoft first started offering discounted Windows; it was 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, and 10.1" display at one time. All of the cheap Chromebooks sold to the education market qualify, as do Chromesticks and Chromeboxes.

That 32GB limit is REALLY limiting for Windows. Owners quickly discover that if they store more than about 5GB of their own stuff, the system no longer has enough free space to install new builds of Windows. (There are workarounds involving flash drives.) New builds come along about every six months so that's no small thing; Microsoft will probably have to raise the limit to 64GB, like their own low-end device (the Surface Go) has.

This new class of premium Chromebooks lies outside the parameters for cheap Windows licenses so the cost of Windows is a factor there. Many of them have mid-range CPUs and Microsoft will be forced to respond by allowing a larger range of systems to get cheap licenses for Windows, more than just allowing more storage. 8GB RAM, real SSDs with 128GB or more storage, and i5 processors are common for that class of system; some companies are even offering an option for an i7. So far they all use low power (U series) or very low power (Y series) processors; I don't think we'll be seeing a Chromebook with an H series process or its equivalent from AMD any time soon.

I suspect that the end point will come within five years (and that's a conservative guess): Microsoft will make ALL licenses for Windows Home free of charge. You will only pay for the Windows Professional and Enterprise features: domain logon, disk encryption, remote console capability, etc. They may also continue to charge for licenses for the very high end hardware that requires the Workstation edition: multiple CPUs, RAM above 256GB, etc.

like this one ?

Intel sells 64-bit CPUs for limited RAM systems for continuity of code, not because the 64-bit would run the code better.

As far as the 100% faster bit, you're absolutely full of it. The most seen from the change was 28% in benchmark comparisons and most of that was attributed simply from improvements generation-over-generation in the silicon and not the bit rate change. Here's a comparison between the architectures when used by the Raspberry Pi tick:

http://www.cnx-software.com/20...

Provide a citation proving your position, because I cannot find any data supporting your statements.

Then this article at least got the title right, but makes the same error in the first sentence already.

Typical case of copying from an article somebody else wrote, like this one.

That's damn hungry for IoT...
Meanwhile, ARM announces Cortex M23 potentially capable on running purely on harvested energy alone apparently.

Read about this on CNX. A commenter pointed out that there are already lots of Arduino compatible boards available on Ebay.

Police can arrest whoever they want to. What are the judges and parliament going to do about it? The police are the ones who have guns.

Technically, using their guns in such a way (i.e. overstepping their constitutional mandate) would be a coup d'État. And the only thing the judges and parliaments could do in such a case would be to call on the populace to resist. And even that is moot, if the police had the foresight to occupy the media (TV stations, ...) first (which is actually what often happens during a coup d'État). There's still the internet to get the word out, but right now, they're taking "care" of that... Mesh networks? Oops, they're taking care of that one too.

Well, honestly, given that people make bluetooth keyboard cases this is fairly trivially solved if you care enough.

Maybe phone companies figure the accessories market can solve this problem?

I'm willing to bet it's a smaller amount of people who want a physical keyboard than those who don't. In which case, you're not a profitable enough segment for the companies who make phones, but an excellent niche market for people who make accessories.

It's not like you can't have what you want now, you just won't get it from the main companies selling phones.

... or you can just use any of the already available in much cheaper HDMI dongles and install linux on them. For example, here's one way to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.cnx-software.com/20...

You can get an RK3188 based HDMI stick on amazon for $40 - $50 (I didn't spend much time searching... I'm sure there are cheaper ones and beefier and more expensive ones). Alibaba has them much cheaper too, if you're willing to wait for it.

Dual core A9? You sure about that?

This.
From a link (http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=zNxgHtdA) in the comments here:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 38.40
Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0xc07
CPU revision : 5

El Reg's article is very misleading. Are there ANY quad core ARM SoCs or designs, at all?

Some rumours about a $5 price drop to just $20....

Is the performance limitation you mention about the number of wireless connections, or the processing power?

I tried several such devices with the intention of prototyping my own software, but either their CPUs were underpowered or they were unreliable. I got Debian on a GK802 for instance, installed in the internal SD-card so leaving the external slot free, with a USB WiFi dongle in addition to the internal WiFi so that it could work as a gateway to certain web content while serving its own applications. The problem I had was that it did not boot reliably, maybe because the file system got corrupted occasionally when powering off: it does not have a power button.
Another limitation is the number of simultaneous connections, which was not important for me in the prototype phase.

At the time there was a device developed for that usage, serving a whole classroom, called the SMILEplug:
http://www.cnx-software.com/20...
https://www.globalscaletechnol...

It used a separate WiFi chip from Marvell that supported up to 60 simultaneous connections, with applications running on NodeJS on what seems to be a standard Debian system.
I haven't heard about them in a while and suspect they just abandoned the project: http://www.smileconsortium.org...

Is there some way I could follow your project?
I'm very interested in the subject, specially in the difficulties and needs found in actual use.
You can find my e-mail address at my website: http://sentido-labs.com/en/abo...

You can get a netbook that will draw around 5-10W. If you get one with intel cpu and chipset you will have the advantage of massive compatibility, especially if you skip the original Atom chip. Once the dual cores came out it was pretty well abandoned by everyone.

That, or get one of these ~$100 android units which also runs Debian. But I don't really recommend that. The only one which seems very performant and yet inexpensive is the mk908 which is a bit of a turd reliability-wise and which doesn't yet have complete hardware support, e.g. http://www.cnx-software.com/20...

I stand by the netbook

Rich-people problems... unless you bought your cheap devices in the last 3 months, chances are this will be better as the bottom-end specs for these things go up constantly.

On a related note, the CNX guys tlooked for the cheapest tablet (including the shipping). $44 all in, crazy.

http://www.geekbuying.com/item/MK808-Dual-Core-Android-4-1-Jelly-Bean-TV-BOX-Rockchip-RK3066-Cortex-A9-Mini-PC-stick-307415.html

$42, but free shipping so I'll let that slide - no ethernet or GPIO, but does have built-in WiFi and 8GB flash storage and includes a mains adaptor. Will run Linux (with hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES) via the unfortunately-named Picuntu.

Interesting. Anyone got anything better?

You can't use google?
Here, here, here, here, and there are many, many others capable of running XBMC and have been around for a long time, many of them even come with the "bonus" you mentioned of a dedicated remote. The ability to do what you are after has long been available.

There has been some work in making XBMC work better, but that requires flashing your own ROM file, and that can be a really big pain with the extremely cheap but really unsupported systems.. (See http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/12/xbmc-for-linux-on-allwinner-a10-devices-it-works-sort-of/ for an example of how to make it work.)

The devices usually come with a custom video player which works really well (the MALI GPU is quite powerfull), and I believe the youtube app has also been optimized. Hopefully the producers of the cheap Android sticks and tablets can work together with the XBMC team - the market must be enormous.

try this one for example, in google results for "arm vs x86" http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/06/19/arm-vs-x86-servers-benchmark-calxeda-energycore-ecx-1000-vs-intel-xeon-e3-1240/

Taken from Bero's comment:

Obviously saying we’ve made it “twice as fast” is a bit of an oversimplification.

This particular benchmark (the 3D benchmark included in 0xbench) runs twice as fast on this particular hardware. Other benchmarks (e.g. Sunspider) are “merely” 30% faster, some others are only slightly faster (e.g. GLMark2 – as it’s mostly GPU bound), and it would be possible to craft a benchmark showing that our build is 10 times faster (write a benchmark that uses strcpy, memset and friends heavily, which I’ve actually done, not to show off but to test if our changes are as beneficial as we’re hoping).

As they say, the benchmark used is CPU-bound and as such what you're referring to is irrelevant. You can go ahead and test the optimizations made if you feel like, it is all there. A 3D benchmark was only chosen so they have something more interesting for the spectators to look at than a console application or Sunspider.

Read more: http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/06/03/linaro-android-puts-stock-android-to-shame-on-ti-pandaboard-omap4430/#ixzz1xPbZP4t0

After digging through the TFA I found Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430). Which after digging in the comments leads to www.linaro.org/
 
But the meat of the whole report is contained in this comment from Bernhard Rosenkraenzer which contains some better stats and also links to the toolchains and source code.
 
After this much manual digging I've realized that I'm getting to jaded for /.

After digging through the TFA I found Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430). Which after digging in the comments leads to www.linaro.org/
 
But the meat of the whole report is contained in this comment from Bernhard Rosenkraenzer which contains some better stats and also links to the toolchains and source code.
 
After this much manual digging I've realized that I'm getting to jaded for /.

Maybe not for the same price as 35 dollar, but then again the RPI doesn't cost 35 dollars in this country but 55$ when you calculate all the "hidden" costs.

Wait a little and you will have ARM based (Allwinner) hack friendly that will do circles around the RPI. There are a lot of similar devices in the pipeline.

Mele A2000 can be picked up as cheap as 70$ last times I looked

* Cortex A8 1Ghz
* Mali GPU (if I'm not mistaken completly open source driver instead of RPI blobs)
* 512MB DDR RAM
* SATA
* HDMI/VGA/Component
* HDMI / Optical Out / Stereo
* Ethernet/WIFI
* Extremly hackable
* Case


Oh and btw it already runs ubuntu/debian

Maybe not for the same price as 35 dollar, but then again the RPI doesn't cost 35 dollars in this country but 55$ when you calculate all the "hidden" costs.

Wait a little and you will have ARM based (Allwinner) hack friendly that will do circles around the RPI. There are a lot of similar devices in the pipeline.

Mele A2000 can be picked up as cheap as 70$ last times I looked

* Cortex A8 1Ghz
* Mali GPU (if I'm not mistaken completly open source driver instead of RPI blobs)
* 512MB DDR RAM
* SATA
* HDMI/VGA/Component
* HDMI / Optical Out / Stereo
* Ethernet/WIFI
* Extremly hackable
* Case


Oh and btw it already runs ubuntu/debian