Atom-Based JaguarBoard To Take On Raspberry Pi (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: The tiny single-board PC movement that's leading the Internet of Things (IoT) market is largely dominated by ARM-based processors, and for good reason — they're cheap, low power and capable. However, what if you prefer to work with the x86 architecture? JaguarBoard looks strikingly similar to Raspberry Pi, which is arguably the most popular single-board mini PC. But unlike Raspberry Pi, JaguarBoard allows users to develop for x86, courtesy of its Intel Atom Z3735G (Bay Trail) foundation. The chip is a quad-core part clocked at 1.33GHz to 1.83GHz with 2MB of L2 cache, offering a fair amount of horsepower for IoT applications. In addition to an Atom processor, JaguarBoard also boasts 1GB of DDR3L memory, 16GB of eMMC storage, three USB 2.0 ports, 10/100M LAN port, HDMI 1.4 output, SDIO 3.0 socket, two COM ports, four GPIO pins, and audio ports. It's an interesting device that you could use strictly as a mini PC for general purpose computing, as an embedded system, a learning or research tool, or for whatever DIY projects you can conjure up. It's not the only hobbyist-appropriate x86 board, but those specs are pretty good for $45.

Comments

Not a Raspberry pi competitor.

[goombah99]

4 gpio ports? this is not competing against a raspberry pi. And if I'm looking for something that is a computing device not a hacker board then I can take my $45 and get a Amazon tablet with USB IO for that whihc includes batteries, and a powersource. then I've got usb I/O or wifi I/o to a CHIP, Arduino or Raspberry pi $5. So it hits the sour spot between being under ported as a hacker board and over priced as a cheap computer.

The x86 SBC's "secret weapon"

[chihowa]

The advantage of an x86 based SBC is the ability to take advantage of the maturity and relative uniformity of the x86 platform. The arcane uboot process and the need for specific support for not only different ARM SoCs, but the specific machines built on them, leaves dozens of abandoned ARM based systems stuck on ancient custom-tweaked kernels (and Linux only). Almost all of the problems you list are inherent in any ARM-based system until the equivalent of a uniform and predictable BIOS-type system is implemented for ARM.