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Raspberry Pi 3 Is a Nice Upgrade, But Alternatives Exist With Faster Performance (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: With the Raspberry Pi 3 now available, benchmarks have been done comparing the Raspberry Pi 3 to other ARM SBCs. The Raspberry Pi 3 was found to be a faster upgrade compared to the Raspberry Pi 2, but the ODROID-C2 is a much faster alternative. For only $5 more than the Raspberry Pi 3, it includes twice the amount of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and a faster SoC. The ODROID-C2 also has HDMI 2.0 and superior Ethernet while the Raspberry Pi 3 has an advantage of 802.11n WiFi. The ODROID-C2 also has a heatsink for ensuring the SoC doesn't get as toasty as the Raspberry Pi 3.
The Pine64 is nice as well.
But standardizing on one or two model also has its perks. Cheap cases and other peripherals, easy to find software, an abundance of tutorials.
Its starting to sound a bit like the history of the IBM PC.
Someone replaced my news with an ad for a Raspberry Pi competitor.
It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on /. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?
Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If it doesn't have oss drivers vthen it doesn't matter how fast it is, it'll be severely limited in what can be run on it.
This story is at least two years old -- everyone knows that the reason to go with the Pi is the community support, not the benchmarks.
Stating a price doesn't matter if I can't actually buy it at that price. What does it cost to actually get one delivered that I can hold in my hand? And from someone that I can trust, not those crooks at Alibaba or the electronic bay of thieves? What is the cost to get it in my hand compared to the cost to actually hold a PI-3? And on that topic, how do I get a PI-Zero that I can hold in my hand without paying more than twice the supposed price? They might as well join the late night TV thieves and tell me that I can "get a second one absolutely free, just pay extra shipping and extra fees".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
ODROID-C2 is real 64-bit rather than having 64-bit capable CPU but only 32-bit kernel and userland with the raspi team announcing that in several months they'll "consider" whether making 64-bit drivers is worth it.
And the performance difference is MASSIVE. I own an ODROID-U2 and its contemporary RPi 1b -- even when overclocking the latter, Odroid wins in compile times by a factor of ~16, and that's assuming raspi won't start swapping due to its miniscule RAM. For a disk, Odroid can use either microSD or their fancy eMMC -- the latter is more expensive but drastically faster. And 100Mbit vs 1Gbit ethernet is not a negligible difference either.
The only upside of raspi is that it ships from nearby countries (UK, US) while shipping Odroid from Korea means unpleasant mucking with the customs.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
For one, Raspberry Pi is no Apple, and Apple's mobile devices ain't driven by Raspberry Pi, either
While it is correct that all the other factors do matter, many from the Raspberry Pi community do engate with SoC from other vendors too, plus there are a lot of crossovers (both ways) from/to the arduino community as well
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The idea of _all_ the Raspberry Pi models is to be cheap enough for kids to buy one with their pocket money.
Not to be the backbone of someone's BitCoin mining rig.
I find that so many other "competing" boards somehow miss the point. Keeping the Pi at or below $35 keeps it in the realm of disposable. 35 bucks can be put into a robot. $35 can be put into some dumb home automation system. 35 bucks can be sent to school with the kid's project. $35 can be risked in some project that might not survive.
But much more than that means that people start to ration. They don't buy multiples, they don't put it into risky situations, and they don't leave them behind as the brains of some project. To a large extent that makes any competitor that doesn't do the above a cheap crappy desktop. In that case I will just use my laptop/desktop.
The other factor is that there is generally a gradient of embedded systems. Most people are throwing Arduinos into things willy-nilly. This is because they are easy, very cheap, very low power, and really simple. There are a few more capable Arduino like boards which can do more but at a certain point people need something more capable. The raspberry pi is quite ready to step into that breach. It can run basic OpenCV, it can power things like touch screens, it can convert text to speech or the other way around. There are lots of things it can do. And it can do all of these while not rapidly draining a battery and it is fairly small.
But for most projects if the horsepower of a Pi is not enough, it is not probable that a small increase in horsepower is enough. Double or triple is not that big of a leap if you are talking about some Genetic Algorithm that needs to run in real time or some crazy complex image recognition or whatever. Thus a board that is a bit better is not really filling the gap for most people unless you buy something very expensive such as the new nVidia board but that is so far beyond the price range of the Pi as to not really be comparable.
What most people do when their Pi runs out of power is to offload the task to a desktop or laptop over some sort of data connection. Transmitting video in near real time or sensor data is not that huge a task and then you have a pile of power and might even be able to drop back to the Arduino under remote control.
Then there is the whole thing around the Pi becoming a bit of a standard. There are wonderful Python libraries well tuned for the Pi GPIO and whatnot. How well do they work with the Better-than-a-pi-board-2000? I don't know and I don't want to screw around with them for a day. Basically the Pi is pretty much going to be first in line for any ports such as ROS.
So if someone wants to compete with the Pi they need to understand that this is not a desktop war where some extra memory or a few more Hz is going to win my heart. A great example of a competitor that caught my attention is the C.H.I.P. for $9. It pretty much meets all the above requirements in spades. Now the completeness of the Pi with BLE and whatnot is pretty attractive but in many cases I could use the horsepower of the CHIP and the rest would be wasted. Thus I can see a future where I have 5-10 CHIPS in my toolbox, and 3-4 Pis. I don't see a future for a $60+ board in my toolkit. Literally the next step beyond a pi will be something that is effectively a small desktop, even if it needs to be an embedded system.
Should your mobile phone be banned too?
Jesus, dude.
Whilst the 64 bits are mainly for show in the raspberry (yet) as all the software still is 32 bits...(...) The show this year will be the new 64 bits machine. In that respect we have the new 64 bit newcomers the Raspberry PI 3, the Odroid C2 and the Pine 64. The Odroid C2 seems the more interesting and faster of the two. Good quality hardware, good ecosystem of parts, reliability. Alas, the transport fees are obscene, and in Europe converting dollars to euros, you are paying around more 40%-80% for it, and the parts can get to the double of the price, and to top it of, still obscene transportation costs. So to sum it up, the Odroid only makes sense to people in the US (ameridroid store), or Korea (hardkernel store). Period. For the kind of money involved buying it, you can buy much better hardware, and it is not definitively on the price range for small projects. The Pine 64 it is built on the cheap, period. The team does not seems savvy enough about open source though. Time will tell. Raspberry PI 3 has the ecosystem, and the hardware decoding. The hardware decoding part is still tying it to 32 bit software. Strange choices have been made in the architecture (cost? compatibility), that tie it to 1GB of RAM. So contrary to the other two alternatives, it is a dead-end architecture running in 32 bits and limited to 1GB of RAM. For that enough, I would wait for the Raspberry "4". Lemaker also has interesting hardware in the 64 bit, but unfortunately, it seems to have only USB and HDMI. Odd. As for the 32-bits alternatives, the market is relatively crowd, and a few Chinese vendors can give you a run for the money, in the costs of board+fees. Depending on what you need, you can have broads from 12 euros (orange PI H3), to more interesting boards like the banana Pro or the Lamobo R1/Banana PI R1 for a modest router. Often they have small or no extra costs.
which would be the best alternative for a NAS ?
I know you're probably trolling but: node.js/apache server for windows users is a pretty good reason.
The RPi community is hard to beat. The amount of work I had to go through with my Odroid XU4 to get it to work properly was a lot more that what I had to do with my pi2. First of all, the images I downloaded from the Hardkernel website had a tendency to brick themselves every 5 hours, needing a hard reset. Not even the hardkernel accessories worked as advertised. I had to use boot parameters to stop my cloudshell lcd from turning off. The official scripts failed since the necessary setterm commands stopped working somewhere between ubuntu14.04 and 15.10 (still on the official builds).
I am not an arch user on the desktop, but running arch on the odroid xu4 has actually been far less painful than having to deal with the pain of running an xu4. I just had to set the performance governor to ondemand or conservative to stop the fan from turning on every 2 minutes.
Hello,
I'm trying to build my own portable computer from the ground up, and have a widescreen (1600x480) panel I want to use. It has an LVDS connector.
Are there any SBCs that have LVDS ports on them? (And are well documented!)
Thanks
Robert
--- My dad's political betting
Hardware alternatives exist, but make sure the software support is good. Nothing more annoying when a simple "apt-get upgrade" doesn't work on supplied distros or "apt-get install something" just throws errors. Seems hardware is easy, software is hard.
I've always felt the hardware to be underwhelming though. Perhaps that can be explained by their relationship to Broadcom who traditionally sell SoCs that go into bluray players, satellite receivers etc. These chips are perfectly fine for supporting a single app running over a kernel but they struggle when they're asked to run a desktop, or even an app with lots of graphics.
If they were allowed to shop around for other SoCs they'd get a lot more bang for their buck. Given how many people want more performance, perhaps they should add a model C to their lineup which provides it. Throw $5-10 on the price and put in a better CPU, memory and stuff like IR & soft power button that would prove popular with people running Kodi or similar software.
I think that is primarily why as an educational tool the PI doesnt really need to be fastest of all.
Trolly trolly trolly troll.
The magic $35 border is just arbitrary. For some it will be an investment, for others just small change.
Before buying anything, ask yourself: what do I want to do with it, and subsequently look around and find which is the best offer. Then all kinds of aspects play a role, indeed specs, features, and performance. And the support by a community.
Done that, I bought a couple of ODROIDs because they fit *my* need: decent quality hardware, Gb network, good performance. Community support is less than RPi, but more than enough for *my* needs. They're not as cheap, but for *my* need they're worth it.
Again: look carefully at *your* needs and budget, and then just look around what suits.
Which makes the Pi a better choice for a LOT of projects. It's almost as if the submitter thinks the Pi is some kind of desktop computer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Damn fucking indians, only shady moves or engrish posts. Do not click on this link, it is here just to boots visits.
My RPI happily runs for lots of weeks now, providing:
+ a little server I can reach behind my DSL modem using the afraid.org dyndns
+ a personal web server
+ a personal ssh+svn server, which I use for my personal and professional paperwork
+ a proxy server which will protect my true computer location from Google, despite them effectively blocking TOR users.
No need to sign over my data, my life, my freedom to Google Docs, facebook and all the other Billionic Maniacs like Zuckerberg, Brin and Chodorkovsky or Gates.
RPI is a computer for freedom lovers !!!!
Where can I get the RPI Laptop, without all the Android and Windows Creepware ?
test 123 123
My RPI happily runs for lots of weeks now, providing:
+ a little server I can reach behind my DSL modem using the afraid.org dyndns
+ a personal web server
+ a personal ssh+svn server, which I use for my personal and professional paperwork
+ a proxy server which will protect my true computer location from Google, despite them effectively blocking TOR users.
No need to sign over my data, my life, my freedom to Google Docs, facebook and all the other Billionic Maniacs like Zuckerberg, Brin and Chodorkovsky or Gates.
RPI is a computer for freedom lovers !!!!
Where can I get the RPI Laptop, without all the Android and Windows Creepware ?
So, If I'm willing to pay more, I can get a more powerful device? What a scoop!
They might want to do their personal information storage NOT on a creepcloud system ("dropbox", "google docs", "one drive (to hell)" etc etc). Because they do not like the Cloud Shackles.
Search for FREEDOM COMPUTER on this page for more information. Even if your post was meant to be ironic; cannot fathom that.
Apple did not "capture the market" by "colluding with chosen carriers", the guy was talking about the iPod. That's pre-iPhone era. That's from the basically-all-the-MP3-players-suck era, when you drag and dropped files to MP3 players and then basically had to use "File Explorer" to play your music. Apple added a way to manage and play music files more intelligently via iTunes and metadata.
So for the iPod, Apple did compete on merit, despite its price and despite iTunes running like mollasses on Windows.
Everybody knows that the Rasberry PI is never the fastest or cheapest or most featured. It's still the best in terms of support and constancy of design available accessories and an the likelihood of a path forward for things built in one generation to work on the next. It also now even runs windows, has embedded or server versions and a large range of price points. SO yeah we all know there's things like Pine and Orange Pi and Bannana PI and orroid and beagle bone circling the trade-space of the raspberry. And I even enjoy articles comparing these. But singling out one of these for headline space on Slashdot is just blantant astro turfing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You mean your paymasters in Redmond do not like a small, energy efficient and potentially highly portable device like the RPI ?
Yeah, makes sense for Bloatcorp.
Give us the GMO Manna from your Monsanto friends !
Also, ssh != ssl
Much more important is the level of support, the availability of hardware and the knowledge that in the future you will *still* be able find people to help beginners to get started with the product. Add in that the Pi has known and documented limitations (as opposed to unknown and undocumented ones) and is more-or-less reliable and will continue to be available for many more years, and those are the factors that attract people to the product - not the GHz speed of the CPU(s).
When the "other" manufacturers start to realise that simply knocking out a piece of hardware and tossing it over the wall to "users" is a futile exercise - and that the users put much more value in the ease and ability to get it to do something useful - only then will they be able to eat into the RPi's market share.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm told this iNtel start up is shipping a very fast one. i7, I think they call it. Nice stuff.
Because otherwise it will never be a mobile thing like an RPI. An RPI typically consumes 2Watts.
And ban producing food in your own garden. Only terrorists do not want to use Monsanto seeds.
What a stupid article.
My i7-4790k will beat any of these single board computers by orders of magnitude. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper in terms of both dollars per gigaflop and watts per gigaflop. It doesn't mean it's automatically a better choice. The point is the SBCs are meant for a difference purpose where you don't want maximum processing power.
Something like the RPi with 8 million units in the wild and a huge amount of information, support, and stable software is fantastic. Something 50% more powerful with unstable software, little support, and little user community is just garbage. Only a masochist would invest their time in one of these obscure little boards.
Good people only use 1% certified systems like Windows. Everything else is cruelty against the all knowing, most-well meaning elite.
Should we call Windows "Halal" ?
Spoken like a true idiot. Apple absolutely *did* use lock-in on the ipod and everything after both to sell and retain slaves to their products. When you've actually spent some time trying to manually curate your mp3s, maybe you'll understand why any number of other music library managers is better than the garbage which is iTunes.
You still manage your music files by hand, in directories? Wow, that's so 1990. Congratulations!
In this world, we have more than Intel Brontosaurs and RPI hedge hogs. Skunks, eagles, owls, crows, ravens....
1.) Buy expensive device for the purpose. Have someone make you an exhaust into the wall.
2.) Jury rig a Vaccuum Cleaner for the purpose. Get some extra flex pipe and make a hole into the wall. keep the VC outside. That should be an excellent low price alternative to 1. Also you learn a bit of bricklayer operations, which is a good learning experience. Even Churchill did that once.
But a step into the right direction: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Portable-Computer-Using-a-Raspberry-Pi/
http://lifehacker.com/5970968/build-your-own-pocket-sized-computer-with-a-raspberry-pi
How well do any of these devices play HEVC encoded video at 720p/1080p?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
AFAIK there was nothing remotely similar to iTunes at the time and when Apple added the built-in music store, it was easily the best choice for non-technical people. They even fought and won against the labels to remove the DRM later on. The music files they sell today are DRM-free and have been for a long time.
By the way AAC is a much better encoder than MP3, stop living in the dark ages.
Ah, you never understood the attraction of geekiness and I'm afraid you never will for our minds probably are too alien for each other to reach some form of mutual understanding.
In the '80's you were playing street soccer while I was coding my first lines on a ZX spectrum.
In the '90's you started dating girls while I explored the realms of procedural programming, fractals and electronic music.
At the turn of the millennium I bought a Creative Nomad Jukebox already knowing for 4 years, MP3 was here to stay (using XMMS on Linux, being able to stably decode high quality stereo VBR on a Pentium 200MHz CPU and have enough CPU cycles left for a usable, responsive GUI, to boot). You bought your iPod a year later and thought you were super hip.
Ten years later you probably have a wife, some kids, work for sales or in government... or maybe you're one of those banker guys? I'm probably working in IT, doing work I thoroughly enjoy doing for reasonable hours and reasonable pay. Or I work like crazy on stuff I'm really good at... It's a bit stressfull, but I'm making a shit-load of money in the process. Either that or I've just IPO'd a tech start-up.
I may or may not have a wife and kids 'though. If I do have them, my son of 7 is getting a RPi for his birthday to tinker with. I'll watch him carefully while he's soldering for his first extension project.... like my dad did 33 years ago when he offered me a safe interface on the ZX Spectrum's edge connector... in case my first try would result in smoke otherwise.
... says the guy who can't capitalise "Indians" correctly, and who wrote "boots" while castigating someone for poor spelling... I guess people prone to making generalisations of over a billion people have a rather tenuous relationship with logic...
I wish one of the many boards like this would think to include a SATA III interface (or 4), since it would then make them ideal to be a NAS controller.
The only board [ve found with a SATA interface at all, is the Banana Pi, but its SATA II and connected via the USB bus so waaay to slow.
Remember that the ARM core on the Broadcom IC used in the RPi was intended as a communication-offload coprocessor for the main event, the VideoCore.
The more recent models have really beefed up the ARM capability, but RPi 3 still is using a processor which is VideoCore first, ARM co-processor. So why do all these benchmarks ignore the more powerful component of the chip?
Of the "competitors" in the Phoronix benchmark, only the two Jetson designs are even in the same tier as the RPi. Some other commenter asked how well these devices play encoded video... these three can perform the encoding in real-time, the others merely keep up with decoding.
(Yes, I know why the benchmarks focus on the ARM -- it's because Broadcom has mainly kept all the details on programming that VideoCore goodness to themselves. Anyone know whether the new "open source" drivers actually have full control over the VideoCore, or just implement the ARM side of an interface to Broadcom-supplied VideoCore firmware? Or is it a half-and-half, where Broadcom has released details of portions of the VideoCore needed for 3D graphics, but still kept the input port and stream manipulation/compression parts proprietary and secret?)
Nuff said
Performance is only one part of the equation...
I have a few Pi's and an oDroid C1 too. oDroid really went into the C1 not knowing what they were getting themselves into. The Pi, as much as it's touted as a development board, is almost in the realm of consumer electronics now. As such the oDroid guys went from supporting a bunch of fairly knowledgeable people to supporting people of a totally different skillset. Plus the boards weren't exactly problem free. Touch the HDMI in the wrong place ? That's a blank screen because we have earthing problems. EDID not reading corrently ? Ooh, quite possibly. Try another display. USB FIQ IRQ handled correctly ? Nope. So they had the same problems as the early Pi kernels : tap a key on the keyboard and it might register 20 times or not at all, and the busier the USB the worse it got. Their solution was to move all the USB IRQ handling to the last core of the CPU. Not ideal. The oDroid stuff on paper rocks, but take a wander round the support forums for a bit and you start to see the downside.
The Pi isn't perfect. Not having USB3 or Sata drives me nuts, as does the lack of Gigabit Ethernet, but what it lacks in hardware it makes up for in the community, the amount of documentation and the support you can get on the forums.In addition the foundation are really, really committed to keeping it current with regard to the Linux kernel etc.
Now if the article said "New Device X beats the Pi on spec, has massive community, company regularly updates firmware and kernel" then shut up and take my money, I'll take a bunch of them immediately.
FWIW, as a generalization, I would say Indians cook great food, are more fluent in English than most USAians (in dire contrast to the Chinese for the most part), and are very industrious and self-motivated.
The Raspberry Pi really has no competition. Huge user base, excellent community support, multiple well maintained distributions, and a broad range of 3rd party supporting product. Everything else is just a janky niche product.
And if you really care about speed you'd use a full x86 computer.
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who would say that the current version of iTunes isn't a complete disaster.
That being said, it wasn't always so. There were many versions of iTunes in the past that were fantastic. It all went off the rails when they decided it needed to be the hub of all device and media sync IN THE WORLD. Now it's a massively bloated piece of crap that barely functions at it's core task - organizing and playing music.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Is Odroid backwards compatible with stuff for Pi 2?
What is it with reviewers and their complete inability to explain that more expensive often means higher performance?
I see it in phone reviews all the time -- "we compared this quite nice inexpensive phone against an $800 phone. The inexpensive phone had a worse display, used plastic instead of metal, and felt less pleasing....". Yeah, not really a surprise.
In this case, they compare the Pi3 against other, more expensive boards and are shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that some more expensive boards have more components and run faster!
Want a sig like mine? Join ACM's SigSig today!
If I spend as much as 15% more on buying a car, I can get loads of things I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
Why is this particularly surprising?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How many GPIO pins?
Can we stop with the fanboy nonsense already? "Faster performance"? Tell us how is this relevant with context? The ODROID requires markedly more power than the Pis do, so if it didn't run faster they would simply have made an inferior product. Considering that power draw is generally a factor in these things, it's simply disingenuous to even mention "faster" without considering work-done-per-amp-hour. Just because it's posted on Phoronix doesn't automatically mean it's not just meaningless fanboy jibber-jabber designed to generate clickthroughs.
Otherwise, a good desktop PC is an "alternative" that "exists" and can stomp them both into the dirt--if one ignores the wildly greater power consumption, heat production, massive increase in size, and cost.
If you get a laptop old enough to have a parallel port, then 8. If you need GPIO, though, it's probably smarter to buy a $3 Arduino Nano clone on eBay to go with your $25 antique laptop...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
TL;DR: Comparing performance with this class of device serves no useful purpose other than providing fodder for people who masturbate to performance statistics.
It's amazing how people manage to miss the point of things.
The raspberry pi exists because it provides a cheap and low-learning-curve introduction to creating your own electronic projects.
Yes, there are alternatives, because having different options is a good thing cause different people and different projects have different requirements. But the idea of benchmarking inexpensive hobby boards is just.... absurdist e-wanking. Either the board is suitable for what you're trying to do, or it isn't. If your project isn't going to run properly one board, why would it work on a board that's a little bit faster?
If your project needs the best possible performance, then maybe you're using the entirely wrong class of hardware.
And then of course, is this bit here:
While the ODROID-C2 doesn't appear to be shipping in quantities yet
So in other words, it's not even an option for most people if they want to build something right now.
How about telling us what the board *can do* compared to the Pi? Does it handle EM interference better? Does it have a ginormous number of I/O pins for connecting large quantities of sensors? Is it powerful enough to serve as a self-contained media box that can stream full HD video without dropping frames or hiccuping?
I take back my Thanks. I've learned that the $40 computer costs about $49 to get from them. But I've also learned that they only accept payment through PayPal, and using PayPal in any way is against my religion. Worse, they claim to be the Exclusive US distributor, so that means that I'll have no other option.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You come off as bitter and maybe mentally unwell..
"Apple FORCED YOU TO USE a way to manage and play music files more intelligently via iTunes and metadata."
FTFY. Itunes is way too heavy handed and takes liberties it really shouldn't (like obfuscating folders instead of databasing the existing filenames).
TO me, drag and drop is VASTLY superior to Itunes in EVERY way. Only idiots need itunes to manage their music. Winamp was pretty much the pinnacle of MP3 player design. its all downhill after that.
It all comes back to modern users want all the power and none of the responsibility.
Good-bye
Trouble with laptops/pcs is that you have to spend so much time fighting against the os for hardware control - and you hit driver problems, firewall problems, anti virus (and just plain virus) problems, all shifting like the sands of the Sahara from update to update.
Things like the raspberry pi are more like old-fashioned 8-bit micros from the 80s, but with seriously beefed-up specs. So you don't have to dig through mountains of shit to, say, put 3.3v on the base of a transistor to drive a motor, or read the temperature sensor you hooked up. You just issue a simple command / follow one of a dozen tutorials and it happens.
I'm not saying a laptop is out of question, but simplicity has its advantages.
So as a RPI user and owner is it worth getting this C2 just to run android on?
Microsoft being dominate in the market did not automatically make it the best choice for everyone. The same applies to Raspberry Pi. Windows also had the largest community.
There are those like me that like having the choice of Windows or Linux and Raspberry Pi or Odroid. The fact I can get a 64bit computer that is 4K capable with 2GB of RAM and GigabitEthernet all for $40 is just amazing! Hopefully there will be more, not less, competition forthcoming.
Maybe, maybe not. I have yet to see an indian post in linked.in without spelling errors.
With pricing being a key point in IoT and SBCs the 5$ difference makes, well, all the difference. If the Pi Foundation did target a different price point and went with 40$ rather than 35$ resale I am sure they could add more RAM and a faster processor. I am also sure that if the Pi 3 has such a massive heatsink burying the board then the processor can be clocked much higher. I don't understand the complaints, for the price the Pi 3 is an excellent piece of hardware in an incredible form factor with plenty of applications. The common desktop user finds in this little thing a suitable replacement or alternative to a big bulky desktop PC. Eagerly awaiting my Pi 3 and hope that the Pi 4 comes with SATA or any other common, but faster connection to mass storage.