Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Raspberry Pi Gets Competitors (hackaday.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Pi-fight dept.

Hackaday reports that Asus has "quietly released their Tinker board that follows the Pi form factor very closely, and packs a 1.8 GHz quad-core ARM Cortes A17 alongside an impressive spec At £55 (about $68) where this is being written it's more expensive than the Pi, but Asus go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is significantly faster."

And though the Raspberry Pi foundation upgraded their Compute Module, Pine64 has just unveiled their new SOPINE A64 64-bit computing module, a smaller version of the $15 Pine64 computer. An anonymous reader quotes ComputerWorld: At $29, the SOPINE A64 roughly matches the price of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, which ranges from $25 to $30. The new SOPINE will ship in February, according to the website. The SOPINE A64 can't operate as a standalone computer like the Pine64. It needs to be plugged in as a memory slot inside a computer. But if you want a full-blown computer, Pine64 also sells the $15 SOPINE Baseboard Model-A, which "complements the SOPINE A64 Compute Module and turns it into a full single board computer," according to the company...

The original Pine64 was crowdsourced and also became popular for its high-end components like a 64-bit chip and DDR3 memory... It has 2GB RAM, which is twice that of Raspberry Pi's compute module. SOPINE also has faster DDR3 memory, superior to DDR2 memory in Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 board.

7 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Da faq? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Raspberry Pi had competitors before it ever existed. Are people really this fucking dense around here?

    1. Re:Da faq? by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Pi is two things, Pi the hardware and Pi the infrastructure. Hardware-wise, there's a bazillion devices that "compete" with the Pi, many of them much, much better. In terms of the infrastructure, there's nothing that comes close. Until something can replicate and then supplant the entire industry that's evolved around the Pi, you can't call anything "competition". The hardware is mediocre, the infrastructure is unbeatable.

      Before I get lots of flames for the hardware comment, it really is. I kinda hate saying this because it's completely changed the industry and totally fulfilled its promise as an educational toy, but dear Ghod you don't want to build a product around it. Compare it to my current go-to alternative, the Odroid C2: It has power conditioning and protection circuitry on both DC in and USB ports, it has a high-current, standard barrel jack connector for power not micro USB (so it can actually power its own USB peripherals rather than needing a hacked-up external USB powered hub or having things fail to work mysteriously), it has a massive heatsink to deal with heat issues, it has proper GigE not pretend USB ethernet (and a 64-bit CPU with 2GB RAM to drive it), it has proper eMMC storage rather than an SD card, and so on and so on, it's actually been designed by competent hardware engineers who know how to build a solid, reliable system.

      Oh, and it costs all of $5 more than a Pi.

    2. Re:Da faq? by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Pi was designed as an educational prop and hobbyist toy at a throwaway price. It fits that better than anything else out there. If you're looking for professional equipment it's lacking. The Odroid C2 is pretty awesome but it's almost double the price of a Pi3 at 60 dollars on amazon. I have a few of the Raspberry a+ computers I picked up for 25 bucks apiece and got cameras for at 25 apiece. I stuck them around the outside of my house and installed motion on them giving me a dirt cheap way to monitor the area. I'm really blown away by how well they work. I'm sure I could spend 3 times the money and have something a little better but part of the joy is that this stuff is cheap enough that I'm not concerned about it. For things that require a lot of computing power it's not the solution. The things they're doing with the 5 dollar Pi Zero is what really amazes me. It's the culture that surrounds the Pi, the community really, that makes it what it is along with the dirt cheap I don't care if my kids break it price.

  2. Competitors don't get it by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh so I can pay 2x and get something 2x faster. Wow. And I could pay 2x of $60 and get a whole chromebook or used laptop that was 8x faster. Or a I could buy a cheap android phone and have my rockchip with a touch screen and battery for that $60.

    they just don't understand the price point logic of $35.

    Likewise going the other way you can buy a cheaper and more powerful board like a Pine or an Orange PI, save yourself $10 in parts and then pay about $300 in time and effort (assuming your time is worth $50/hour) to get a linux distro and and all the needed packages that actually works on it. the orange PI's are junk because a usabale software set only gets ported a year or more after the board has been on the market. I bought one once, and had to download several different distro's for it till I got one with drivers that would support the Key board, Blue tooth, and screen I was using. And even then it was only using just 1 of it's 4 processors and no graphics acceleration from the Mali chip. that took hours to wade through. then when I tried to install other code the libraries didn't compile. Fast forward 3 years, and it works fine now but the rasperry PI 3 eclipsed it.

    The whole point of the RPI is a bomb proof little circuit that has loads of well testd software so it's not the project, it's the thing you put into the project.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  3. Re:RaspberryPi still has no competitors... by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I won't call Arduino a competitor Raspberry pi - different animals. An Arduino is an embedded system while Raspberry is a minicomputer. For example you would not want to use a Raspberry pi in something that will have its power pulled abruptly or on and off - unless you go though a lot of hoops to create a read only file system and even then it is risky to use it for something in the field or embedded in a another system.

  4. Lacking in I/O by Walter+White · · Score: 4, Informative

    The extra processor horsepower and RAM is nice but it seems like it is not matched by I/O. is the gigabit Ethernet tied to the processor? One of the drawbacks of the Pi (not Pie, BTW) is that Ethernet is off the internal USB2 hub.You could put gigabit Ethernet on a USB2 hub and get no increase in bandwidth. The Tinker has one micro-USB connector for power. Does it support OTG? (According to the Hackaday article it does have multiple USB 2.0 ports.) Sata would be nice too.

    The biggest advantage of the Raspberry Pi is the community. It's going to be hard to match that. The RPi has hit critical mass when I can go to my local Microcenter and get a Pi 3 Model B for $30 US or a Pi zero for $5.

  5. What about the C.H.I.P.? by Feneric · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A big draw of the Pi is its price point. More expensive devices aren't necessarily competition. Less expensive devices like the C.H.I.P. are the ones I'd expect to take a bite out of Pi.