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Raspberry Pi Gets Competitors (hackaday.com)
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.
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.
Raspberry Pi had competitors before it ever existed. Are people really this fucking dense around here?
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.