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Survey Says: Raspberry Pi Still Rules, But X86 SBCs Have Made Gains (linuxgizmos.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the life-of-Pi dept.

DeviceGuru writes: Results from LinuxGizmos.com's annual hacker-friendly single board computer survey are in, and not surprisingly, the Raspberry Pi 3 is the most desired maker SBC by a 4-to-1 margin. In other trends: x86 SBCs and Linux/Arduino hybrids have trended upwards. The site's popular hacker SBC survey polled 1,705 survey respondents and asked for their first, second, and third favorite SBCs from a curated list of 98 community oriented, Linux- and Android-capable boards. Spreadsheets comparing all 98 SBCs' specs and listing their survey vote tallies are available in freely downloadable Google Docs.
Other interesting findings:
  • "A Raspberry Pi SBC has won in all four of our annual surveys, but never by such a high margin."
  • The second-highest ranked board -- behind the Raspberry Pi 3 -- was the Raspberry Pi Zero W.
  • "The Raspberry Pi's success came despite the fact that it offers some of the weakest open source hardware support in terms of open specifications. This, however, matches up with our survey responses about buying criteria, which ranks open source software support and community over open hardware support."
  • "Despite the accelerating Raspberry Pi juggernaut, there's still plenty of experimentation going on with new board models, and to a lesser extent, new board projects."

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards? by guruevi · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Pi is great and all but its woefully underpowered. I've tried a number of different boards, the ODROID has way better specs and in the same price class.

    But every other x86 and even ARM boards I've tried are unstable. UDOO, Intel Compute Stick, UP Board all worthless as they crash from overheating within 48h of operation. And on ARM boards I can find little under $200 that has anything better than a Mali 450 GPU which is already nearing a half a decade old.

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  2. Re:Amen by Gaygirlie · · Score: 4, Informative

    How do the different Pis have a "strength in communicating with an Arduino?" The x86- and MIPS-boards can do that just as well, there is nothing stopping one from communicating with an Arduino over I2C, SPI, serial or whatever even on the other platforms. And no, Pi definitely doesn't have a "strength" in Ethernet, either, considering it's just 10/100 and it's actually a USB-device and thus eats bandwidth from the USB-ports, all of which are internally connected to a single USB-hub on the PCB.

  3. Re:Yet still with the unfixed USB b/w bug. by Gaygirlie · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not a bug, it's a hardware-limitation. The SoC only provides a single USB-port and the only way of connecting a USB-Ethernet and providing 4 USB-ports for the end-user to use is through a USB-hub, which obviously will mean that they all share the 480Mbps bandwidth of the single USB-port the hub is connected to. The only way the RPi Foundation could fix that is... by switching to another SoC. They'd lose backwards-compatibility, though, so that's not going to happen anytime soon.