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

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."

Comments

Dupe

[ArchieBunker]

Plus who cares about numbers? The pi and x86 boards are meant for totally different applications.

Re:Dupe

[caseih]

I'm not so sure they are.

I for one would far rather have an x86 equivalent of the Pi. Being able to interface with lots of GPIO pins but able to use a stock x86 kernel and stock distribution would be so much more convenient and useful to me than using one of the various Pi distros.

On the other hand, few seem to think as I do, as Intel has canceled their hobby SBCs.

Re:Dupe

[Gaygirlie]

One of the problems with x86 SBCs is that they are pretty much solely based on Intel's offerings, which makes them quite a bit more expensive and therefore not as appealing to home-tinkerers and the likes. I suppose that is the primary reason for their apparent unpopularity. That said, I do like the promise of the x86-boards myself, what with proper QuickSync for all sorts video-needs, like e.g. realtime transcoding, and full OpenGL instead of OpenGL ES for any graphical applications and quite mature software-landscape in the big picture. They're just lacking in community-support and e.g. all the easy-to-follow tutorials and such for home-tinkerers to interface with all sorts of sensors and stuff. One can always hope things will pick up; the fact that Intel dropped their line of SBCs isn't necessarily an indication of the market at large, as Intel has a tendency of doing this kind of a thing, and there are several other players who manufacture x86 SBCs.

Re:Dupe

[geoskd]

One of the problems with x86 SBCs is that they are pretty much solely based on Intel's offerings

That cost problem is actually much more acute when you are talking about the real volume customer for these machines: Commercial products that use the Rpi are on the rise, and already account for more than 1/3rd of Raspberry Pi sales according to my supplier (I use the BBB for my commercial product line, which is much closer to 80% commercial product use now). The extra cost of intel based offerings is absolutely a deal breaker for us, as it does not come with any kind of advantages in exchange for the additional cost. The pi3 is already vastly overpowered for what we need, but the arduino has too little power

The true story of the market driver for the Pi and its competitors is that IoT commercial space. That is the market Intel wanted in to, and that market is *very* price sensitive. Intel cant compete in that space because their core IP is simply too expensive to actually manufacture. The x86 architecture was shit the day it was created and has 30 years of cluster^&*$ hacks in it That mess brings zero value to the Iot world, but has a huge per unit cost. ARM is winning by default because they have had 15 years without a real competitor in their space, and every new generation of product, they simply abandon the old generations mistakes instead of having to support them in perpetuity.

If Intel really wants to survive, they need to start making actual plans to abandon x86 and x64, and use their vast knowledge to go back to the drawing board with a squeaky clean design from scratch. That offering would have a chance in the IoT world, since they could probably get the design to be very efficient in both mip/flop per $ and mip/flop per watt if they didn't have to continue to support the legacy x86 garbage. That would be an offering that could compete with the ARM legions.

x86 is a write off. Intel can abandon it now, or they can try to milk it until its too late, but either way, x86s days are closely tied to Windows and Desktop computers, both of which are facing the beginning of the long slow slide to irrelevancy and eventual abandonment.

Re:Amen

[splatter]

I also have to wonder if they really are looking at all the options, because the espressobin board is ARMv8 but also has SATA.

Why Raspberry pi wins

[goombah99]

It hits the sweet spot for price/performance/Low hassle.

Faster and more expensive? I might as well buy a cheap tablet.
Faster and cheaper? But lacks library support and a user based chock full of not just FAQ but rarely asked obsuratta that is key thing you needed to understand to get your job done

If your time has any value then there is no computer cheaper than a pi worth the price difference. One can say that almost factually.

THe ones that do compete are the ones offering more features like beagle bone.

Re:Why Raspberry pi wins

[goombah99]

Add to that:
Worth your time to develop on because it will be supported 5 years form now. [See Intel or Orange pi for counter examples]

Re:Why Raspberry pi wins

[ShanghaiBill]

Also, if you develop a software project on RPi or a add-on SBC, you can share it with a lot of other people that also have RPis. It is popular because it is popular.

Re: Why Raspberry pi wins

[that this is not und]

There is no certainty the RPi will exist in it's present form five years from now. It is dependent on a mobile CPU that is single sourced from a relatively minor vendor who one of the foundation members happens to work for.

  It is a quite praiseworthy project, but it's aims are pedagogical, and trends in education could shift significantly. Five years is a long time, and the R Pi Foundation has a lot of opportunity to grow in that five years.

Re:Why Raspberry pi wins

[tlhIngan]

No, the REAL reason for RPi's success is the community.

There are faster boards, there are better boards. But they don't have community behind it. This means the software stagnates and is out of date on release. But for RPi, there's plenty of community support such that software stacks keep getting updated. And there's lots of people to ask questions to.

Community is probably the #1 factor in whether something will be around a year from now or not. If people aren't using your boards in any significant degree, then when they leave, it's dead. When you have a lively community, they're keeping it alive.

Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[guruevi]

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.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[Gravis Zero]

They aren't underpowered but they also aren't intended to be used as workstations. If you want the performance of a workstation then you should buy a workstation.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[DontBeAMoran]

Funny how you think a Raspberry Pi is underpowered for any use and yet there's projects all over the planet that run fine on a cheap 8-bit ATmega328P running at 16MHz, i.e. Arduino UNO. There's even projects for the ATtiny85 running at 1MHz via its internal clock.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[drinkypoo]

I've had good luck with Pine A64+. It has the crappy old GPU you're complaining about, but it's pretty cheap.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[Hognoxious]

It's a small computer, not a coffee machine.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[serviscope_minor]

So, sure, you could save a few bucks by reusing a wallwart ... for the original Pi. Finding a "good" 2.5A or what the recommendation is for the Pi 3, micro USB "psu" however, isn't that easy. It's quite possible that even if you have a whole bunch none of them cuts the mustard at a closer inspection.

I think it's an idea whose time is coming: phones are getting chunkier and with it, PSUs are getting bigger. My old old phone charger won't run the Pi. My latest one will. Either way though I just forked out for the official PSU, dot a DIN rail mounted one and used the header, jacked into a molex from a desktop PSU, or just used my bench supply, depending on what I was doing. I do like that it has many options.

The higher voltage would not have helped with the model 1 since it used a linear supply.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[serviscope_minor]

As I said in another post, there are threads over at the RPI forums full of people facing weird problems caused by dodgy mico usb adapters, and on ongoing quests for which ones are "good enough" to do the job.

Well, people will use the cheapeat crap they can find off ebay and not read the specs. In one case, I got the official adapter. In another, I used one I had lying around which could supply the requisite current.

All of which could have been avoided if they had used a barrel connector and a 12V or at least 7V adapter from an old modem or something from the start. But no, you've gotta pinch those pennies, lest you might actually create a good product.

You can put power in directly on the 5V rail using the header.

The trouble with barrel plugs is fewer people have adapters already, and they're harder to buy. The mucro usb ones aren't problem free, but it is very very widely available.

Re:Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards?

[maestroX]

mini ITX celeron J1800, more expensive though, but at least you have something useful after playing.

Nope.

[Gravis Zero]

Intel just killed it's IoT platform line, so there are going to be fewer x86 options for SBCs.

Re:Amen

[Gaygirlie]

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.

"In terms of open specifications"

[Shoten]

On the whole, people don't want open specifications more than they want something that is well-supported. Open specifications are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between something that's a huge hassle to get working (and keep working) smoothly that's open and something that just plain works...well, I offer this survey's results as Exhibit A.

Re:"In terms of open specifications"

[Gaygirlie]

There is an open-source driver for the GPU nowadays, capable of doing OpenGL (not just OpenGL ES) and such, and there is work going on for developing an open-source blob for booting the boards, too. I haven't checked in a good while how the projects are faring, but the last time I tried the open-source GPU-driver, it worked surprisingly well already. These projects give hope for a pretty good long-term support as long as one doesn't need H/W-accelerated decoding/encoding (there is no open-source support for that atm., AFAIK) of video, and even that may still one day get an open-source implementation.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

pot, meat kettle

Why bring up x86?

[willy_me]

The article little to do with x86 vs ARM market share. It is basically a comparison of different single board computers (SBC). To bring up x86 is kind of pointless - especially considering that Intel just killed the majority of their boards.

Re:Why bring up x86?

[Gaygirlie]

You do realize that there are vendors who do x86 SBCs other than Intel? It's totally not pointless to bring up x86 SBCs in a discussion about, you know, SBCs.

Re:Why bring up x86?

[AHuxley]

Code might exist for x86 that is useful. Code has to be created or found and re created just for non x86 systems.
Thats the difference. A lot of code that exists or a person has to learn to write code or to hope a nice person has the time to make code for a very different non x86 system.
It would have been better to use x86 for hobby use and then to desktop and smaller networks.
Lots of good code exists for the x86, skills can scale to different existing systems. Now people have to learn a new set of skills or find a skilled person to code for them.

Re:Why bring up x86?

[jeremyp]

The Google search you need is "high level language". /they are a fairly recent invention, but they allow you to write your code in a non machine specific notation and it is covered to machine code by a tool called a compiler - or an interpreter.

Re:Awesome

[maliqua]

hypocrisy is a funny thing, sneaks right up on you doesn't it.

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards

[guruevi]

If they come with an HDMI output you would expect it to be able to compose a display at 1080p beyond a single stream movie.

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards

[Gravis Zero]

No, I look at the specs and expect them to do what is listed because I understand it's an SBC, not a workstation.

Desperately needs a die shrink

[jensend]

The 40nm process the Pi is fabbed on is now nine years old.

The Pi 3 is very thermally limited. Overheating and power supply related problems are very common. It's also only a ~30% improvement over the Pi2 while the Pi 2 was more like a 700% improvement over the original Pi. All of this would be very different if the Pi 3 had been fabbed at 28nm.

Yes, it doesn't make sense to try to push the Pi onto a leading edge process like 10nm, where per-transistor costs are going up rather than down and FinFET design gets more complicated. But a move to e.g. 20nm planar would make a huge difference and be enough to keep performance close to other ARM competitors for many years.

The trouble is that Broadcom has largely moved on and it's going to be difficult to get a die shrink (or any improvements to VideoCore) to happen. The Pi 4 will be a long time in coming.

Re:Desperately needs a die shrink

[Anomalyst]

I am wondering if PI might move to a RISC-V in future iterations. https://www.raspberrypi.org/fo...

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM board

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you set it and forget it to do something important 24/7/365 without any real supervision? Having it to deal with a serious amount of data? Fuck no.

We have a couple rpis doing machine vision analysis in our QA shop, and they've been chugging at probably 50+% CPU load along for more than a year. When a vender for more serious equipment was taking a week to get back on an issue with broken equipment, we had a temp solution that became permanent.

The only reliability issue we've had is when using them to control some kilns, where even $1k+ controllers have died. It is pretty trivial and minimum cost to once a month or two to spend five minutes throwing in a new RPi with a copied flash card all setup to go.

Could you use something a whole lot cheaper to do that? Yes.

The equipment cost is trivial compared to engineering time. The cost of a RPi is effectively zero to us as long as you're not burning them for heat. The fact we can hand it to whatever engineer is least busy and have something working in a day is a godsend, especially when the PLC programmers are backlogged. We're not getting rid of the PLC guys, we're just focusing them more on where they are needed. Which is how tools and economics work in the real world: you use what is cheapest over all while getting the job done with sufficient quality. We would gladly pay $10+k for some controllers when needed in a pinch, but if the vender says it will take them a week while in house says they can buy a "toy" and get it done by the end of the day with no long term consequences, we go with the "toy" in that case.

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards

[chuckugly]

Can you set it and forget it to do something important 24/7/365 without any real supervision?

Why is approximately 7 years the benchmark you're setting?

Re:Amen

[fnj]

WHERE THE HELL DO YOU GET THE ESPRESSOBIN, GODDAMMIT??? Not from KickStarter any more obviously. Not from Amazon - "We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." GlobalScale doesn't give any hint. Google doesn't yield any leads.

And how much $ is it in whatever fantasy world that it is actually available?

What the christ is wrong with their marketing?

Yet still with the unfixed USB b/w bug.

[sethstorm]

The deal-killer with the r.pi is the still-unfixed USB bandwidth bug that has plagued the platform since the first generation.

Re:Yet still with the unfixed USB b/w bug.

[Gaygirlie]

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.

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM board

[ebenupton]

Any chance we could get our hands on a couple of your kiln-killed units? Be interesting to see what failed.

Raspberry Pi 3 stability

[Max_W]

I was surprised by the Raspberry Pi 3 stability. I constructed a light on/off switch to switch on light in the apartment via internet when I am on holiday. It can run without reloading for long time. I do not know for how long as the system never has got any issues.

Re:Amen

[fnj]

Duh... from espressobin [espressobin.net]?

What are you, stupid? If you actually do that and press "order now", all it does it take you to the stupid dead ends I listed. Jeeze.

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards

[serviscope_minor]

If they come with an HDMI output you would expect it to be able to compose a display at 1080p beyond a single stream movie.

compose a display?

Honestly I've never checked. I only ever use the HDMI port for debugging. Generally they run headless for me and on the rare occasion I've built a gadget with a screen, then I use the official screen. The graphics (which I freely admit were pointless animations that I did for fun though amazingly actually increased the usability of the device) ran smoothly.

So, works for me (tm), but I've never tried using it as a desktop or laptop replacement.

Three of the top four

[Walter White]

And four of the top ten. Well done RPF! (Raspberry Pi Foundation.)
I believe that one of the most important factors is the same thing that makes the Arduino so popular amongst embedded controllers: Community. Both have vibrant active communities where newcomers can share ideas and get help. Both provide support for those getting started.
With the Pi Zero and Zero W we have a ridiculously inexpensive platform that runs a full blown OS. True, it is not up to snuff for replacing your desktop and costs do add up adding peripherals, but there are still some applications where the cost is significant.

FWIW, I have two employed. The first drives a retired monitor to provide a 'fireplace display' for SWMBO's office (https://github.com/HankB/pi-video-player) This one actually required some programming and runs on a Pi Zero. The other application is a Pi 3 B running an MPD server to play music on my home stereo. It would probably run on a Zero W (which was not available when I built this) but I'd have to rig up something for audio output since the Zeros do not have an audio jack.
These are very handy little devices.

Re:Amen

[kent_eh]

>I>How do the different Pis have a "strength in communicating with an Arduino?"

Yes you can use USB on any computer to talk to an Arduino, but the PI also makes it easy to use I2C and/or SPI to talk to them.
An x86 or other boars without GPIO - not so much.

Re:Amen

[Gaygirlie]

The RPi isn't the only SBC with a GPIO-header with user-accessible I2C and SPI. There are about a billion different ARM-based SBCs like that around by now, and plenty of x86- and MIPS-based ones with available GPIO-headers, too. Of course it has "strength" over a board without such accessible interfaces, but that's just a stupid comparison to begin with, like comparing apples and airplanes, and it has no "strength" over any other board with those interfaces.

Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards

[guruevi]

That doesn't we should be happy with poor thermal design and crashes. If you give a board certain features, then using them for any period of time should not cause them to overheat and crash.

You can't expect certain things from an SBC but not crash every 48h because there is some load is one of them.