Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

12 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe by ArchieBunker · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re:Dupe by geoskd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
  2. Why Raspberry pi wins by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:Why Raspberry pi wins by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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]

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    2. Re:Why Raspberry pi wins by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re: Why Raspberry pi wins by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 2

      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.

  3. 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.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  4. 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.

  5. "In terms of open specifications" by Shoten · · Score: 2

    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.

    --

    For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
  6. Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  7. Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM board by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. 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.