Raspberry Pi's Smaller, Cheaper Rival: NanoPi Neo Plus2 Weighs in at $25 (zdnet.com)

FriendlyARM, the maker of compact NanoPi developer boards, has released the NanoPi Neo Plus2 for $25. From a report: This board is an update to the recently released NanoPi Neo 2, a $15 cookie-sized developer board measuring 40mm x 40mm (1.6in) with a 64-bit Allwinner H5 processor, 512MB RAM, and one USB port. The NanoPi Neo Plus2 is slightly larger at 52mm x 40mm (2in x 1.6in) and has two USB ports. It has the same H5 quad-core A53 ARM Cortex processor, but comes with 1GB RAM and 8GB eMMC storage. The NeoPlus2's storage in addition to Gigabit Ethernet puts it ahead of the Raspberry Pi 3 on paper, and at $25 undercuts the better-known board by $10.

Comments

Re:It's a component, not a computer

[bluefoxlucid]

I've been hoping for a Raspberry-Pi-like thing including a Snapdragon 850 with 8GB RAM. The Snapdragon 850 is ~$45, although some volume discounters have gotten it for $25-$30. That's 2.45GHz ARMv8-A with GPU, DSP, and 802.11a/b/g/n.

That's a nice place to start. With 8GB RAM and that much CPU, plus an M.2 or mSATA port, plus a SATA controller with 4 ports, you can actually build something like a viable FreeNAS box. You'll need a secondary PSU to drive hard disks; an SSD draws up to 5 watts, which is 1 amp at 5V or 42mA at 120V. USB 3.0 supplies only up to 1.5A at 5V at charging downstream, although the USB Power Delivery Revision specifies 20V at 5A or a maximum 100W.

The Pi 2 used up to 6.25 watts, and the Pi 3 uses up to 3.7 watts at peak; those Snapdragon 800-series can pull 8-10 watts at full load. That means 2A off a 5V USB or 0.5A off the 20V high-speed power delivery revision. Alternately, the engineers can just stick a DC power supply on there, and you use a wall wart that can give 12V at 5 amps or about 60W.

So the Pi is already based on a SOC. We're looking at a $45 SOC plus a $12 SATA controller. The PSU to carry all this power will cost you $5. That's up to $62 on top of the Pi 3 (at $40), but their SOC costs $25; you're looking at a $77 board.

With a 60W carry capacity, you can run a 5W M.2 main disk and four 5W Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSDs all pulling peak at 25W, leaving 35W to run everything else.

Now you have a peak-power-usage of about 45W-50W for a NAS. Thing is those drives usually run 0.030W, maybe up to 1.5W during brief operations; and the CPU consumes approximately nothing when idle. You're going to average under 10W, under 88kWh/year.

It won't run your enterprise VMWare server farm. That's not to say you can't use this thing for 10Gbit/s iSCSI to a pretty active Web server (primarily reading!) or even a desktop OS, both of which would cache most reads. You can serve an NFS/SMB file share to hold your movies and music. Hell, in the enterprise, this could be your Gitlab and Owncloud server.

That's what I'm waiting for: getting the hard drives out of my desktop PC, getting the music collection off one PC or another, getting my non-cloud files somewhere that doesn't rely on a machine whirring loudly and chugging 50W just to idle. They're thinking too small with these boards.