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

Allwinner. Nope.

[0100010001010011]

I have way too many cheap development boards floating around my house. The only truly useless ones are the Allwinners. uBoot is a non-standard locked down version with no source available. The Linux kernel is a custom version with no source available.

While Broadcom isn't exactly great, the RaspPi's success as pushed them into opening some things up and the RaspPi's community has the momentum behind it to keep it going. And my ~10 year old SheevaPlug with a Marvell chip is still going strong. Marvell went the exact opposite way of Allwinner and said "eh, screw it, here's everything" and has their code in the kernel mainline.

$10 is not worth the hassle of dealing with an Allwinner chip.

Re: Allwinner. Nope.

[John Allsup]

Exactly. I learned this with the OrangePi boards. And my 'kodi boxes' are retired in favour of Rpi2's (or pi3's, but pi3's slightly higher power needs are a annoyance so far as what USB sockets you can run them off).

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[Lady Galadriel]

Agreed. Even though somethings about the Allwinner look good on paper, I prefer a product that is a bit more stable and well supported.

One other note, the Allwinner is from a Chinese source. I do not trust them yet to produce flawless products. (If Intel, AMD, Broadcom, and other western suppliers can't get things right, I doubt newer companies from China can do so.)

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[MangoCats]

For $10, I'll take the HDMI port too, thanks. Not that I always use it, but just having it is a big plus.

I do like the smaller form factor, but Raspberry Pi3 is small enough that the accessories around it are usually bigger anyway.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[hughbar]

Thanks, saved me a post. I participate and help arrange (one) Pi Jam(s), apart from a certain (cough, cough) quantity of them in my house. The community is always going to make them win out, until something really, really spectacular in terms of spec and price point appears. But, even then.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[randomErr]

The Linux kernel is a custom version with no source available.

Huh?

The post was very self explanatory. They compile the kernel internally and drivers are all closed source. So yes the source for Debian and Ubuntu code is free (as in beer) but you will not be able to compile them and get the system running without the proprietary code. At best without the proprietary code you'll just be able to get a command line.

There has been very little support on these boards in the past beyond the community. So updates are slow and sporadic.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[0100010001010011]

Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days,

Awesome! Can you provide any instructions or links to make my CubieBoard 4 with Allwiner A80 not useless?

sunxi linux still lists most things as not supported and not worked on: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_m...

Under GPL violations they list:

As is usual, there are the libnand and libisp violations. But with A80, Allwinner decided to step this up a notch, or two, or all the way to 11.

I haven't checked recently but Ubuntu and Debian were both at least 1-2 versions out of date.

And that's putting aside the reset issues if you put it under any sort of load for over a few minutes.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[RabidReindeer]

In other words, there are additions and/or modifications to the source code used to generate the kernel that are not made public. Meaning that you cannot yourself generate a functional kernel for the unit using the standard open-source kernel processes. You therefore cannot customize the kernel for your special needs and you don't really have any way to know what possible nefarious activities it's up to.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[swillden]

In that case, I find it very surprising that the FSF has not sued.

Sue for what? There is nothing that says that the modifications are released under GPL. As long as the company is willing to provide the original source code without their modifications they are in the clear. They don't even need to publish it on a homepage, they could send it to you on a CD and charge you for the CD, stamps, and work spent on burning the CD.

You need to re-read the GPL. Or a summary of it. Or any discussion of it. Or, really, anything at all about it.

Again

[Anonymous Coward]

And again.. "RPI Rival!!! Cheaper and better!!" Community? Standard? Support? AllWinner? Upps!

Allwinner

[tonywestonuk]

Yes, they are a shit company.

BUT, they are also very, VERY cheep. In any case, most of the GPL violating stuff has been reversed engineered.

I run this as a home server - it works great.

https://www.aliexpress.com/sto...

Re: Allwinner

[John Allsup]

I tried an OrangePiLite. The WiFi was unsupported, the Ethernet port was removed to make way for it, and USB Ethernet and WiFi adapters I tried did not work with the Linux images supplied. Not worth the time given Rpi's work.

1GB RAM and 2 USB ports

[abainbridge]

It seems like the summary is wrong. Or at least it disagrees with this wiki page http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wi...

Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can get started on any Pi just by hooking up an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse. This is a serious hindrance to any beginner and an annoyance to anyone beyond that.

Re: Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original purpose behind the Raspberry Pi is to give to kids to plug into the TV and start experimenting. I think replacing the display ports with a serial port might hinder this somewhat.

Re: Where is the open source GPU driver for this?

[John Allsup]

You are very generous in assuming they give you good enough software for it to function. The OrangePi's taught me not to take this for granted.

On Paper?

[wisnoskij]

In my experience most of these boards are limited by their board speed. Many of the PI ports get significantly less bandwidth than they can handle normally, and even that is shared between the ports. It might be a gigabit port, but if it is similar to other single board computers it cannot utilize half of that.

Re:On Paper?

[drinkypoo]

It might be a gigabit port, but if it is similar to other single board computers it cannot utilize half of that.

Even the Sheevaplug can't meaningfully saturate its GigE link. But it's still nice to be able to pull 20MB/sec instead of 10MB/sec from a connected HDD, which is my use case. I'm using a Pogoplug V4 for convenience and the reduced CPU overhead of USB3, because the CPU overhead of USB2 on such limited hardware will punch it right in the breadbasket and I have the system doing some other simple jobs as well.

Re: Where is the open source GPU driver for this?

[c]

Yeah, no GPU. You need to use a USB-to-TTL adapter to bring them up the first time or you have to put in the effort in setting up the SD card to boot it headless.

Once they're up and running, NEO's are decent little units. Armbian installs painlessly.

A major problem with the NEO's is that their documentation and tools for using the GPIO's is, apparently, shit. I've got some NEO's, but I haven't tried to do anything with the GPIO's so it hasn't been a problem for me.

I would never pay $25 for one, though. At $10 each it's an attractive buy. At $25 it's worth the extra $10 to get the real thing.

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.

Re:Funny

[DontBeAMoran]

macOS is what makes a Mac. Their hardware is either the same as a PC or years behind yet still sold at insane prices.

A Hackintosh running macOS is a Mac, a real made-by-Apple computer running Windows/Linux is not a Mac anymore.

But it's still not a RaspberryPi

[CrazySpence]

The RaspberryPi community still trumps it for beginners. If you're not a beginner then it doesn't matter, choose what fits the job. I am glad there are lots of boards popping up all over the place, Choice is good but I am puzzled at the fact that there's so many allwinner SoC's running around but the drivers are still...questionable. You'd figure that would be sorted out by now.

Why Pi?

[crafoo]

BeagleBone is superior, and with better options, and a far better, technology-first web site. I honestly can't stand the white space and marketing trash pile of the Rasp Pi landing site.