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.

[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.

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...

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.

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.

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: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.