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Raspberry PI alternative: Cubieboard 1Ghz 1GB RAM
- protomyth 14y agoLooks nice, a little worried about how low some of the funding options were. I do wish someone would build an ITX sized motherboard with SATA, actual ram slots, and gigabyte network ports. Perhaps when the 64-bit version is more available someone will.
- alexkus 14y agoThere are plenty of commercial ITX motherboards with those specs, i.e. http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~DH61DLB3 http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~DH61DLB3 or http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~Z68-ITX-A-E http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~Z68-ITX-A-E for dual gigabit LAN. Or am I missing something? (Ah, you probably want ARM rather than x86[_64]).
- andybak 14y agoThe price.
- pja 14y agoAnd the power consumption.
- DannyBee 14y agoYeah. My little pandaboard, if i'm not powering the USB ports at full bore, doesn't take more than ~7 watts while doing full 1080p video decode of a movie over the network. The same on one of these ITX boards would take probably 25-30 watts, minimum.
- protomyth 14y agoYes, I want an ARM not an x86.
- EwanToo 14y agoOne interesting thing about the Cubieboard is the SATA port, otherwise it's very similar to a lot of other ARM boards out there (e.g. Beagleboard, Pandaboard, etc). This makes it much easier to stick a low power SSD on the device, rather than rely on a hugely slow SD card. What I'm looking forward to next are Cortex A15 boards, the first CPUs are shipping (In the new Chromebook), so hopefully we'll start seeing them on small hackable boards soon.
- IsTom 14y agoIsn't SSD disk going to cost more than this board?
- masklinn 14y agoYes, even crappy ones are going to be twice the price of the board itself.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoNot sure why that matters?
- EwanToo 14y agoI think the final price of the Cubieboard is $50, the cheapest SSDs start at around $50 too [1][2], so yeah it's going to add to the price, but it's also going to make it useful for a lot more projects than an SD card. 1 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227811 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... 2- http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT064V4SSD2 http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT064V4S...
- hermanhermitage 14y agoAnother board is say: https://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry%20A10%20Developer%20Board https://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry%20A10%20Developer... With WiFi. Other alternatives are at the same site. I have a few Mali devices next up on the chopping block after I finish reversing the VideoCore IV.
- Nursie 14y agoThis is kinda cool actually. I had been looking at the ODROID-X (hardkernel.com) and various other single-board machines for a while. Whilst this isn't particularly powerful (ODROID is quad core exynos), it does have an advantage I haven't seen anywhere else - SATA. Does anyone know of any other boards that have a SATA connector?
- justincormack 14y agoThe cubox does http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox and a few others.
- Nursie 14y agoHmm, looks good (and tiny) but seems slow. Certainly has a lot of interfaces! And mainline linux support which is a bonus.
- justincormack 14y agoI dont think its that slow. Its got fall hardware floating point and a newish CPU. Depends on what you compare against....
- nitrogen 14y agoThe Marvell-based stuff (e.g. SheevaPlug, DreamPlug, D2Plug, OpenRD, CuBox) mostly has SATA (not SheevaPlug) and gigabit Ethernet (though for some reason the GuruPlug Display only has 100mbit). It just tends to be a bit pricier, and mostly lacks an FPU or GPU. I look forward to the day when I can get a Cortex A9 or A15 board with a USB host good for the full 480mbit/s, SATA, and gigabit Ethernet.
- Nursie 14y agoI had a sheevaplug about three years ago. I was hoping things had moved on a bit since then... I also look forward to that day. We seem to be at the stage right now that we can have some but not all of those things. Soon, soon...
- mtgx 14y agoIf they are this late in the cycle, they should've gone with the Cortex A7 CPU and Mali 450 GPU. They might even be cheaper than A8 and Mali400, since they are targeted at the mass-market.
- fn0rd 14y agoThere is no SoC currently shipping that uses the A7 as the principal core. It's also considerably slower than the A8 in meaningful ways.
- gregsq 14y agoI'm sort of amused that an outfit from Shenzhen China, perhaps the worlds great manufacturing centre for options like this, is asking for US dollars to make 1000 boards, when firms like ARMJISHU can knock ARM boards out in no time and sell them cheap as chips. There's nothing that special about this that I can see. And giving loaned Chinese money back for free when they have such a massive comparative advantage seems an exercise in market distortion to me.
- wisty 14y agoSmall innovative Chinese outfits lack capital. There's big, government affiliated outfits with lots of capital, and outsourcing companies (like Foxconn, which is Taiwan run), but not a lot of capital for bootstrapped companies. OK, I've heard that's changing, but it's not Silicon Valley.
- SeanDav 14y agoReally needs to be Raspberry PI compatible to take advantage of the growing libraries.
- Nursie 14y agoReally? It surprises me that Pi compatibility is a criteria for stuff, though I know it's popular. Are we talking pin-compatibility? AFAICT the Pi is just another linux on a single board device. It's low cost but otherwise fairly unremarkable.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoThe marketing has been pretty spectacular.
- Nursie 14y agoOh true! I'm just wondering why compatibility would be an issue. It's open source baby, we can rebuild it!
- davidw 14y agoI'm not even sure what "compatibility" means in this context. You can run executables for one on the other? But you can swap out the OS on the Pi, so... I'm just confused.
- ivix 14y agoThis kind of thing is what has really annoyed me about the Pi 'movement'. "Raspberry Pi compatible" means nothing. It's a totally standard ARM based linux computer, of which there are a huge (and growing) number.
- steevdave 14y agoBeing as the A10 is armv7, it's already possible to run more on it than on the Pi. Let us move forward, not backward.
- subsystem 14y agoIf you consider buying one, just don't assume it will be useful for your application. Do some research first, especially when it comes to the gpu/vpu. I recommend reading this page and its links: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10_devices http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10_devices and http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
- sspiff 14y agoAre these by any chance built around the Allwinner A10? The specs seem to match the dime-in-a-dozen Allwinner A10 Chinese tablets/phones/set-top-boxes/... I have 3 of these A10 devices, and the performance isn't that bad. It's also not great, but it's sufficient for all the things I tried with it.
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoThe A10's right there in the photo...
- sspiff 14y agoOops! My bad, thanks for pointing it out. Well that explains the pricepoint then :)
- jaggs 14y agoA few other alternatives. http://www.redferret.net/?p=33596 http://www.redferret.net/?p=33596
- lee 14y agoEverytime one of these rPI-like boards list "Use it as your NAS" I get disappointed to see that it only offers 10/100 Ethernet.
- fsiefken 14y agoI am looking for a portable i386 compatible chip&board instead of ARM for running windows programs (wine doesn't work on arm), does anyone have tips?
- 3amOpsGuy 14y agoIntel are just about to release the "NUC" Next Unit of Computing. Looks pretty reasonable, but significantly more powerful and thus expensive than a PI.
- waven 14y ago3amOpsGuy, is there any chance I could email you somehow regarding some ops advice? thanks!
- michaelt 14y agoThere's a few companies that make "pico-ITX" boards that run x86 processors [1]. Mostly low powered chips like Atom, but you can get Core 2 Duo boards if you've got the cash. Prices started around $300 last time I checked. [1] http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/meng/wmr/projects/uav/photos/mountingthesensors/img_7234-raw-1600.jpg http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/meng/wmr/projects/uav/...
- ojiikun 14y agoDoes anyone know the exact model of board in that photo? Clicking around their site yielded only images, and sadly little text.
- michaelt 14y agoA Kontron something-or-other, sticker's on the USB port. Similar-looking things (without the heatsink) here: http://uk.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/embedded+sbc/pitx+25+sbc/ http://uk.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/embedde...
- iyulaev 14y ago
- nullc 14y agoThis is good news— the rpi is really an embarrassing system. It is shockingly slow compared to other small arm systems clock per clock. A lot of people seem to be trying things on it that would be fine on almost any other arm SBC but fail on rpi… There are many alternatives which are much faster but none are within a factor of two of the rpi's price, so people keep buying the rpi and walking away disappointed.
- ibrow 14y agoI completely disagree with you calling it an "embarrassing system". I've had my Pi for a couple of weeks now and been happily tinkering with it. For the price I am utterly amazed with it (in fairness, I'm a bit of an old git and amazed that you can buy a 2TB HD for less than £100 so I may not be the best judge here). Whilst it may not be the quickest thing out there, it is a start, and I think this is the most important thing about the Pi - it is a statr. It is so cheap it will get people interested in and tinkering with this kind of technology. As a result more people will move into this space, surely the Cubieboard is testament to that. (As well as the Parallella[1] which sadly I don't think will make it's Kickstarter goal) [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-su...
- stan_rogers 14y agoSomehow people keep missing the point: Raspberry Pi is meant to be a nearly-disposable kids' learning toy first and foremost. The object of the game, from the beginning, was to get a programming sandbox into as many small hands as possible—in families that couldn't afford a "real" computer, or couldn't/wouldn't allow kids to try potentially damaging things on the family machine. It's nice that it can, incidentally, play other roles, but those other roles are not it's purpose. It's not an "embarrassing system"; low cost, "universal" peripherals (common televisions as the "monitor", for example), enough portability to get the unit to and from school are its primary concerns. It's an OLPC for the western world, a BBC Micro reborn for the modern age. Y'all rabbits might like these Trix, but they're for kids.
- subsystem 14y ago
- adestefan 14y agoRealize that the A10 does not have mainline kernel support and part of that reason is because the code is so bad no one wants to even try to get Linus to add it.
- astrodust 14y agoSounds like opportunity, doesn't it?
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoBut it looks like this board uses the A8.
- adestefan 14y agoThe Allwinner A10 is a SoC that uses an ARM Cortex A8 as the CPU, a Mali 400 GPU, Ethernet, SATA, etc. Yes it's confusing. It's like calling a hypothetical Intel Core based SoC the Foobar Core 10. Apple called their ARM SoC the A4 and then Allwinner probably designated their SoC the A10 to play off that marketing.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI've looked at the Cubieboard in the past, its an interesting take. What strikes me though about this, the Pandaboard, the Chumby, Etc, is that one of the effects of the 'post PC' momentum shift is that people who were building general purpose computers have switched to building these things which are tailored more for browsing and content consumption, and perhaps business content (documents, spreadsheets, reports) generation. That shift has once again opened up the market for a general purpose hobbiest computer. That is pretty refreshing to see.
- agumonkey 14y agoReflecting about all this, I find the rpi design curious. Most of the SoC is wasted and impose heavy side effects (lan over capricious usb). The graphical applications (video processing, etc) seems to be limited by what is already in the GPU blob. Honest question, isn't there more simple SoC (armv6 + basic 2d gpu) with sane default and i/o chipsets ? How much of the closed source binary is due to the GPU ? With a simpler and open source system, I think it would have provided a better learning substrate than what it is now.
- anotherbadlogin 14y ago"How much of the closed source binary is due to the GPU ?" The Pi team addresses this on their site. I think the answer to your question is "a lot."
- drivebyacct2 14y agoDon't fall for the Mali/A10. Constant, repeated disappointment.
- concsiecourses 14y agoSorry if slightly OT but we organized a "Raspberry Pi's Impact on Hacking" Web Show with forensics expert DJ Palombo. Thought might be of interest to y'all! Here is the link - http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/ http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/ Thanks Henry