An Alternative to the Raspberry Pi

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It is NOT a rPi Killer if it costs more than 20% more no matter if itā€™s 2x more powerful or not.
Sorry but the janky way this guy does the comparison turned me off big time. I mean he add different accessories and skips others. sorry but a fail on my books. There are all kinds of SBCs out there for many different needs so if you need X86 and 32GB of memory because you want to run Windows itā€™s not a Pi killer.

They actually have a model that it comes pre-installed with Ubuntu for the same price.

In another video he installs Mint and Linux software for ham radio enthusiasts.

BTW have you seen the recent price of a RPI?

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Well, he specā€™ed out 32GB of RAM so that to me is a Windows user. Sure there are reasons for wanting lots of RAM on a Linux box but 99% of the time throwing RAM at a machine is because itā€™s running Windows.

All I can say is click-baiting by saying itā€™s a Pi Killer is getting REALLY old. And the boards which do come close to rPi specā€™s and pricing like BananaPiā€™s just donā€™t use the click-bait titles of being a Pi Killer.

And 8GB rPi 4 is going for $75 and a 4GB rPi 4 is $55. rPi ZW goes for $15

Donā€™t get me wrong, that might be a fine board for some use cases but it is NOT in the ballpark of any Raspberry Pi.

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Bottom line, it depends on your needs. The term ā€œkillerā€ might be a bit strong, but if he said ā€œalternativeā€, that could be a better description.

Personally, this allows me to put any OS on it that I wish to play with. Iā€™m not limited to specific distributions for a specific computer.

As with most comparisons, itā€™s not perfect Apples to Apples.

Hardware is getting inexpensive again and affordable so itā€™s up to the end user to figure out what will fit their needs the best as well as how quickly you can get it.

Peace Out!

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Yes but I wish they would just shut up about them being anything comparable to a Raspberry Pi. Apples to watermellon comparisonā€¦ Itā€™s just click bait crap because they have no skills in marketing the product on its own and they get $$ for all the people interested in Raspberry Pi clicking thinking there was something remotely similar.

Itā€™s just another SBC and has nothing to do with a Raspberry Pi. They should be targeting Microsoft Windows users but who knows, itā€™s probably Microsoft paying them to say they are ā€œRaspberry Pi Killersā€ because thatā€™s the crap Microsoft did for 2+ decades and itā€™s right up their alley. Windows is tied to the hip to x86 and ARM has already eaten their lunch on phones and tablets so it would not surprise me they are funding all these ridiculous claims.

I agree. That board would be much better suited as a router/firewall running PFSense or similarā€¦ But, Definitely not in the same class as a RPiā€¦

:heavy_plus_sign: :one:

A quick google for "raspberry pi killer" - Google Search gives 10K reponses, many on YouTube. Generally written in bold red text across the thumbnail and some bro holding out a random SBC getting in your face. And my reaction is ā€˜boooooring.ā€™

These discussions have been a bit on my mind recently, too much, so I thought Iā€™d do a TL;DR brainfart here.

There are a bunch of ARM based machines at similar and lower price points than a Pi, if you get one with good Armbian support and a vendor who cases about upstreaming code these make an excellent tools. You can effectively choose the CPU/Memory combination you want and they can offer more suitable I/O options. Twin ethernet, CAN bus, AI cores etc. can all be found. Many of these boards look ā€˜weirdā€™ because they are designed for applications in the automotive / manufacturing / development space. But educators and hobbyists find good uses for them too.

With a good Armbian/Debian/Arch install (or any other major distro these days) these will be operational and secure for years, so why join the waiting list for a Pi and then have to plug HATā€™s in to get the IO you need. This is why this market exists and flourishes; plus the choice of OS and quality of documentation is better if you speak Chinese or Hindi :wink: . The west is not really the target market; but being good capitalists the manufacturers and distributors will promote and sell to anybody and everybody.

I have a VisionFive 2 (4x1.5Ghz core, 8Gb ddr, risc-v SOC with a pci NVMe ssd) and itā€™s bloody lovely to be honest. With the NVMe it cost 2x as much as a 8Gb Pi4 without storage, but arrived in 14 days. Itā€™s development board, and the current ā€˜officialā€™ os is a Bullseye snapshot with a patched kernel. But it works well and StarFive are pro-actively upstreaming their code; when Debian Trixie releases this board will be fully supported out of the box.

I just wrote a screed on the practical differences between the VF2 and my Pi4 on the VF2 support forum:

The biggest missing part of the ā€˜universal OS for ARM and risc-v 64-bit boardsā€™ puzzle is boot mechanisms; the current outpouring of boards all use a combo of OpenSBI and U-Boot, but with custom dbti (device tree) files and memory map in the boot sector. Looking ahead this is slowly coalescing around standard maps and device tree mechanisms. The latest firmware for my VF2 board has basic UFEI support, and StarFive are saying that they will support a risc-v UFEI boot from USB, SD, PCI and flash memory in a future firmware.

To be clear, Iā€™m a dev-ops engineer and I bought a development board, which has been a lot of fun for me but is a serious trap for the unwary. It was 99 Eur including shipping, then 25 Eur for a 256G NVMe and 35 Eur for a proper USB3 PD to power it (youā€™ll need storage plus a proper PSU for the Pi4 too!). At least I could print a case for it :slight_smile: (offtopic: Iā€™m constantly amazed at how much money people will spend on butt ugly SBC cases, especially ones with unnecessary oversized fans.)

The future is interesting, ARM is deep into itā€™s up-streaming and becoming accepted as just another architecture that runs Linux and BSD well even on low-end systems, but can be tricky to install.

Risc-v has also hit the ground running and is using the roadmap laid down by ARM to get itself supported everywhere too. A big current blocker is that work on the JIT runtimes is still ongoing, Javascript and (some other tools) will run but are in serious need of architecture specific speedups.

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