Survey Says: Raspberry Pi Still Rules, But X86 SBCs Have Made Gains (linuxgizmos.com) 82
DeviceGuru writes: Results from LinuxGizmos.com's annual hacker-friendly single board computer survey are in, and not surprisingly, the Raspberry Pi 3 is the most desired maker SBC by a 4-to-1 margin. In other trends: x86 SBCs and Linux/Arduino hybrids have trended upwards. The site's popular hacker SBC survey polled 1,705 survey respondents and asked for their first, second, and third favorite SBCs from a curated list of 98 community oriented, Linux- and Android-capable boards. Spreadsheets comparing all 98 SBCs' specs and listing their survey vote tallies are available in freely downloadable Google Docs.
Other interesting findings:
Other interesting findings:
- "A Raspberry Pi SBC has won in all four of our annual surveys, but never by such a high margin."
- The second-highest ranked board -- behind the Raspberry Pi 3 -- was the Raspberry Pi Zero W.
- "The Raspberry Pi's success came despite the fact that it offers some of the weakest open source hardware support in terms of open specifications. This, however, matches up with our survey responses about buying criteria, which ranks open source software support and community over open hardware support."
- "Despite the accelerating Raspberry Pi juggernaut, there's still plenty of experimentation going on with new board models, and to a lesser extent, new board projects."
Re: (Score:1)
pot, meat kettle
Re: (Score:2)
hypocrisy is a funny thing, sneaks right up on you doesn't it.
Dupe (Score:3)
Plus who cares about numbers? The pi and x86 boards are meant for totally different applications.
Re: (Score:2)
I also have to wonder if they really are looking at all the options, because the espressobin board is ARMv8 but also has SATA.
Re: (Score:2)
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU GET THE ESPRESSOBIN, GODDAMMIT??? Not from KickStarter any more obviously. Not from Amazon - "We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." GlobalScale doesn't give any hint. Google doesn't yield any leads.
And how much $ is it in whatever fantasy world that it is actually available?
What the christ is wrong with their marketing?
Re: (Score:2)
What are you, stupid? If you actually do that and press "order now", all it does it take you to the stupid dead ends I listed. Jeeze.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes you can use USB on any computer to talk to an Arduino, but the PI also makes it easy to use I2C and/or SPI to talk to them.
An x86 or other boars without GPIO - not so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not so sure they are.
I for one would far rather have an x86 equivalent of the Pi. Being able to interface with lots of GPIO pins but able to use a stock x86 kernel and stock distribution would be so much more convenient and useful to me than using one of the various Pi distros.
On the other hand, few seem to think as I do, as Intel has canceled their hobby SBCs.
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Why Raspberry pi wins (Score:5, Insightful)
It hits the sweet spot for price/performance/Low hassle.
Faster and more expensive? I might as well buy a cheap tablet.
Faster and cheaper? But lacks library support and a user based chock full of not just FAQ but rarely asked obsuratta that is key thing you needed to understand to get your job done
If your time has any value then there is no computer cheaper than a pi worth the price difference. One can say that almost factually.
THe ones that do compete are the ones offering more features like beagle bone.
Re:Why Raspberry pi wins (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that:
Worth your time to develop on because it will be supported 5 years form now. [See Intel or Orange pi for counter examples]
Re: (Score:3)
Also, if you develop a software project on RPi or a add-on SBC, you can share it with a lot of other people that also have RPis. It is popular because it is popular.
Re: Why Raspberry pi wins (Score:2)
There is no certainty the RPi will exist in it's present form five years from now. It is dependent on a mobile CPU that is single sourced from a relatively minor vendor who one of the foundation members happens to work for.
It is a quite praiseworthy project, but it's aims are pedagogical, and trends in education could shift significantly. Five years is a long time, and the R Pi Foundation has a lot of opportunity to grow in that five years.
Re: (Score:2)
No, the REAL reason for RPi's success is the community.
There are faster boards, there are better boards. But they don't have community behind it. This means the software stagnates and is out of date on release. But for RPi, there's plenty of community support such that software stacks keep getting updated. And there's lots of people to ask questions to.
Community is probably the #1 factor in whether something will be around a year from now or not. If people aren't using your boards in any significant degree,
Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards? (Score:4, Informative)
The Pi is great and all but its woefully underpowered. I've tried a number of different boards, the ODROID has way better specs and in the same price class.
But every other x86 and even ARM boards I've tried are unstable. UDOO, Intel Compute Stick, UP Board all worthless as they crash from overheating within 48h of operation. And on ARM boards I can find little under $200 that has anything better than a Mali 450 GPU which is already nearing a half a decade old.
Re: (Score:2)
They aren't underpowered but they also aren't intended to be used as workstations. If you want the performance of a workstation then you should buy a workstation.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny how you think a Raspberry Pi is underpowered for any use and yet there's projects all over the planet that run fine on a cheap 8-bit ATmega328P running at 16MHz, i.e. Arduino UNO. There's even projects for the ATtiny85 running at 1MHz via its internal clock.
Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM board (Score:3, Interesting)
Can you set it and forget it to do something important 24/7/365 without any real supervision? Having it to deal with a serious amount of data? Fuck no.
We have a couple rpis doing machine vision analysis in our QA shop, and they've been chugging at probably 50+% CPU load along for more than a year. When a vender for more serious equipment was taking a week to get back on an issue with broken equipment, we had a temp solution that became permanent.
The only reliability issue we've had is when using them to control some kilns, where even $1k+ controllers have died. It is pretty trivial and minimum cost to once a month or two to spend five minutes throwing in
Re: (Score:2)
Any chance we could get our hands on a couple of your kiln-killed units? Be interesting to see what failed.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you set it and forget it to do something important 24/7/365 without any real supervision?
Why is approximately 7 years the benchmark you're setting?
Re: (Score:2)
It's a small computer, not a coffee machine.
Re: (Score:2)
So, sure, you could save a few bucks by reusing a wallwart ... for the original Pi. Finding a "good" 2.5A or what the recommendation is for the Pi 3, micro USB "psu" however, isn't that easy. It's quite possible that even if you have a whole bunch none of them cuts the mustard at a closer inspection.
I think it's an idea whose time is coming: phones are getting chunkier and with it, PSUs are getting bigger. My old old phone charger won't run the Pi. My latest one will. Either way though I just forked out for
Re: (Score:2)
As I said in another post, there are threads over at the RPI forums full of people facing weird problems caused by dodgy mico usb adapters, and on ongoing quests for which ones are "good enough" to do the job.
Well, people will use the cheapeat crap they can find off ebay and not read the specs. In one case, I got the official adapter. In another, I used one I had lying around which could supply the requisite current.
All of which could have been avoided if they had used a barrel connector and a 12V or at le
Re: Any STABLE Android-x86 or high-perf ARM boards (Score:2)
If they come with an HDMI output you would expect it to be able to compose a display at 1080p beyond a single stream movie.
Re: (Score:3)
No, I look at the specs and expect them to do what is listed because I understand it's an SBC, not a workstation.
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't we should be happy with poor thermal design and crashes. If you give a board certain features, then using them for any period of time should not cause them to overheat and crash.
You can't expect certain things from an SBC but not crash every 48h because there is some load is one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
If they come with an HDMI output you would expect it to be able to compose a display at 1080p beyond a single stream movie.
compose a display?
Honestly I've never checked. I only ever use the HDMI port for debugging. Generally they run headless for me and on the rare occasion I've built a gadget with a screen, then I use the official screen. The graphics (which I freely admit were pointless animations that I did for fun though amazingly actually increased the usability of the device) ran smoothly.
So, works f
Re: (Score:2)
I've had good luck with Pine A64+. It has the crappy old GPU you're complaining about, but it's pretty cheap.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:2)
Intel just killed it's IoT platform line, [digitaltrends.com] so there are going to be fewer x86 options for SBCs.
"In terms of open specifications" (Score:3)
On the whole, people don't want open specifications more than they want something that is well-supported. Open specifications are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between something that's a huge hassle to get working (and keep working) smoothly that's open and something that just plain works...well, I offer this survey's results as Exhibit A.
Re: (Score:2)
Why bring up x86? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thats the difference. A lot of code that exists or a person has to learn to write code or to hope a nice person has the time to make code for a very different non x86 system.
It would have been better to use x86 for hobby use and then to desktop and smaller networks.
Lots of good code exists for the x86, skills can scale to different existing systems. Now people have to learn a new set of ski
Re: (Score:2)
The Google search you need is "high level language". /they are a fairly recent invention, but they allow you to write your code in a non machine specific notation and it is covered to machine code by a tool called a compiler - or an interpreter.
Desperately needs a die shrink (Score:2)
The 40nm process the Pi is fabbed on is now nine years old.
The Pi 3 is very thermally limited. Overheating and power supply related problems are very common. It's also only a ~30% improvement over the Pi2 while the Pi 2 was more like a 700% improvement over the original Pi. All of this would be very different if the Pi 3 had been fabbed at 28nm.
Yes, it doesn't make sense to try to push the Pi onto a leading edge process like 10nm, where per-transistor costs are going up rather than down and FinFET design ge
Re: (Score:2)
Yet still with the unfixed USB b/w bug. (Score:1)
The deal-killer with the r.pi is the still-unfixed USB bandwidth bug that has plagued the platform since the first generation.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Raspberry Pi 3 stability (Score:2)
Three of the top four (Score:2)
And four of the top ten. Well done RPF! (Raspberry Pi Foundation.)
I believe that one of the most important factors is the same thing that makes the Arduino so popular amongst embedded controllers: Community. Both have vibrant active communities where newcomers can share ideas and get help. Both provide support for those getting started.
With the Pi Zero and Zero W we have a ridiculously inexpensive platform that runs a full blown OS. True, it is not up to snuff for replacing your desktop and costs do add up