For A Few Dollars More Than The Raspberry Pi 3 You Can Have A Much Faster Board

[chithanh]

In 5 years i still can run my RPI, but the other boards might not run modern distros.

Case in point: The ODROID-C1 kernel is still at 3.10, not sure if that is going to change anytime soon.

[kenjitamura]

i know amlogic can't provide mali sources, but do they do upstream kernel development for other hardware pices ?

Have a tablet with an amlogic processor. It has terrible custom ROM support.

If your ARM device doesn't have a broadcom, qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, or Samsung based processor you're probably SOL. Mediatek, Rockchip, Amlogic etc aren't good with providing sources.

[darkblu]

Have a tablet with an amlogic processor. It has terrible custom ROM support.

If your ARM device doesn't have a broadcom, qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, or Samsung based processor you're probably SOL. Mediatek, Rockchip, Amlogic etc aren't good with providing sources.

None of the companies you listed is good with providing sources. There's essentially one vendor which actually does that, and it's Freescale (currently NXP).

[jacob]

Yeah but... The RPI3 has full Linux support, has an Ubuntu kernel image maintained and kept up to date by Ubuntu etc. All these other boards look nice on paper until you realise that they aren't really suitable for running anything other than Android.

[schmidtbag]

I've always been a big fan of Hardkernel's products, but GPU drivers have been a consistent issue. I see the odroid series as being good for very specialized purposes. They pack lot of punch in very tiny packages. I'm currently using an odroid-U2 for an at-home server. I really wish it had gigabit ethernet and at least 1 SATA port would've been appreciated, but otherwise it handles everything without breaking a sweat.

[peppercats]

I don't know where the free worldwide shipping comes from. The official site adds $16 when buying the C2.

As far as price advantage over the Pi 3 goes, after taxes, tariffs, S&H etc. the C2 would come to €70 to ship to the Netherlands, whereas I can get a Pi 3 for ~€40. This may change as local resellers stock the C2, but I'm not holding my breath.

$6 USD shipping on Ameridroid, afaik this applies to Canada aswell.
I'm going to order one for my home server, maybe put a few together for a cross-compilation cluster if the single one works out well.

[mikergray]

The Pi is more about people and ideals than hardware. It is good that there better, similar boards out there, but I don't think the Pi needs to worry about the competition. After the "it's a $35 computer!" thing wore off, a great community began to form.People are drawn to it, and are doing amazing stuff. The documentation and magazine are so good, I can sit a kid down with it, and pretty soon they are making sounds and building minecraft scripts. I don't think that, for example, the Beaglebone will ever be "loved" in the same way. In the end, the advantage is an emotional and branding issue rather than a spec and price war.

[winie]

Is there any Qualcomm based boards available today for under $100?

[Nille]

Is there any Qualcomm based boards available today for under $100?

Sure, the Dragonboard 410c coast around 75$. There are Also some SoCs with the 810 but much more expensive.

[Adarion]

All this ARM stuff does barely make any sense - as long as periphery options are still limited and especially until the GPU problem is solved. The ARM arch itself maybe a nice RISC design, and suitable for a lot of low power things, but the GPU driver situation is still horrible and a lot of boards offer rather limited connections.