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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Can somebody explain to me why I would want to get this instead of a Raspberry Pi or a Beagle Bone?

Gigabit Ethernet is interesting to me, I've ended up using rather more expensive devices than raspberry Pis because their network performance is poor (particularly on the Pi as the Ethernet is attached via USB).

If gigabit Ethernet is what you're after, why not an ODROID? I think almost all of their contemporary boards feature gigabit Ethernet controllers.

Double the ram, twice as fast, gigabit ethernet. 4k. Still usb 2.0 though. Much riskier on OS and software support/community though. If starting out I would go Rpi. But this is defo a very well specced little board.

The specs might be great, but without proper (DKMS) drivers and/or source code you can't make the chips do anything. Especially when the vendor decides to drop software support a year from now...

it is still pretty hard to find ARM with USB3 these days for DIY

I had the same issue (no ARM+USB3+gigabit boards) so I had to build a board that had all of that plus mSata and minipcie.

I just use celeron boards (mini-itx) that has everything I need and is still low-power

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I just posted an Ask HN about it. I'm going to produce the boards as part of the Make/100 kickstarter project

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13500403

To try and help prevent one company having a monopoly on this space?

Open source drivers will be the only way to ensure that. All these fruit clones look great on paper, then you realise you're stuck on an ancient closed source kernel if you want to use the hardware for 3D or video or sometimes even at all.

Release drivers, update images. That's all the Pi Foundation has done to ensure they're the best.

Thanks for the answers! Gigabit Ethernet sounds very interesting indeed, so does more RAM! And, yes, competition is always good to stir things up a little.

(Even though my home network is stuck in the dark ages and has a 100MBit switch only. I know GBE switches are dirt cheap, but this one has been with me for ~13 years now and has survived me losing consciousness and dropping my head on it, so I really want to find out how long it'll last.)

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