A Raspberry Pi Zero is $5, runs ARM, has tonnes of community support, and is available to ship outside of china. If you look at taobao/aliexpress/ebay, there are also hundreds of RPI clones and ARM development boards and even FPGA boards < $10. What makes this interesting?
I’m tempted to buy one just to play around with an unconventional ISA. I don’t think this is meant to be a Pi alternative.
You might want to look at ESP8266 instead.
I'd vote ESP32 in addition to the ESP8266.
I’ve got about a dozen ESP8266 dev boards, but they are not in the same league as this. ESP8266 is just a WiFi-enabled MCU. Getting any kind of video output or even keyboard input from it is a hack, and forget about it running Linux.
I wonder what the power requirements are? If they're substantially less than the Pi Zero, perhaps it has a use case?
The SoC on this board appears to be intended for use as a DVB TV receiver with all of the relevant video decoders onboard, and there are a bunch of receivers based on this chip on Alibaba. I'm not sure why anyone would want this thing without an antenna connection.
None of these cheap computers are worth the support headaches. Just get a Raspberry Pi.
The Chip computer was way better, at just 9$.
The company (nextthing co.) dissolved, however. Haven't understood why yet.
Who knows if their "way better" prices ever were sustainable, especially with their zoo of side-projects. Some people waited years for orders and never got them in the end.