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Comment by coob | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?

I occasionally have a fantasy about Apple putting their latest A-X chip on a SBC form factor for $50 and open sourcing the drivers and letting people go nuts with it.

It's one of those things that will never ever happen because we don't live in a perfect universe.

Maybe for $1000, everything closed source and locked down.

I thought the monkey paw on that deal would be that the SBC comes with only a single USB-C port for all of its I/O, including power.

There are SBCs with recent SoCs but when they cost 200€ you are better off by getting a x86 CPU that has sata, pcie, usb3 and is widely supported by Linux distributions.

They also aren't very attractive from a software freedom standpoint. Why give up decades of work on open source GPU drivers and then be forced to use a vendor provided Linux distribution?

Intel ME and AMD PSP are not a valid threat if you're forced to run proprietary code that may be backdoored on your SBC anyway.

That would probably be the Mac Mini when it switches to ARM, and it would probably start at $500 at the very least.

> Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?

This might be your best bet.

https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/

You're going to have to work harder if you want to use IO pins, but it claims it comes with some.

> One 40-pin Low Speed (LS) expansion connector UART, SPI, I2S, I2C x2, GPIO x12

Closest one I know of is the RockPro64 (https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454), iirc it starts at $59 (2GB RAM) but you need to add the cost for a PSU, eMMC, an eMMC flasher, a heatspreader, etc to that.

Intrinsyc makes boards with Snapdragon SoC's, but the prices are a bit eye popping. Here's their Snapdragon 845 based one, which is north of $1000: https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-ki...

I have a Dragonboard 410c, which was based on what was a good smartphone SoC at the time. A downside was certain features like GPS and Bluetooth only worked on Android, not Linux. I realized one of the biggest advantages of the Raspberry Pi over similar and even more powerful <$100 single board computers is its huge community.

Odroid by HardKernel may fit the bill. Their XU4 is $59 and about 5x as fast as RPi3.

That's quad A15s + quad A7s. The A15s are way faster than the RPi3's A53's, but this is quite a few generations old at this point. They aren't 64-bit and lack all the ARMv8 instruction set changes.

Does that really matter much? Probably not. But if you're looking for the equivalent of a modern phone SoC it's also definitely not that.

Check out the Wand Pi. It uses an NXP i.MX8.

i think such a thing would simply be impractical from a line of business perspective: if I'm going to spend the time/money developing a great soc I'm not going to give it away at cost (which would lead to never recovering dev costs)

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