Ask HN: What Is Going on with SBCs?
It is striking to me that, while there are a plethora of different smartphone designs using ARM cores released in the last couple of years, the same cannot be said at all for SBCs.
The tendency there is for most designs to use SoCs which are based on Cortex A72 or Cortex A73 cores (or similar). These are now 5+ years old. What gives?
If you want an SBC with a recent ARM core there's basically nothing out there. You can get the Snapdragon 888 developer kit for $1400, but that's double what a base spec Snapdragon 888 based phone would cost! Or next year you might be able to get the Jetson AGX Orin with Cortex-A78 cores, but that one also packs a lot of GPU and NPU power and will surely be north of $1000 as well.
Why are there no SBCs using Cortex-A77 or newer and coming in below $400? The chips are out there and surely it is much easier to design an SBC than a smartphone. The closest thing I know of to what I am envisioning is the $400 Jetson Xavier NX, but it is on the very high end of the $200-400 price range I'm thinking of and is using an odd in-house-designed ARMv8.2A chip that is already a few years old.
I'm in the position where I think things like RasPi are great, but personally would like to play with something similar that has compute power close to a mid-range smartphone released the same year. I would be happy to pay around $300 and am sure there are plenty of people in a similar position. So there is pent up demand, what is keeping this market hole empty?
I suppose, since Nvidia is getting closest to scratching this itch, my dream would be for them to finally properly open-source some mainline kernel graphics drivers (maybe contribute to Nouveau directly!) and to release a new Jetson board for about $250-350 based on Cortex-A78 next year. I suspect those would shock them with the sales figures.