Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. ExtremeTech writes about some really cool stuff, but then goes does it in such a blogspammy way. There's an order of magnitude price difference between the products. The title couldn't be more linkbait.

I've started to skip the ET articles and just read the comments on HN, which are usually pretty interesting, and way more accurate.

View on HN

Once you factor in shipping of the computer itself, and a case for the Rasp Pi ($20 or so), the price difference is actually quite small.

The speculated price point in the article is $100 (which is conjecture), but then you have to add an 1155 CPU and a couple of sticks of DDR3 memory. There's also no slot for an SD card, which is going to make storage more expensive.

Practical builds of this aren't going to be below $200 (and that's assuming the price quoted in the ET article is correct).

You're right about no case, but this unit also requires shipping.

I stand by order of magnitude.

Good point, re: RAM!

I don't know what the plan is, re: non-volatile storage. I guess you could plug in a USB memory stick (v. cheap), or use the PCIe headers.

Makes me wonder how cheap Intel could make a computer, if it really tried, though. I guess profit margins are the only thing stopping it from building something cheaper/better than the Rasp Pi.

you can't use USB memory to replace RAM. USB memory has read speed of ~10MB/s, a 100MHz DDR2 RAM has read speed of 3200MB/s.

This product is of a different class. You can't have fancy I/O like Thunderbolt and USB3 and compete on price with RPi.

Unless I'm terribly misreading, he wasn't suggesting USB memory to replace RAM, but rather to replace a hard drive (or the SD Card on the RPi) ("re: non-volatile storage")

Small? You'll need a mobile i5 processor to go with the board, coupled with a stick of RAM, and some storage. The price difference is at least $250.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com