Raspberry Pi gets a serious competitor as Particle unveils its 5G-capable SBC | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi gets a serious competitor as Particle unveils its 5G-capable SBC

xda-developers.com

30 pointssharpshadow15 comments

What makes Raspberry Pis competitive is not necessarily hardware; it is software. I guarantee this is not going to be a serious competitor to Raspberry Pi, at least not for the intended audience of Raspberry Pis.

the pi is not only software, but mindshare. people understand it, there is a community, and many flaws have been worked around. (and it helps kids and other folks get started)

There are lots of other "better than the pi" devices. The beaglebone was always better hardware than the pi (and almost the same price) and the onboard pru was interesting. The jetson nano series is pretty interesting and also does hardware well. The new banana pi does networking well and runs openwrt, which is another well-understood platform.

That said, it is nice to be in an era of these interesting small devices.

Snapdragon SoC is cool. I would buy it if it weren't an "AI chip". I'm not paying extra for that trash.

If it's any consolation, 12 TOPS of Neural engine performance isn't really that much wasted silicon. You're probably dedicating more unused hardware for video decoding/encoding and various other GPU functions most SBCs never use.

You do know it's just a vector processor, i.e. like graphics card internals? :facepalm:

Yea it's literally just their dsp. Not even a particularly new SOC so was probably not originally advertised for AI.

Running modern web browser requires 16 GB RAM. With 8 GB RAM, browser crashes.

If running some AI model, like llama3.1, it requires NVidia/AMD GPU and more than 16 GB RAM. I have run it at i7 laptop, that has 32 GB RAM and NVidia GPU, using Ubuntu 24.04, with commands:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

ollama run llama3.1

Without supported GPU, it will run in slower CPU mode.

Running at M1 Air 16 GB RAM, at Asahi Ubuntu arm64, it runs at CPU mode. I have not yet tried at macOS.

There is some SBC that has 16 GB or more RAM, like OrangePi, but I have not yet tried can they run llama3.1 .

What kind of AI can run with 4 GB RAM ?

> Such is the case with Particle's Tachyon, the first 5G-powered, AI-enabled SBC that the company claims is suitable "for everyone and everything."

> The Tachyon also sports an octa-core Qualcomm Kryo CPU, 4GB RAM, and 64GB of built-in flash storage.

They want to market it for "AI" use cases, but only include 4GB of RAM?

The Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/particle-iot/tachyon-po...

Anyone want my pile of CHiP SBCs?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-wor...

I’ve still got mines… thanks but no thanks. If you want to give away a pocket chip though (the casing with keyboard) that would be interesting

" Finally, it has over 20 different camera sensors,"

Wow.

4gb of memory and no wired Ethernet? I think I'll pass.

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