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Comment by roeme | Hacker News Reader

All these tiny board SoC's are fine and dandy, but as long as they do not have a better I/O (i.e. more bandwidth, read gigabit ethernet speeds) than the RPi; there's no real advantage IMO.

  * You can already output HD with the RPi
  * You can use (some) codecs at an useful speed (no need for more GHz)
  * It's cheap
  * It uses almost no power
  * You have useful (physical) IO
  * (fill in what you like about the RPi)

So what does that leave with the alternatives? More RAM and more processing power. But of what use is it, when you're still limited how fast you can bring data you want to crunch on in and out of the system only at a slow pace?

And if you need a lot of processing power but have only little data; I'm tempted to say that such a small system is the wrong choice anyway.

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Well if you're running something that requires any sort of crypto, i.e. a bitcoin node, then the RPi's slow CPU is very detrimental.

But the same limitation applies to the contenders, doesn't it? As they're not _that_ much more powerful to make a real difference in this case, or am I wrong?

Actually the difference between the RPi's CPU and the CPUs on beefier ARM boards is quite staggering.

Err, no. The differences are pretty massive. The Samsung and Qualcomm processor cores are not only much, much faster but more sophisticated too. The Pi is very basic.

The Pi was also not the first of these boards, merely one that had great marketing and an appealing price point. My sheevaplug predates it by a couple of years (and is still faster)

The problem is not that RPi doesn't have the horsepower. It does - but you've got to use Videocore IV. Hopefully there'll be some good compiler with at least intrinsic support for it.

What baffles me is there is a simple to understand addition to these RPi competitors that would make them very useful for a number of key applications, that nearly always seems to be missing, namely... a SATA connector. It would be really handy for both NAS boxes and media centres.

There are quite a few with SATA but you have to hunt around. Eg the Cubox does.

You should check Olinuxino Lime[1] if you're looking for SATA connectivity. It costs 30 EUR and is open source hardware.

[1] https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A10/A10-OLinuXino-...

For me, as long as the IOPS as mentioned in my parent post aren't available, I can just as well connect the Disks through USB. shrugs

Cubietruck -- dual core, quite fast, fairly open, supports hardware virtualization. It has a true SATA port (note that many ARM systems have faked SATA via USB which can be slow).

Have a look at i.MX6 based machines. Namely CuBox-i, HummingBoard, SABRE Lite and Wandboard. The Utilite is fine, too.

Rather with a PCIe connector.

The HummingBoard will have Gigabit ethernet; no word on price yet, though: http://hackaday.com/2014/04/22/hummingboard-the-vastly-more-...

> The HummingBoard uses a Freescale i.MX6 quad core...

Current i.MX 6 silicon aren't able squeeze out more than 470 Mbps from their Ethernet MAC.

http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.p...

ERR004512

My desktop (really a netbook) has gigabit ethernet but it's not connected when the slower wireless works just fine. My ADSL is slower still so it just doesn't matter.

So should I swap it for an RPi? For what use is all the processing power I have.

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