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Comment by jalopy | Hacker News Reader

Complete noob (to hardware/ARM stuff) question: Why would I buy this over the much cheaper Raspberry Pi 2? Does it just have a (much?) faster processor?

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It's a good question. It has more CPU power, and likely more GPU power as well, but not an order of magnitude more. They main selling point (from my point of view) is for people who want to get their hands on a dev board that has 64-bit ARM.

This board also has software support from Linaro, which is very good, but the Raspberry Pi community should offset this advantage.

Still they (Linaro) are calling it "Consumer Edition" - so IMHO no market fit.

In addition to sspiff's good info, take a look at the I/O options:

https://www.96boards.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HiKey_Us...

This will likely limit how useful the board can be, because the I/O choices will prevent a good ecosystem from growing up around it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this true for all popular ARM boards today? Decent CPU, low power consumption, and terrible I/O performance?

I remember the PandaBoard as exceptionally bad, most are better but still pretty slow.

Take a look at the BeagleBone Black. It has pretty decent I/O. The big gaping missing piece, of course, is better video output, but that's sort of in the same bucket as open source GPUs: missing in action.

I actually have one on my desk, waiting to be used. Hoping to play around with OpenBSD on it.

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