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Pandaboard ES
If you're willing to get your hands dirty and build your own system, a more powerful alternative to a BeagleBoard is the Pandaboard. These sport dual-core 1GHz or 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 CPUs, 1GB of RAM and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The Pandaboard looks likely to be the successor to the Beagleboard in the RISC OS world, but for now the port is still rather immature and unstable – and it's very unlikely that RISC OS will ever support more than a single CPU core. However, the devices run various Linux distros and Android.
Despite Eben 'Raspberry Pi' Upton's comments, Texas Instruments have admitted to subsidising the price of the Pandaboard to keep it down to $174. The original PandaBoard shipped in 2010; the more powerful ES version, which appeared in late 2011, currently offers the most bang for your buck in small ARM systems.
Price £145
More info Pandaboard or Farnell
Rhombus Tech Allwinner A10
Allwinner's A10 CPU is already shaking up the ARM market dramatically in China. It's a 1.2GHz single-core Cortex-A8 based System-on-a-Chip with a Mali 400 GPU for just $7 in large volumes. Rhombus Tech plans an open-source circuit-board in the physical form-factor of the old PCMCIA card – also known as EOMA-68.
This will be around $100 at first but the company foresees it falling to around $41 as volumes ramp and conceivably as low as $15 in mass volumes. If it meets its maker's claims, this means the board will be a considerably more open device with a price firmly in Raspberry Pi territory – although it will need a host board with a suitable slot to use it. ®
Price Estimated at $100 (£65), later falling to $41 (£27)
More info Rhombus Tech or RH Technology
Trim-Slice
The Trim-Slice is a high-spec (by ARM standards) ultra-small-form-factor desktop from the creators of the Linutop. It has a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core ARM9 CPU, a 1GB of RAM, 4 USB, Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI ports, with options of Wi-Fi, an SSD or an on-board 2.5in SATA hard disk. On sale since early 2011, it's a relatively venerable device and comes with Ubuntu.
Price £342
More info Trim-Slice or Fit PC
COMMENTS
Re: *I think I paid around £27 with vat and shipping.
"When I give up smoking I'm guna buy Raspberries instead!"
IF you live that long !
Development costs
> "It’s not entirely clear to me why the Beagleboard is so expensive ... "
We are told the Pi took 6 years to develop. I'm guessing that during the time the developers had proper jobs and regarded the Pi as a sort of altruistic hobby. It definitely wasn't going to be a source of income during those years.
Consequently all the time and resources used for the development process are a sunk cost and don't have to be recouped from the unit-price of the eventual product. That's what makes the Pi different from commercial offerings. In these cases the years (or more likely: months, for time is money) of developer time has to be paid for - in salaries, equipment and facilities.
We also know that given a large enough production run (say for a mobile phone) these costs don't add a great deal to each board when you're producing a million of them. Even less if all you have to do is add new features/power to an existing design. However for a low-sales, niche market that only produces one-hundreth the number of units, those same costs will contribute 100 times as much to the price of each board made.
Maybe the longest lasting legacy of the Pi won't be introducing children to little motherboards, but will be the creation of a low-cost, open sourced basis for future embedded hardware.
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