7 ms·
Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?
by coob 8y ago
Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?
- mlevental 8y agoi think such a thing would simply be impractical from a line of business perspective: if I'm going to spend the time/money developing a great soc I'm not going to give it away at cost (which would lead to never recovering dev costs)
- nordsieck 8y ago> Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC? This might be your best bet. https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ You're going to have to work harder if you want to use IO pins, but it claims it comes with some. > One 40-pin Low Speed (LS) expansion connector UART, SPI, I2S, I2C x2, GPIO x12
- jandrese 8y agoI occasionally have a fantasy about Apple putting their latest A-X chip on a SBC form factor for $50 and open sourcing the drivers and letting people go nuts with it. It's one of those things that will never ever happen because we don't live in a perfect universe.
- downrightmike 8y agoMaybe for $1000, everything closed source and locked down.
- jandrese 8y agoI thought the monkey paw on that deal would be that the SBC comes with only a single USB-C port for all of its I/O, including power.
- imtringued 8y agoThere are SBCs with recent SoCs but when they cost 200€ you are better off by getting a x86 CPU that has sata, pcie, usb3 and is widely supported by Linux distributions. They also aren't very attractive from a software freedom standpoint. Why give up decades of work on open source GPU drivers and then be forced to use a vendor provided Linux distribution? Intel ME and AMD PSP are not a valid threat if you're forced to run proprietary code that may be backdoored on your SBC anyway.
- saagarjha 8y agoThat would probably be the Mac Mini when it switches to ARM, and it would probably start at $500 at the very least.
- lorenzhs 8y agoClosest one I know of is the RockPro64 (https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454 https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454), iirc it starts at $59 (2GB RAM) but you need to add the cost for a PSU, eMMC, an eMMC flasher, a heatspreader, etc to that.
- ac29 8y agoIntrinsyc makes boards with Snapdragon SoC's, but the prices are a bit eye popping. Here's their Snapdragon 845 based one, which is north of $1000: https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-kits/open-q-845-development-kit/ https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-ki...
- ridiculous_fish 8y agoOdroid by HardKernel may fit the bill. Their XU4 is $59 and about 5x as fast as RPi3.
- kllrnohj 8y agoThat's quad A15s + quad A7s. The A15s are way faster than the RPi3's A53's, but this is quite a few generations old at this point. They aren't 64-bit and lack all the ARMv8 instruction set changes. Does that really matter much? Probably not. But if you're looking for the equivalent of a modern phone SoC it's also definitely not that.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoI have a Dragonboard 410c, which was based on what was a good smartphone SoC at the time. A downside was certain features like GPS and Bluetooth only worked on Android, not Linux. I realized one of the biggest advantages of the Raspberry Pi over similar and even more powerful <$100 single board computers is its huge community.
- Unklejoe 8y agoCheck out the Wand Pi. It uses an NXP i.MX8.