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The second one is a complete machine, not a motherboard...
by joshu 14y ago
The second one is a complete machine, not a motherboard...
- ajross 14y agoTrue enough. Embedded devices are never 1:1 in feature sets. So you'd have to add a $10 DIMM and a $20 power supply. And then you'd have the choice between a $74 stick based on an unknown SoC ("Allwinner A10" apparently is a single 1GHz A8) with minimal software support and a $110 dual core 1.6GHz Atom with 8x the RAM. And it runs Ubuntu/Fedora/SuSE/Mint (hell, even windows if you're into that) out of the box. I'm not dinging the ARM stuff really, just pointing out that for a lot of these "cheap computer" applications the best choice is often just a PC.
- joshu 14y agoIndeed. The ARM stuff is hobbyist only, now. I wouldn't want to run production stuff on one. People really think super tiny machines are very very amazing. I wonder if it's a discontinuity in value perception. The Atom probably uses a bunch more power, though. (Personally I am fond of x86 SBCs such as PCEngines Alix, since they run normal OSs, like you said.)