Banana Pi is working on the upcoming Banana Pi BPI-M7 SBC powered by Rockchip RK3588 SoC whose low profile design reminds me of boards from Khadas such as
The Banana Pi BPI-M7 single board computer is equipped with up to 32GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash, and features an M.2 2280 socket for one NVMe SSD, three display interfaces (HDMI, USB-C, MIPI DSI), two camera connectors, dual 2.5GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header for expansion.
Is it $60 or less? Everytime one of these alternative boards with an assload of more features pops up, nobody bothers to mention the price. Obviously we could spend more money to get more features, that's what spending more money does. You can't replace something without actually offering an alternative. The pi's biggest selling point was that it was cheaper than a steak dinner. If you dont match or beat that, you aren't actually competing with the pi.
It looks like it's ~$100. But when I've used similar SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. Even if something is faster and better specced than a RasPi, you end up outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.
For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.
SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. (...) outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.
The RPi does have a nice ecosystem but the trick is to pick a board supported by Armbian - that will ensure future kernel updates and low level things working fine. For instance I've been using a NanoPi M4v2 since 2018 with a RK3399 CPU mind that at that time it already had a PCIe x2 interface, 4GB of RAM and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.
Thanks for saying this. It's features at price point.
"It's better than the Pi at only 3x the price."
And what's with the "Avoid the Raspberry PI" sentiment? They are hard to get (?). I've been using the Pi for forever, and have zero 'product' complaints that would make me want to "Avoid the Pi'. If anything, I have plans for more. Again, the price - A Zero2W is $15 MSRP. For $15, You can put that in everything. A Pi4 is $35. Its just a great deal.
Is it $60 or less? Everytime one of these alternative boards with an assload of more features pops up, nobody bothers to mention the price
Have you considered that if you buy a RPi5 today it wont be 60$? Either if that's your price point, depending in your use case, there might be better options. For a NAS for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME. For electronics Radxa Zero 3W / Zero 3E.
There's definitely an argument for not supporting the Pi Foundation with their anti-consumer practices over the last few years. They've sold out to corporate interests and don't give a shit about the educational/hobbyist mission of the original Raspberry Pi.
What if you really hate the fact that The RPi foundation is being hostile against people nowadays with proprietary PCIe connectors, telemetry, requiring a custom flash tool to get SSH and whatnot?
There aren't really any reasons to avoid it. There are certainly reasons to choose an alternative product, namely the complete unavailability of 4B and 5 boards. My biggest issue so far is that the alternatives offer features that I don't want, or have a price that's way too high for a SBC
You may want to have a read at this: https://lemmy.world/comment/5357961. The Pi is becoming the least consumer friendly SBC and a money grab like no other.
This is the only question that really matters. If it's overpriced? meh, it's a cheap alternative to a NUC. But if it's going to be stuck on obsolete software forever, run.
??? Armbian is open-source. Some boards eventually get stuff from Armbian merged back into upstream Debian however you’re still better running Armbian as it comes with optimizations to avoid burning SD cards etc.
If you're mad at NVidia for their closed-source drivers, then remember that ARM seldom makes their Linux drivers available for free, so you have to either have to deal with absolutely no GPU driver while the CPU does the graphics rendering (might not be a big deal on a NAS though), or with open source drivers that are less capable than the Nouveau drivers and even fiddlier to install. The ARM Mali driver issue is so bad I was legit thinking on a solution to run the Android binary blobs (which at least are available by ripping them off from the Android kernel) on regular Linux, a lot of function call redirects would likely take care of that issue.
I've got one of those cheap Rockchip rk322x TV boxes and it took me fucking literal hours to get the Mali driver working and the performance, while noticeably better, was still way worse than if I ran it's stock Android image on it.
Depends on your use-case. If you want to use GPIO and other low level features, yes the Pi is faster to get going, if you're just using ir for a NAS/storage then a board like that will work out of the box.
I dunno, this is going to be expensive, unless you need the GPIO or the smallest size possible I'm not sure what the advantage is over spending $150 or so on one of those mini Intel N100 boxes with dual 2.5GbE, they are x86 so can easily run normal software like Opnsense or similar without worrying about support going away down the road.
Or without 2.5GbE just one of those $60-80 8th gen Dell/Lenovo/HP USFF PCs off ebay.
SBCs just don't seem very competitive currently because they're quite expensive for what you get, and require specialized software releases, plus stuff like hardware transcoding never seems very well supported even though the chip can technically do it.
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
RPi 2B+ for around 10$ nowadays (...) other brand new cheap SBCs such as the Radxa Zero 3W or the Zero 3E or even the Raspberry Pi Zero W. The point is that it doesn't make sense to buy a standard and expensive RPi for things that don't require much CPU. If you don't really need an OS and you code C or MicroPython a 3.5$ ESP32 board as well.
I agree with you, i wanted raspberry pi for my EE practice in uni but it was way too expensive for what it gives and i bought raspberry pi pico 16mb type c for 2$ on sale, for those who want compact pc to tinker with it's better to buy used mini pc because it'll be much better bang for the buck
If you're looking for cheap... what would recommend is instead a Mini-PC like the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 DM or the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro.
For a small NAS and self-host a few services even an old laptop will do it, however there are advantages to picking a mini PC. Those machines are quiet, don’t require much power and some can even fit a 2.5" hard drive so you won’t need external hard drive enclosures. More on that later.
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot.
I’ve got HP ProDesk 600 G5 Mini i5-9500T off ebay for $190. Best damn purchase ever. Running 21 docker containers and transcode 4k with ease while consuming only 35w.
However, sometimes you need GPIOs especially for school projects.
Oh, waw, this is amazing. And exactly why I don't follow this kind of things :). I don't need a new router. But then again, need is such a weird word ...
Unless it can natively run all the existing ready-to-go Pi images and software packages and will also receive community support when I ask for help in a Pi-adjacent forum it's not really going to be a competitor to the Pi. The hardware is pretty much irrelevant.
That "SBC" has a strange price point because it is Intel and costs 250$. For 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways.
Will be interesting how much that'll cost - but generally it looks like we're finally approaching a point where you can buy small systems with enough RAM and network bandwidth for cheap enough that it makes sense to create ceph OSDs with just one or two disks attached each.
The full PCIe slot on those boards is just gold. I have a NanoPi M4v2 that also has PCIe in a M2 slot, used a cheap board to get 6 sata ports out of it.