Seeed sent me an ad/newsletter describing a potentially interesting SBC.
<https://www.seeedstudio.com/Rock-Pi-X-Model-B-4GB-p-4277.html>
(Seeed is a Chinese company that's a bit like Adafruit. If you like
SBCs and playing with circuit's, Seeed's newsletter is worth
subscribing to. It's not just advertising.)
Summary: quite a bit of machine for the price. But fairly niche. You
will likely want to add a case , a power supply, and a battery for the
clock. Software support is really easy since it is X86-64.
Details:
Rock Pi X B4E32 pre-order: US$75 + shipping
- Atom X5-Z8350 (old Atom; 64-bit)
- 4GiB RAM (64-bit dual channel)
- 32G eMMC. Should be faster than SD. Large enough for a full Linux
distro.
- microSD socket
- HDMI 2.0 up to 4k@30Hz (I would have expected HDMI 1.x; this doesn't
seem to match Intel's spec for the chip)
- WiFi 802.11ac
- BlueTooth 4.2
- gigabit ethernet
- one USB 3.0 (OTG: can be host or device, if I understand correctly)
- three USB 2.0
- a 40-pin expansion header for hanging your circuits off
My Impression:
- quite a lot for the same price as a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GiB of RAM
- processor is old: introduced in early 2016 but little different from
z8500 introduced in early 2015. "Cherry Trail"
- I have a tiny PC (a Kangaroo) with the similar z8500 processor. It
doesn't quite cut it for streaming video under Windows 10 at FullHD.
By that I mean: it works but sometimes struggles. Intel's site
suggests that the Z8500 should be faster but perhaps cooling is an issue
on my Kangaroo or the 2 GiB RAM is pinching
<https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=85474,93361>
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