Raspberry PI alternative: Cubieboard 1Ghz 1GB RAM

Raspberry PI alternative: Cubieboard 1Ghz 1GB RAM(indiegogo.com)

132 points by nyrb 13 years ago | 79 comments

EwanToo 13 years ago |

One interesting thing about the Cubieboard is the SATA port, otherwise it's very similar to a lot of other ARM boards out there (e.g. Beagleboard, Pandaboard, etc). This makes it much easier to stick a low power SSD on the device, rather than rely on a hugely slow SD card.

What I'm looking forward to next are Cortex A15 boards, the first CPUs are shipping (In the new Chromebook), so hopefully we'll start seeing them on small hackable boards soon.

hermanhermitage 13 years ago | |

Another board is say: https://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry%20A10%20Developer...

With WiFi. Other alternatives are at the same site.

I have a few Mali devices next up on the chopping block after I finish reversing the VideoCore IV.

wladimir 13 years ago | | |

I have a few Mali devices next up on the chopping block after I finish reversing the VideoCore IV

Hehe. Reversing a GPU is a lot of work. From my experience it usually involves zillions of commands, state bits that subtly change handling, and different instruction sets for different kinds of shaders and other sub-processors... (even figuring texture formats can be lots of work) I can't even imagine starting such a project again, though it was fun, wish I'd still have the time...

I wish you the best luck of course!

3amOpsGuy 13 years ago | | |

>> after I finish reversing the VideoCore IV

I've only just stumbled across details of your efforts in the past couple of days.

I wish you every success, if you were to be successful, you would open the door to impressively cheap possibilities.

anthonyb 13 years ago | | |

Hey napierzaza, you've been hell banned.

throwaway1979 13 years ago | |

I didn't realize there was a significant speed difference between SD and SSD technology! After some googling, I found a good video that gives the relevant figures:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fxAQv_KDV0

In short, the class 10 SD card I got for my Raspberry Pi is rated for 10MB/s. An SSD drive can do 1GB/S (I imagine the numbers vary for reads vs writes). Also, SD cards seem to be able to take a lot fewer writes per block before they wear out.

wtallis 13 years ago | | |

1GB/s is a bit much for an SSD, since SATA currently only goes up to 6Gbit/s. PCIe-based SSDs can do it, but for a good SATA SSD, you can expect speeds ranging from 100MB/s to 500MB/s depending on the workload.

Most of the speed advantage SSDs have comes from having a dozen or more flash chips that are internally treated as something like a RAID array. Memory cards and USB sticks usually have only one or two chips.

skeletonjelly 13 years ago | | |

It's quite significant. SD card is fine for the hacker community though. They have different intentions I suppose. SD cards weren't really designed for OS (particularly if you forget to disable a pagefile which will constantly write old memory to "disk" and drastically shorten its life)

justin66 13 years ago | | |

To be fair, a class 10 SD card could be ten times faster than the figure you quoted. Still a big difference, of course, and I imagine there are some write queueing feature differences as well.

morsch 13 years ago | |

SATA port also means it's viable as a small NAS solution. Shame it doesn't come with gigabit Ethernet.

EwanToo 13 years ago | | |

Absolutely, there's all sorts of things that can be done which aren't really workable without some better performance/capacity storage than an SD card (even the nice new 64GB ones)

justincormack 13 years ago | | |

IO performance on these CPUs is fairly poor, so gigabit is unlikely to actually be worthwhile.

plaes 13 years ago | |

In case you want something hackable, check out Olimex.com.

Strshps1MoreTim 13 years ago | | |

In case you're afraid of real hacking ...

FTFY ;-)

IsTom 13 years ago | |

Isn't SSD disk going to cost more than this board?

EwanToo 13 years ago | | |

I think the final price of the Cubieboard is $50, the cheapest SSDs start at around $50 too [1][2], so yeah it's going to add to the price, but it's also going to make it useful for a lot more projects than an SD card.

1 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227...

2- http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT064V4S...

masklinn 13 years ago | | |

Yes, even crappy ones are going to be twice the price of the board itself.

alexchamberlain 13 years ago | | |

Not sure why that matters?

gregsq 13 years ago |

I'm sort of amused that an outfit from Shenzhen China, perhaps the worlds great manufacturing centre for options like this, is asking for US dollars to make 1000 boards, when firms like ARMJISHU can knock ARM boards out in no time and sell them cheap as chips.

There's nothing that special about this that I can see. And giving loaned Chinese money back for free when they have such a massive comparative advantage seems an exercise in market distortion to me.

wisty 13 years ago | |

Small innovative Chinese outfits lack capital. There's big, government affiliated outfits with lots of capital, and outsourcing companies (like Foxconn, which is Taiwan run), but not a lot of capital for bootstrapped companies.

OK, I've heard that's changing, but it's not Silicon Valley.

Nursie 13 years ago |

This is kinda cool actually.

I had been looking at the ODROID-X (hardkernel.com) and various other single-board machines for a while. Whilst this isn't particularly powerful (ODROID is quad core exynos), it does have an advantage I haven't seen anywhere else - SATA.

Does anyone know of any other boards that have a SATA connector?

nitrogen 13 years ago | |

The Marvell-based stuff (e.g. SheevaPlug, DreamPlug, D2Plug, OpenRD, CuBox) mostly has SATA (not SheevaPlug) and gigabit Ethernet (though for some reason the GuruPlug Display only has 100mbit). It just tends to be a bit pricier, and mostly lacks an FPU or GPU.

I look forward to the day when I can get a Cortex A9 or A15 board with a USB host good for the full 480mbit/s, SATA, and gigabit Ethernet.

Nursie 13 years ago | | |

I had a sheevaplug about three years ago. I was hoping things had moved on a bit since then...

I also look forward to that day. We seem to be at the stage right now that we can have some but not all of those things. Soon, soon...

brigade 13 years ago | |

Nitrogen6X and SABRE Light do (http://boundarydevices.com/products/), and should be $200 in a week.

Wandaboard (http://www.wandboard.org/) should have a SATA connector on future configurations, but nothing concrete has been announced.

Nursie 13 years ago | | |

Cool, thankyou, the SABRE looks awesome.

justincormack 13 years ago | |

The cubox does http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox and a few others.

Nursie 13 years ago | | |

Hmm, looks good (and tiny) but seems slow. Certainly has a lot of interfaces! And mainline linux support which is a bonus.

subsystem 13 years ago |

If you consider buying one, just don't assume it will be useful for your application. Do some research first, especially when it comes to the gpu/vpu.

I recommend reading this page and its links: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10_devices and http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page

adestefan 13 years ago |

Realize that the A10 does not have mainline kernel support and part of that reason is because the code is so bad no one wants to even try to get Linus to add it.

astrodust 13 years ago | |

Sounds like opportunity, doesn't it?

Florin_Andrei 13 years ago | |

But it looks like this board uses the A8.

adestefan 13 years ago | | |

The Allwinner A10 is a SoC that uses an ARM Cortex A8 as the CPU, a Mali 400 GPU, Ethernet, SATA, etc. Yes it's confusing. It's like calling a hypothetical Intel Core based SoC the Foobar Core 10.

Apple called their ARM SoC the A4 and then Allwinner probably designated their SoC the A10 to play off that marketing.

sspiff 13 years ago |

Are these by any chance built around the Allwinner A10?

The specs seem to match the dime-in-a-dozen Allwinner A10 Chinese tablets/phones/set-top-boxes/...

I have 3 of these A10 devices, and the performance isn't that bad. It's also not great, but it's sufficient for all the things I tried with it.

ConstantineXVI 13 years ago | |

The A10's right there in the photo...

sspiff 13 years ago | | |

Oops! My bad, thanks for pointing it out. Well that explains the pricepoint then :)

nullc 13 years ago |

This is good news— the rpi is really an embarrassing system. It is shockingly slow compared to other small arm systems clock per clock. A lot of people seem to be trying things on it that would be fine on almost any other arm SBC but fail on rpi…

There are many alternatives which are much faster but none are within a factor of two of the rpi's price, so people keep buying the rpi and walking away disappointed.

stan_rogers 13 years ago | |

Somehow people keep missing the point: Raspberry Pi is meant to be a nearly-disposable kids' learning toy first and foremost. The object of the game, from the beginning, was to get a programming sandbox into as many small hands as possible—in families that couldn't afford a "real" computer, or couldn't/wouldn't allow kids to try potentially damaging things on the family machine.

It's nice that it can, incidentally, play other roles, but those other roles are not it's purpose. It's not an "embarrassing system"; low cost, "universal" peripherals (common televisions as the "monitor", for example), enough portability to get the unit to and from school are its primary concerns. It's an OLPC for the western world, a BBC Micro reborn for the modern age. Y'all rabbits might like these Trix, but they're for kids.

subsystem 13 years ago | | |

"in families that couldn't afford a 'real' computer, or couldn't/wouldn't allow kids to try potentially damaging things on the family machine."

How many of those families are going to buy a rpi, have the knowledge to teach set it up and teach their kids, etc? What's going to get kids programming is a really cheap "normal" computer, just like it always has.

ibrow 13 years ago | |

I completely disagree with you calling it an "embarrassing system". I've had my Pi for a couple of weeks now and been happily tinkering with it. For the price I am utterly amazed with it (in fairness, I'm a bit of an old git and amazed that you can buy a 2TB HD for less than £100 so I may not be the best judge here).

Whilst it may not be the quickest thing out there, it is a start, and I think this is the most important thing about the Pi - it is a statr. It is so cheap it will get people interested in and tinkering with this kind of technology. As a result more people will move into this space, surely the Cubieboard is testament to that. (As well as the Parallella[1] which sadly I don't think will make it's Kickstarter goal)

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-su...

fsiefken 13 years ago |

I am looking for a portable i386 compatible chip&board instead of ARM for running windows programs (wine doesn't work on arm), does anyone have tips?

michaelt 13 years ago | |

There's a few companies that make "pico-ITX" boards that run x86 processors [1]. Mostly low powered chips like Atom, but you can get Core 2 Duo boards if you've got the cash. Prices started around $300 last time I checked.

[1] http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/meng/wmr/projects/uav/...

ojiikun 13 years ago | | |

Does anyone know the exact model of board in that photo? Clicking around their site yielded only images, and sadly little text.

iyulaev 13 years ago | |

There's tons of book-sized systems available, typically with lower-end AMD or Intel chips. Throw in a DDR2/3 SODIMM and a SATA drive and you're good to go. These start around $100.

Example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205...

3amOpsGuy 13 years ago | |

Intel are just about to release the "NUC" Next Unit of Computing. Looks pretty reasonable, but significantly more powerful and thus expensive than a PI.

waven 13 years ago | | |

3amOpsGuy, is there any chance I could email you somehow regarding some ops advice? thanks!

reefab 13 years ago | |

Not sure about windows, but VIA is making something somewhat similar but with a x86 processor: http://apc.io

lee 13 years ago |

Everytime one of these rPI-like boards list "Use it as your NAS" I get disappointed to see that it only offers 10/100 Ethernet.

ChuckMcM 13 years ago |

I've looked at the Cubieboard in the past, its an interesting take.

What strikes me though about this, the Pandaboard, the Chumby, Etc, is that one of the effects of the 'post PC' momentum shift is that people who were building general purpose computers have switched to building these things which are tailored more for browsing and content consumption, and perhaps business content (documents, spreadsheets, reports) generation.

That shift has once again opened up the market for a general purpose hobbiest computer. That is pretty refreshing to see.

agumonkey 13 years ago |

Reflecting about all this, I find the rpi design curious. Most of the SoC is wasted and impose heavy side effects (lan over capricious usb). The graphical applications (video processing, etc) seems to be limited by what is already in the GPU blob.

Honest question, isn't there more simple SoC (armv6 + basic 2d gpu) with sane default and i/o chipsets ?

How much of the closed source binary is due to the GPU ?

With a simpler and open source system, I think it would have provided a better learning substrate than what it is now.

concsiecourses 13 years ago |

Sorry if slightly OT but we organized a "Raspberry Pi's Impact on Hacking" Web Show with forensics expert DJ Palombo. Thought might be of interest to y'all!

Here is the link - http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/

Thanks Henry

jaggs 13 years ago |

A few other alternatives.

http://www.redferret.net/?p=33596

protomyth 13 years ago |

Looks nice, a little worried about how low some of the funding options were.

I do wish someone would build an ITX sized motherboard with SATA, actual ram slots, and gigabyte network ports. Perhaps when the 64-bit version is more available someone will.

alexkus 13 years ago | |

There are plenty of commercial ITX motherboards with those specs, i.e. http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~DH61DLB3 or http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~Z68-ITX-A-E for dual gigabit LAN.

Or am I missing something? (Ah, you probably want ARM rather than x86[_64]).

protomyth 13 years ago | | |

Yes, I want an ARM not an x86.

andybak 13 years ago | | |

The price.

mtgx 13 years ago |

If they are this late in the cycle, they should've gone with the Cortex A7 CPU and Mali 450 GPU. They might even be cheaper than A8 and Mali400, since they are targeted at the mass-market.

fn0rd 13 years ago | |

There is no SoC currently shipping that uses the A7 as the principal core. It's also considerably slower than the A8 in meaningful ways.

SeanDav 13 years ago |

Really needs to be Raspberry PI compatible to take advantage of the growing libraries.

Nursie 13 years ago | |

Really?

It surprises me that Pi compatibility is a criteria for stuff, though I know it's popular. Are we talking pin-compatibility?

AFAICT the Pi is just another linux on a single board device. It's low cost but otherwise fairly unremarkable.

davidw 13 years ago | | |

I'm not even sure what "compatibility" means in this context. You can run executables for one on the other? But you can swap out the OS on the Pi, so... I'm just confused.

alexchamberlain 13 years ago | | |

The marketing has been pretty spectacular.

steevdave 13 years ago | |

Being as the A10 is armv7, it's already possible to run more on it than on the Pi. Let us move forward, not backward.

drivebyacct2 13 years ago |

Don't fall for the Mali/A10. Constant, repeated disappointment.