SBCs

The Orange Pi Zero 2W is the newest and smallest member of the Orange Pi Zero lineup. All of these boards are small-format SBCs (and the board we’re taking a look at today directly follows the format of its namesake, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W), making them perfect for projects where space is at a premium.

In retrospect, when we first had the original Orange Pi 5, our first RK3588S SBC, make it onto our review desk, we couldn’t even imagine that it’d be the beginning of an extensive series of reviews centered around this very SoC (and its more capable sibling, the RK3588).

Starting at $579, the LattePanda Sigma is really expensive. Not just for an SBC — at almost $600 (and more than that in some configurations), it’s a genuinely pricey bit of kit. But, with a 13th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU and up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, it’s much closer in specs to a fully-fledged desktop computer than its form-factor would initially suggest.

The Orange Pi team has introduced us to a new Rockchip SoC, the RK3566, by sending over an Orange Pi 3B board. The chip in question is a 64-bit ARM processor with four Cortex-A55 cores running at 1.8 GHz, and a two execution engine variant of the Mali-G52 MP1 GPU.

Today, we’re taking a look at quite a special board. When it comes to SBCs, or any computing hardware, in general, we’re used to seeing ARM and x86-based processors: the former mainly in mobile devices and the latter in desktop and server gear. Differing in many important aspects, these two architectures both have one thing in common: both are completely closed-source.

It’s finally happening. The successor to the popular, but aging Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is finally here – the aptly-named Raspberry Pi 5 will be available to purchase by the end of October. Spending an unusually long time at the helm – four years – and receiving a significant boost in 2020 with the release of the 8 GB model, the retiring legend truly had a good run.

Our first encounter with the FriendlyElec NanoPi R6S began with an unremarkable brown cardboard box without any prominent branding save for a single white sticker with the letters ’R6S’ printed on it. Flipping the top open reveals a foam protective bag surrounding a pleasantly hefty metal brick.

The Mixtile Blade 3 began its journey as a crowdfunded project, presenting to the world in its May 2022 Crowd Supply campaign. Showcasing this new board as a stackable, high-performance Pico-ITX SBC based around Rockchip’s RK3588, early marketing placed a lot of focus on the cluster features utilizing the U.2 edge connector, enabling the scalable ARM-based servers.

Today, we’re taking a look at Banana Pi’s first RK3588-based board. Not even a full month after its release, we managed to get our hands on a review copy of the BPi ARMSoM W3 board (short for ARM System-on-Module), provided to us directly by the company.

Two Banana Pi BPi-P2 models have recently landed on our review desk. The Banana Pi BPi-P2 Zero (based on the Allwinner H3 SoC) and Banana Pi BPi-P2 Maker (based on the Allwinner H2+ SoC) have been sent to us by the manufacturer to take a look at.

Intel’s NUC series of small-format PCs has been around for a while. Ever since 2012, Intel has been these in the now recognisable 4”-by-4” format. The lineup had had humble beginnings, usually sporting lower-end Celeron and Atom processors up until 2015, when the first NUC with a Core i7 hit the market.

NVIDIA’s Jetson series of modules has always brought an exciting amount of processing power to mobile and edge AI applications—this being their intended use case. The Jetson lineup also includes several developer kits: modules on reference carrier boards in a format quite similar to single board computers.

Yet another SBC landed on our review desk. This time around it’s the Orange Pi 5, a recently released RK3588S-based high-end model from Orange Pi – a company whose main products are ARM-based SBCs oriented towards makers.

We love SBCs. They are perfect platforms to start tinkering with. Offering good specs, low/level hardware access and little-to-no long term consequences if things go awfully awry (it’s reasonably simple to format the main boot drive and start all over), it’s easy to see why they became staples of the maker community.

We’ve taken a look at the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. We found it to be a great cheap SBC which is seriously feature-packed. For just $15, you get a quad-core A53 CPU, 512 MB of RAM and 2.4 GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity.

We’ve already had our hands on the excellent Banana Pi M5 SBC in our previous issue, and have explored some of its capabilities. Today, we’re taking a look at its smaller sibling, the Banana Pi M4, and the differences in features and price that might make it more enticing for some.

A few decades ago, computers were big, clunky boxes that were full of discrete electronics, daughter boards and expansion slots. Miniaturisation brought us to a slimmer, sleeker form factor but only further increased production costs from an already high starting point.

The second SBC we have our hands on in this release is an interesting one. Hauling from China’s SINOVOIP is the Banana Pi M5. The Banana Pi lineup has been a trusted mainstay of the SBC industry for many years now, competing with the popular Raspberry Pi computers.

There’s no doubt that the modern consumer SBC market has spun off from the original Mac Mini, giving users a complete computer in a tiny packaging that’s easy to place anywhere on cramped home or office desks.

About a month ago, we’ve gotten our hands on another prominent SBC: the Pine64 RockPro64. Here are our thoughts and opinions on this piece of hardware, as well as several accessories for it. All the hardware reviewed here has been sent to us by Pine64, the company behind this, and several other SBCs, as well as some other devices oriented towards Linux development.

Continuing our series on single-board computers, we’ve come across a new contender on the market. LattePanda is not a new name in this field, with the original LattePanda debuting way back in 2016. Since then, the brand made a name for itself by being the first x86-based commercially available single-board computer.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B came out a few weeks ago, and it brings a major leap forward in general usability and performance compared to its predecessors. The previous major revision of the board, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ paved the way towards a viable desktop replacement, but just wasn’t quite there.