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Tom's Hardware is highlighting a Kickstarter project for the Pine A64, a 64-bit computer board competing on specs with the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B:
Essentially, the Pine A64 can be viewed as a more powerful next-generation Raspberry Pi device. The Pine A64 contains a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz. Compared to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that was released earlier this year and uses four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 900 MHz, not only does the Pine A64 have a higher clock speed, but it also has a more advanced architecture, which consumes less power and achieves greater performance.
For graphics processing, the Pine A64 uses the dated Mali-400 MP2 GPU. Although we cannot compare the performance of the GPU inside of the Pine A64 to the VideoCore IV inside of the Raspberry Pi without testing both devices, Pine64 stated that the Pine A64 will be capable of 4K video playback, whereas the Raspberry Pi is limited to a resolution of 1920x1200. This gives the Pine64 an edge and should help to attract users planning to use it as a small HTPC system.
The two main options, Pine A64 and Pine A64+, cost $15 and $19 respectively. The A64+ comes with double the RAM (1 GB DDR3 vs 512 MB DDR3) and three additional ports for camera, touch panel, and LCD accessories. Other price tiers come with 2 GB of RAM, and 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday December 11 2015, @07:26AM
but my perception was that the Raspberry was mainly to get kids to build stuff themselves, as in connect and control their own hardware and gadgets
Not really. They originally made it difficult to access the header by unpopulating it because it is 1.8V logic and just about anything you connect to it without taking precautions is going to kill it. They vastly underestimated the determination of the hacking community of course and now there is a vast ecology around the Pi, second only to the broken design Arduino standardized around AVR chips.
I really and truly do not understand the initial goal for the Pi and I doubt the founder is clear on it. His statements contradict themselves and none of them wouldn't have been better served by a bootable USB stick and USB I/O dongle.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Friday December 11 2015, @09:17PM
Pretty sure the Pi is 3.3V logic, but you can get it to run at 5V without a problem. I have a Pi B+ that I was using as a media center, and I used a cheap powered USB hub modified to backfeed power to the Pi through the data connector. The hub actually puts out around 7.5V, and not only does the Pi tolerate that just fine, it gets the GPIO pins up to 5V, which means I could wire them directly to some Radioshack 5V relays. I then drilled some holes in my stereo and projector and just wired those relays across whatever buttons I needed to control. Worked flawlessly for over a year, though I've since upgraded to a full PC which I'm using as a Steambox. But I now own five Pis that I'm using in various places. They're excellent little devices. And in my experience, I absolutely do just connect it to anything without taking any precautions (I know software, not hardware :) ) and I've yet to kill a single one.
By comparison, I've used some microcontrollers in the past (mostly MSP430s), and it usually takes more than a week just to get the development environment running (assuming I don't just give up first.) I've never actually gotten anything useful running on one of 'em, I get halfway there and get so frustrated I give up. With the Pi you just wire crap together, write up a quick shell script, and it's done. If hardware isn't your thing, the Pi is beautiful.
You could buy a dozen Pis for the price of the computer you would need to connect those USB devices too.
Hell, the Pi is probably about the same cost as those two USB dongles alone.