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Let's say you've got something that needs to be computerised at a slightly higher level than an Arduino, with the computing part costing less than about $100-150, and ideally less than $50 (think Beaglebone, Odroid, PCEngine, Pi and clones, Pine, etc). It looks like the only choice is between ARM at the low end and x86 at the high end. Everything else has fallen by the wayside: The last MIPS-based product was the Ci20/Ci40 from 2015 and neither the hardware nor software have been updated since, PowerPC is out there but only as high-priced SBCs and good luck finding a distro that supports it, Sparc is left with Fujitsu working on it for mainframes, and RISC-V is still a glint in everyone's eye - the few SBCs based on it cost more than a low-end server, and despite various enthusiastic press releases I can't see any timeline where I can get a $50 RISC-V device that performs the same as a $50 ARM-based one. And then there's the software support, once you leave the x86 world you've got, outside of various specialised RTOSes, Linux. A very few systems have one or two of the BSDs, often in a hit-and-miss manner, but that's it.
Has Linux + ARM/x86 killed everything else?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:24PM
Pi Zero and Pi Zero W are unavailable from official distribution at the moment (as per normal), there's some abnormally cheap back stock for about $15-20 (before shipping) from Adafruit or similar.
Shipping to Australia would easily cost about double the board cost on a single unit. So in-country resellers get as many as they can then flog them for slightly under the shipped cost.
Shipped cost on a Zero has fluctuated between $40 and $100 for the entire life of the device in all its iterations. It was far worse in the beginning when there were supply issues, but it has literally never been possible to get a $10/€5 Zero. They're speciality devices that are always out of stock and in high demand. A regular Pi 3B+ costs a fair bit less.