RasPi killer?

I have been expecting one or more boards to appear on the market with superior specs to the Raspberry Pi but about the same price.

The most likely will be something based on the Allwinner A10 or it's cut-down version the A13. Which is partly why I am using this architecture myself.

don570 has posted about the first of them, though it is preliminary, not yet for sale:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=77917

The company is Olimex and they are claiming the board will be about 30 Euros:
http://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/cortex-a8-in-tqfp-sure-allwinner-a13/
http://www.olimex.com/dev/a13-olinuxino.html

One significant difference is that it will have VGA only, not HDMI output. My Mele has both (both provided by the A10 chip). The RasPi only has HDMI.

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Comments

ARMv7
Username: Raffy
The common element of all of them is that they should work using ARMv7, and the ARMv7 specs say that it shall be compatible with ARM1176 (in the RasPi, although I don't know exactly how this gets implemented). [BTW, the "F" in the ARM1176JZF-S signifies hardware floating point, that the RasPi engineers seem to be very proud of, when used with the GPU power of the Broadcom chip.] All of the proponents tout "GPL hardware", although it is easy to see that the RasPi has the right organization (and family, literally) already in place. And no, a fun-loving family can't be defeated, and in his heart Puppy knows that (***Resistance is futile*** as we love to say). For us users, if we can leverage on this "ARMv7 compatibility", then we can have the best of all the future scenarios. But if in doubt, I'd say stick with the RasPi. :)

Tags: general