this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
33 points (100.0% liked)
Single Board Computers
1219 readers
7 users here now
A community for the discussion of all single board computers. Raspberry Pi is ok, but there are so many other boards now that get looked over that deserve attention.
Post news, questions, your setups, guides, anything that has to do with SBCs. Server wide rules apply
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The irony of the RP2040 is that the RPi guys opened the door for Intel when it comes to the SBC market.
Up until now it was very hard for Intel to get into the SBC market, not because of power or price, like most people think, but because Intel CPUs didn’t have proper GPIO, I2C, SPI baked in and the respective software support from all those Python libraries people like. Now with this low cost chip they can get that without changing their architecture and also have instant software support from all libraries and code previously made for the Raspberry Pi.
Mayhaps Intel didn’t see the
need(profitability) in such an undertaking. When you have a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, with community and documentation settled nicely on the market, one does not simply undertake such odds.I’m certain that the market isn’t eagerly waiting, with bated breath, to purchase x86 SBCs just because GPIO is included in the package.
ARM (The Raspberry Pi foundation specifically) currently has the momentum in that market. When you want compute, you x86. When you want to signal the thing that computes, low powered ARM SBCs are currently the jobby.
Some industries are. Those ARM CPUs are unable to pass most harsh compliance tests and GPIOs on the industry are expensive and not as practical as they could be with a SBC. Right now the industry depends on very closed solutions that are a hard and expensive to deal with, or in big x86 machines with FTDI bridges for I/O.
Even if the SBCs can only serve a very small fraction of professional users during COVID we saw what happened to the stocks and that the Pi guys had to prioritize those markets.
Hobbyist users of SBCs are just the testing ground and initially the way to make it popular, the industry has the real numbers and scale but you can't just enter that market as easy.
You may also want to read this: https://lemmy.world/comment/11259594