Banana Pi - Largely Raspberry Pi compatible, but with more grunt

[EightBySix]

Wonder if it will tip the balance in favour of it being appropriate for small builds...

http://www.bananapi.org/

[DeLuSioNal29]

Hmm. It might. Read more here:  http://hardware-libre.fr/2014/06/raspberry-vs-banana-hardware-duel/

[sharpfork]

They have open sourced the hardware and sent it directly to china.  The price is going to drop a bit if there is much demand.  I think I'm going to pick one up to play with.

[Haze]

"This is a surprise : in a single-threaded test, the Allwinner A20 chip is slower than the Broadcom BCM2835, even with theorically 1GHz, compared to the Raspberry’s 700MHz.."

Unless that measurement is erroneous then it's actually worse than the Pi for emulation... somehow (that takes some doing)

[sharpfork]

"This is a surprise : in a single-threaded test, the Allwinner A20 chip is slower than the Broadcom BCM2835, even with theorically 1GHz, compared to the Raspberry’s 700MHz.."

I guess I'll wait for someone else to test it 

This article http://liliputing.com/2014/04/banana-pi-a-57-rasperry-pi-clone-with-a-faster-cpu-more-memory.html
Has direct links to shop for it on aliexpress with prices  under $50.
It also links to a Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 based humming board that is pretty cool too: http://www.solid-run.com/wiki/index.php?title=HummingBoard_Hardware

At some point one of these cheap little boards is going to have enough power to run a decent level of emulation.  When they get there, someone will make a SD card image that has a linux or android OS and front end with an easy way to load emus and roms and output to HDMI or VGA (with converter).

[nitrogen_widget]

"This is a surprise : in a single-threaded test, the Allwinner A20 chip is slower than the Broadcom BCM2835, even with theorically 1GHz, compared to the Raspberry’s 700MHz.."

Unless that measurement is erroneous then it's actually worse than the Pi for emulation... somehow (that takes some doing)

From what I've read on the retro-pie & pi play forums (the emulation distro's for raspberry pi) the current batch of emulators are optimized for raspberry pi hardware not banana pi hardware and that is why you don't see too much of a speed increase.

I also read the default OS images are interchangeable between the devices so no optimization is going on at all.

Someone has to patch the code to take advantage of the bannana pi's hardware.
RaspberryPI has such a large community due to the price and reason it was created, bannana pi probably won't catch on unless the price drops.

This guy used an OUYA to power his arcade cabinet.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2734586

so that's a cheapish higher powered alternative.
not as open but useable.

Also, for $40-$50 shipped you can get a dual-core atom or amd mini-itx board off ebay that will out perform both of them and the board would still fit in a bar top no problem.
Not as power efficient but still useable.

[EightBySix]

Its the cooling requirements that can make small build tricky....

[ark_ader]

"This is a surprise : in a single-threaded test, the Allwinner A20 chip is slower than the Broadcom BCM2835, even with theorically 1GHz, compared to the Raspberry’s 700MHz.."

Unless that measurement is erroneous then it's actually worse than the Pi for emulation... somehow (that takes some doing)

Correcto mondo.

[Grasshopper]

Hmm. Interesting board but that site looks a bit vapourware-ish to me. If you're in the market for an A20 based development board then there are several other probably better choices out there such as the boards made by Cubietech and Olimex. Based on reviews I've read, I'd say the Olimex boards are the best bet at the moment. I like the fact that they're open hardware.

Also, those benchmarks are way off. The general consensus is that the A20 chipset is at least twice as fast as the one in the Raspberry Pi for single threaded tasks. Obviously, if an application can utilise both cores simultaneously then it will be faster still. That should be fast enough to comfortably run even the most recent bloated versions of MAME, as long as you're not interested in running the more modern games.

But the problem with these Chinese SOCs is not really the hardware but the software. Typically, they'll only be supplied with a shoddy half-assed buggy version of Android, which will never be upgradeable. And most (all?) of the manufacturers offer no official Linux support at all. Indeed, they're often downright obstructive towards the open-source community. They also tend to ride roughshod over the GPL, either releasing their source code very late, or not at all. As a consequence, open-source developers are forced to rely on a mixture of closed-source binary blob drivers, and source code 'leaked' from dubious sources.

It's a real shame because the hardware is mostly incredible for the money. With the right software, there's no reason why the faster SOCs couldn't be used as a substitute for a desktop PC, at a fraction of the cost, and with much lower power consumption. But these devices will continue to punch below their weight until the SOC manufacturers change their attitude, and get their act together.

[nitrogen_widget]

The thing with the Banana pi is that I see them at $75.
For another $30 you can buy a Nvidia K1 test board that will be even faster than that.