What boards should element14 carry besides the Raspberry Pi?

I like the Odroid-U2 for it's faster cpu and 2Gb ram, but not for the interesting looking heatsink 'case' and usb ethernet.

The UDOO with it's iMX6 SoC is interesting, but I'd like more gpio via the iMX6 rather than the double indirection via the onboard arduino. I see they have a goal to do this if they get funded to $500K.  I struggle with the hybrid approach - a standalone arduino due is going to be cheaper and I can use it with an existing pc.

I'd like to see the CubieBoard as it's reasonably cheap while offering some different options from R-Pi & BeagleBone.

While I can understand that e14 wouldn't want to carry every available board, we already see Olimex, R-Pi, Beagleboard, Sabre-Lite etc. and it's noticeable that the various Alwinner or exynos boards appearing out of china are under represented in e14's lineup.

what about the Wandboard http://wandboard.org/  ?

or 2Gb Nitrogen 6x http://boundarydevices.com/products/nitrogen6x-board-imx6-arm-cortex-a9-sbc/ ?

pcDduino

Maybe we can come up with a list of which board characteristics we would

like to see.  For example:

a.  SATA is a plus

b.  ARMv6 is a minus

c.  1080p decode is a plus

d.  trouble-free, mainlined USB driver is a plus

e.  1.8v UHS SD card support is a plus

f.  HDMI that can power HDMI to VGA converters is a plus

g.  ethernet over USB is a minus

h.  closed source bootloader is a minus

i.   lack of hot-plug USB thumb drive support is a minus

j.   plastic SD-card holder is minus

coder27 wrote:

 

e.  1.8v UHS SD card support is a plus

I've yet to see a board that supports that. Schematics for all the ones I've got so far show the SD card hard wired to 3.3v.

I'll add,

k. full sized SD, especially where the card hangs over the edge of the board is a minus

l. accelerated X11 drivers are a plus

m. reasonable number of gpio is a plus

and I'd maybe modify b, to be ARMv6 or earlier

colecago wrote:

 

pcDduino

That looks quite nice... another example of the under represented Allwinner A10.  But I wonder why, like Olimex, they don't bring out the sata port.

n.  boot from USB/ethernet/SATA is a plus

o. battery backed RTC

> l. accelerated X11 drivers are a plus

Accelerated X11 drivers are in the land of broken promises.

Liz wrote on Feb 17, 2012:

"We're going to be offering a bounty for the best accelerated X implementation from the community - more news about that after launch."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3145&start=20

Liz wrote on Oct 15, 2012::

"Accelerated X will be a solved problem soon; we've put engineering resource on it, and it's actively being worked on."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=194400#p194400

but Simon (working on his own) has apparently given up, writing on May 7, 2013:

"Nay, I didn't have much time to work on it at the beginning of the year. When I did restart there were some weird bug reports which I could never repro, then I realised that it's just not worth the effort...the demand for an accelerated X is much lower than you might imagine."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=4649&start=396

Earlier he described the problem as essentially fundamentally unsolveable

due to X applications doing too many single-pixel operations that are

impossible to accelerate due to the overhead involved in gpu communication.

There is perhaps hope for X applications such as web browsers to

switch to a different toolkit that can be accelerated, as is done with

most cell-phone browsers.

coder27 wrote:

 

Earlier he described the problem as essentially fundamentally unsolveable

due to X applications doing too many single-pixel operations that are

impossible to accelerate due to the overhead involved in gpu communication.

That's mostly an implementation detail of the Pi's unusual architecture. Other GPU's manage it fine in x86 land even if it is with closed drivers.

I agree that gpu stuff is currently off in the clouds playing with the flying pigs.. Still, if someone pulls a rabbit out of the hat, or if the lima project gets useful then a group of sbc's using whichever gpu will become much more attractive.  Which puts pressure on competing vendors to do the same.

No, I'm not holding my breath waiting