After playing around a lot with my 2 Raspberry Pis and being pretty satisfied with it, today I received my Cubieboard. Specification comparison:
| Raspberry Pi Model-B Developer: Raspberry Pi Foundation Operating system: Linux Power: 3.5 W (model B) via Micro-USB CPU: ARM1176JZF-S (armv6k) @ 700 MHz SoC: Broadcom BCM2835 GPU: VideoCore IV RAM: 512 MByte (Model B rev 2) Storage: SD card slot (SD or MicroSDHC card), USB Graphics: Broadcom VideoCore IV Video: Composite, HDMI Audio: 3.5mm jack, HDMI Network: 10/100 RJ45 Other: 2x USB Dimensions: 85,60 x 53,98 x 17 mm My benchmarks: 273 Whetstones / 1108 Dhrystones (tested with BOINC) |
Cubieboard Manufacturer: CubieTech Operating system: Android preinstalled, Linux via MicroSDHC or SATA Power: via Mini-USB or DC CPU: ARM Cortex-A8 @ 1Ghz SoC: Allwinner A10 GPU: ARM Mali-400 RAM: DRAM 1GB DDR3 @ 480MHz Integrated storage: NAND 4GB Video: HDMI Audio: 3.5mm jack, HDMI Network: 10/100 RJ45 Storage: MicroSDHC, SATA (+5v power), USB Other: Infrared, 2x USB Dimensions: 10cm x 6cm x 2cm My benchmarks: 199 Whetstones / 2000 Dhrystones (tested with BOINC) |
The advantage of the Pi is that it’s widely being used, so there is much more specialized software for it available, more information on the net, etc.
The advantage of the Cubieboard is clearly its better hardware; I especially like that it comes preinstalled with Android, and you can easily install Linux on a SDHC card or on an attached SATA hard drive – where the SATA slot is another advantage, of course.
If you need to decide – should you be after the faster mini-linux computer, get the Cubieboard. If you’re more after playing around with it and programming, get the Pi 
BUT: If you’re after max. speed, you have to get the ODroid-X2!
There are other mini computers besides the Pi and Cubieboard, see below for links of all that are worth mentioning:
- Raspberry Pi: http://www.raspberrypi.org/
- Cubieboard: http://cubieboard.org/
- BeagleBoard: http://beagleboard.org/
- APC: http://apc.io/
- Pandaboard: http://pandaboard.org/
- ODROID-X2: http://tinyurl.com/odroidx2
- OLinuXino: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino
You might also want to check out this site: http://tinyurl.com/sbccomparison – it contains a comparison table of this boards: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, CubieBoard, Gooseberry, APC Rock, OLinuXino, Hackberry A10
Also informative: Wiki articles “List of single-board computers” and “Comparison of single-board computers“.
Just gave your blog a plug on my blog. Great stuff! Keep up the good work!
I reckon the internet needs a dedicated BOINC for ARM community site for consolidating all this BOINC work being done on these new ARM based devices.
By the way, I suggest you give the ODROID-U2 a crack. I’ve got one and it’s quite the little cruncher. All your existing ARMv7l binaries compiled for the Cubieboard will work straight out on the ODROID-U2 – assuming you’re running some Linux variety.
Uuuuh, nice! Thanks for the tip!!
Ordered the X2
Also thx for the tip with the BoincDEV mailing list, let’s see what their status regarding Android atm is.
There’s also the CuBox http://solid-run.com/ (which I haven’t played with) and the Bifferboard http://bifferos.co.uk/ (which I have played with). The bifferboard hardware looks pretty weak now, but when it was first released (2009) it was one of the first truly low-cost SBCs.
Thanks for your review. Helped me a lot in choosing between the Cubieboard and the ODroid-X2. I would prefer the ODroid-X2 for its better performance, unfortunately there is no S-ATA port :-/. So I’ll give the Cubieboard a try…