This is how you destroy Raspberry Pi

LattePanda's Mu is the latest entrant in the 'Pi Killer' battle, but it has a trick up its sleeve.

LattePanda sent me the Mu and carrier board for review, so I'm marking this video as having a 'product placement'—however, they had no input into the video's contents, and have paid nothing for me to talk about their product.

Some of the things I mentioned in this video:

Contents:

00:00 - Hardware is (not) the answer
01:17 - Conjoined triangles of success
02:32 - x86 (not Arm)
03:52 - Where's the support?
06:24 - LattePanda Mu
08:20 - A lot of promise (is it enough?)

[scratchanitch]

Moore's law isn't dead, it just has a new definition: The number of Pis you accumulate doubles roughly every 2 years

[ExplainingComputers]

Great video -- which I watched on an N100 system running Linux. :)

"Or put it in your drawer and hope to someday" That felt like a personal attack, Jeff.

[trickman]

"Until next time I'm Jeff Geerling". Drops the next video, still Jeff Geerling. False advertising.

[ganniterix]

I never understand why reviewers of SBC's keep saying statements X-times faster than RPi. The litmus test is always "How many products from this vendor still get support 6 months down the line?" In most cases a lot of the SBC's are built around SOC's meant for a specific Android version, and good luck getting long term Linux support. To be honest, I don't care how fast SBC's are. They are not about speed. I couldn't have agreed more with you during this video!

[drewswoods]

I used a rpi4 as my primary computer for two or so years, and from my experience, it's software support that matters most for medium-high end SBCs. I saw significant improvement in usability on the pi4 over the two or so years, and I'd hate to have to go through that rough starting phase again.

[whothefoxcares]

Can you legally punish your own children by forcing them to build your kernels without pay on underpowered SBCs?

[mehdimido]

Intel based SBCs' main advantage for me is the video encoder which makes it perfect for a media server

[cva]

It's not even about "destroying" Raspberry Pi (Jeff needs to stop outsourcing the writing to Redshirt). There is clearly room for a number 2 in the market (an Avis to Rasberry's Hertz, in rental car terms, or, if you like a Lyft to Rasberry's Uber), and it's been very clear what that takes - dedicated support. And a strong number 2 in the market would only make Raspberry better - it would make them work that much harder.

With apologies to Jeff, this has been obvious for years. What's crazy is that as obvious as it is, no manufacturer has taken up the challenge.

I think it's worth thinking deeper about what that would mean - maybe challenge Jeff to do that, because his knowledge on this far outclasses mine, for sure. Would that mean picking the top five or six Linux distros and ensuring they run on new SBCs out of the box? Guarantee five years of support?

What's the kind of minimum viable level of support that would start to separate the sheep from the goats in the non-Pi SBC market?

Another thing I've wondered - is it possible to have a Raspberry clone? Or a near clone? Is that a viable path for a second player to emerge?

[TheGhostInTheWires]

At $185 for the LattePanda MU, forget it. I bought 3 GMKtec NucBox G3 Mini PC's with the N100, 8GB of RAM each, 256GB M.2 NVMe, 2.5GB Ethernet/Wifi 6E.. for $120 each. And the RAM/SSD is upgradable. And there is an extra M.2 slot to run another SSD or external GPU. And you get a Windows 11 Pro license. And you can get that price all day on Amazon and have them the next day.

[None]

"Temperatures matter to a degree" Oh you rapscallion you

[danny_the_K]

Well said Jeff. You can pretty much build anything with a RPi w/o building boards because there is so much 3rd party support and product availability. That lets you focus on what you’re building. I am doing that right now with a project. It will be a bit more expensive than I want and complete in <60 days. The ball is truly in my court. That’s why the RPi wins again. Now I just need a couple case mfg to realize there are applications where we don’t want the micro-sd card available from the outside of the case.

[burkec]

As a casual hobbyist, support matters. I have a 2 Pi 0's and 2 Pi 4's performing different functions (pump monitor, web server, file server, dashboard), and all of them have been running for years (still regret getting rid of 2 Pi 3's for next to nothing). Hardware is reliable, cheap, and the broad support base keeps me attached to these.

[thegreyfuzz]

The only limitation for the N100 is the 16G of RAM limit. I have one of those cheap microITX N100 mainboards ($129(ish)), in a NAS case running on M.2 drives, Proxmox hosting pfSense, PiHole, a few more smaller VM's and a bunch of containers, and a NAS (passthrough for 4 x 2T SSD's)... power draw hovers at only 27w ! The N100 may be a real contender, a lot of punch for smaller power reqs. I'd like to see what the N100 SoM can do.

[PlayButtonWithNoViews]

Agree! Even for firmware wizards its nice to have something working out of the box and not have to fiddle around.
Unless fiddeling around is the project, usually you'd rather spend time one the actual project :)

[delarosomccay]

I wrote mobile software in the early 00's for Qualcomm and later Kyocera Wireless (who bought out Qualcomm's handset division). Back in those days getting ahold of an ARM compiler was a PITA. They were SUPER expensive and single seat licensed - they were basically node locked. So once you installed it somewhere, it was a PITA to get it installed somewhere else. Say you got a new machine or whatever - yeah, you can't run the ARM compiler you payed over $1k of year 2000 dollars for. There were some enterprising groups working GCC ports, but they weren't quite there yet and didn't produce the same optimized code as the ARM compiler (back in those days on those handsets saving even 100 bytes of RAM or NAND storage space was paramount). The landscape is way different now - the ARM port for GCC is very mature and I don't even know if they still sell an ARM compiler since GCC produces pretty well optimized code now (plus we don't have the same resource constraints we did 20 years ago).

[roland]

$155 - $180 is the cost of a 4GB Pi 5. A latte panda is cheaper in Australia, at least.

[carpdog]

I feel like you nailed it in the begining on the price/support situation. To pay $149, even without considering a carrier board, I have to be very wedded to a SBC form factor because I can already slap an old PC on the network for that. I can see paying a premium for the form factor if it really matters.

[jefftp]

I was all ready to make a comment about "conjoined triangles of success" but Geerling beat me to it. Foiled again!

[LanceThumping]

I'm glad to see non-RPi videos. I've kinda been tired of RPi of late.
The N100 and any other cheap x86 processors that might come out have been far more interesting to me anymore.