Hoping to tap into the highly lucrative and popular Raspberry Pi market – 12.5 million sales in five years – Linaro and Huawei have unveiled a high-end (read: expensive) rival.
Read more: Google plans to bring AI tools to the Raspberry Pi
The HiKey 960 96Boards are designed as alternatives to Raspberry Pi, using ARM mobile technology specifically for Android developers.
They use the same operating chip as the Huawei Mate 9, meaning they're operational power is said to be that of a high-end smartphone.
Read more: As it sells its 12 millionth board, Raspberry Pi reveals why it's shifting away from hardware
The HiKey 960 has 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM, which is relatively low compared to a computer but offers a boost over the Raspberry Pi 3, with its 1GB LPDDR2. The HiKey also has OS support with AOSP/LINUX systems.
With 40-pin and 60-pin connectors, the 96Board offers additional room for customisation and hardware compatibility, while the PCIe M.2 slot allows for the potential to upgrade the speed of the 32GB onboard storage. Elsewhere, it has in-built wireless and Bluetooth capabilities and has three main modes: normal, fastboot and recovery.
The HiKey board is designed for creating apps, particularly on Android devices. Google designed the phone to be able to run on multiple architectures and the Linaro products are typically geared towards ARM-based system-on-chips, making it compatible with the handsets.
Android said that: "Google supports HiKey and Hikey960 certified 96Boards as Android reference boards. AOSP provides kernel source and board support for HiKey so developers can easily create and debug new and existing peripheral drivers, do kernel development, and perform other tasks with fewer OEM encumbrances."
The HiKey 960 will launch in the US, Europe, and Japan in "early May" with a price of $239. The Raspberry Pi Zero W costs just £10.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
