Beyond RaspberryPi: What are all the other SoC vendors up to *summarised*
29 comments
·October 24, 2025rcarmo
Huh. It mentions neither Intel nor AMD, and I am seeing _a lot_ of N100/N150 industrial SBCs right now (outside the hobbyist space). Intel in particular seems to be replaying their approach of flooding the market with Atom chips and making N-series available to OEMs in volume and relatively low price.
Full marks for Rockchip coverage, yes, they're filling in the gaps below the RK3588, although some of those chips aren't that interesting in terms of power budget and have apparently low yields.
wpm
The N100/150's are great.
BolexNOLA
Got an N150 running elementary as a basic plex server and I couldn’t be happier. About to shift it to Jellyfin this winter just need to find time and do it lol
Sponge5
it's right there in the first section:
highlighting notable advancements in ARM-based Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) and their increasing competitiveness against traditional x86 platforms.bluGill
Not discussion x86 doesn't highlight how their competitiveness. It might be a useful article for some, but for most of us the N100 is a better option overall for everything we might look at a SoC for. YMMV of course, I haven't seen a N100 SoC (I've also never looked), but complete N100 systems that are ready to work are similar prices to an ARM SoC after you buy the non-optional extras like case, disk, and power supply.
It also misses the other end - many things people think of SoC for could be done with a ESP32 or other microcontroller for less cost, and this might be a better option.
I'm not completely faulting them, you have to set limits someplace. However the limits they have make this summary less useful for most people who will read it.
yjftsjthsd-h
Thanks for covering the software support side of things; that's always been the worst part of the ecosystem, and annoyingly hard to get info on.
On which note: Oh, wow, the Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great! Mainline support, good hardware, good price. Once it's back in stock I may have to buy one:)
8cvor6j844qw_d6
I have dabbled in model edge processing like Efficientnet and YOLO on Hailo platform.
Raspberry Pi and its AI HAT+ seems to be the most accessible, often others can easily pick it up the basics and get up and running without much trouble even without experience.
I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.
babl-yc
What Raspberry Pi is to Broadcom (developer-friendly SBCs), Beagleboard is to TI.
It's a slightly different approach -- Beagleboard is a non-profit and emphasizes openly purchasable components. But similar in that it is the cheapest way to tinker with SoCs from that vendor.
BeagleY-AI has 4 TOPS for ~$70. AI inference tooling is still improving but I've been working on it here: https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...
justin66
> I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.
Combined they're like $250? Not expensive.
On the other hand, at that price maybe you ought to get a Jetson Orin Nano.
HeyMeco
In this format I go deep down the Mailing lists, news articles and more to summarise what exciting hardware has been published and software has been merged into Linux. Also breaking down rumours and developer conferences about future SoC‘s. Hope you all find it useful!
joezydeco
If you could mirror your feed on Bluesky, that would be appreciated. Some of us will not use X.
mberger
Can you include more prices? It would give me an idea of the cost even if it is in USD. What i found most annoying about my latest search is that it is hard to find something not named raspberry or Arduino for a reasonable price. I was looking for a simple gigabit board with usb 3 to attach a removable drive to. The only one i found was raspberry pi orange 3B . Nobody else seemed to have gigabit nic with usb 3.
nine_k
Why would you expect USB3 and Ethernet, fast and relatively expensive interfaces, to be attached to a cheap low-spec MCU?
Did you consider a ready-made USB3 extender over Ethernet? There is a reason they cost so much ;-/
rjsw
Rockchip SoCs starting with the RK3399 can do both USB3 and Ethernet.
The only board that I own that does both at the same time is the Pine64 Quartz64 that uses the RK3566. My Pinebook Pro doesn't have an ethernet port, Orange Pi 5 Max has ethernet but doesn't use the builtin controller to provide it.
Joel_Mckay
Pi4 does two USB 3.0 ports, but you are right in that USB 3.1 is a little much for a SoM.
Its a nice little SoM, in some ways it was better than the pi5 for hardware media encoding. =3
fisian
Does a Banana Pi BPi-M5 fit your specs? The banana pis have pretty good networking options.
Joel_Mckay
The Raspberry PI also has an intangible value from years of community goodwill. And people trust that the kernel OS support will be around in 10 years.
The NVIDIA solution is impressive... but self-immolated with the consumer price point (markets for government equipment may work.) People usually either have money or time... asking for both in a product is foolish.
The other SoM also have a long-tail market attention problem, as one could spend 2 weeks tracking unstable kernel driver problems. Or just drop in a $35 pi, and solve the task at hand. =3
bangaladore
Title critique:
RaspberryPi is not an SoC vendor. They take proprietary SOCs from Broadcom, use proprietary firmware and build a product around it. They obviously upstream what they can, but they fundamentally are a system integrator, not an SoC vendor.
klelatti
Not to disagree with your critique but just to note that they are a microcontroller vendor with the RP2040 and RP2350.
I do wonder if there is a long term wish to break their dependency on Broadcom but I suspect creating an SoC for the main Pi series is probably in the 'too difficult' category.
tonetegeatinst
Does any SBC offer SFP+ or SFP28?
I don't see any option to sort by network speed or network chip
nbf_1995
The solidrun LX2 offers 4x SFP+, but that board is getting quite old at this point.
There are a couple of bananapi router boards that have 1 maybe 2 SFP+
null
nickpeterson
Anything new happening on the risc-v side of things? Last I heard there were some micro-itx boards at around rpi4 speed but haven’t heard much since.
jpm_sd
Nothing about NXP? They are a pretty big player in this space, and mostly do a great job contributing upstream to the kernel, but I guess they don't have a hobby-level entry point readily available.
I've used NXP-based embedded Linux hardware from Toradex, Gateworks and EmbeddedTS in previous projects, but there are lots of vendors out there.
jauntywundrkind
Lovely snapshot in time view of the small computers that drive a ton of product innovation.
One major gap I'd really like to see covered better is power consumption. We've started seeing unboxing and reviews for the Arduino Uno Q for example, but no one seems to be breaking out a simple USB power meter to get some idea how much power it takes, headless or sitting at desktop.
Pretty nice that so many chips have pretty good Linux support.
Something I'd be very interested in seeing summarized is the current state of fully open source software on SoCs and SBCs. I hate how common the situation described in the nVidia section where SoCs that require vendor kernels get abandoned on ancient software, so it would be very useful to know what SoCs are supported to a useful level by mainline kernels.
I feel like there are three tiers of support that most people would be interested in:
1. Usable for headless appliances (serial console or unaccelerated graphics, wired networking, storage, USB)
2. Usable for interactive use (accelerated graphics, WiFi/BT)
3. Fully supported (all major hardware works)