SBCs in 2021: The State of Play

[Music] welcome to another video from explainingcomputers.com this time i'm going to talk about what's going on in the single board computer marketplace i first made a video about the original raspberry pi way back in october 2013 and since that time i've looked at eight more single board computers from the raspberry pi foundation as well as 37 other single board computers made by a range of different manufacturers and yes that's an awful lot of single board computer reviews i've made here on the explaining computer's youtube channel over the past year or so i've also had the increasing feeling that the single board computer marketplace is changing fairly dramatically and that is what this video is all about sbcs are computers with all of their major components mounted on a single board so here for example all of these lovely little devices have their processor and ram directly soldered to them by this definition the circuit boards inside most tablets laptops and smart tvs are also sbcs however often when people use the term sbc they're referring to small form factor boards like these which also feature gpio connectivity which allows boards like these to be used in maker projects and for industrial applications and it is this type of sbc i'm referring to in this video the first sbcs date back to the 1970s while the first small form factor maker board was the beagle board released in 2008. however the market expanded significantly with the launch of the first raspberry pi in 2012 as it presented low-cost sbc hardware to a new audience just as apple did not invent the mp3 player so the raspberry pi foundation did not invent the makerboard sbc but there is no doubt that the raspberry pi became the ipod of a low-cost sbc marketplace with over 35 million raspberry pi's now sold since 2012 we've seen the launch of lots of sbcs many of which have tried to emulate the success of the raspberry pi and generally board other than the raspberry pi have sold thousands or tens of thousands of units compared to millions for raspberry pi models however as you might have noticed if you watch exploding computers and similar youtube channels recently fewer low-cost sbcs have been released and there are various reasons for this for a start over the past few years makerboard sbcs have become a lot more powerful and sophisticated while this is generally a good thing more sophisticated hardware is more difficult to develop and to successfully bring to market and so this has led to the arrival of fewer new sbcs a lot of lower cost sbcs including all raspberry pi models are also based on arm processors and hence do not feature a standardized pc architecture this means that they cannot run off-the-shelf linux distros or a mainstream version of windows as a result the success of many sbcs depends at least as much on the software developed for the board as on the hardware itself the raspberry pi foundation has invested very heavily in software development and related support to compete with the raspberry pi other rmsbc manufacturers need to do the same and this is something that most of them do not have the resources to do for several years many raspberry pi competitors have been marketed as development boards but have largely relied on the maker community to port linux distributions to their hardware but as sbcs get more and more sophisticated it is less or less realistic to expect user communities to have the time and skill required to deliver high quality software for minority products it is therefore not surprising that today many arm-based sbcs have relatively poor software most obviously there are a lot of rms bcs that have the hardware necessary to function as excellent video playback devices but which do not have the drivers and other software necessary to actually allow them to do this one way around this problem is to develop sbcs that have an x86 processor and a standard pc architecture as this allows them to run standard x86 windows or linux operating systems and applications here for example we have a latte panda delta a rock pi x and an odyssey x86j4105 all of which have got intel celeron processors all of these spcs are excellent and work well running linux or windows however intel processors and related hardware are more expensive than their arm equivalents which means that x86 sbcs either have to use older processors or to sell for a significantly higher price than an arm-based makerboard like a raspberry pi x86 based sbcs like these are also relatively hard to design and to develop and the limited availability of intel cpus has also delayed the delivery of some final products for example the rockpi x lattepanda delta and you do bolt were all launched far later than expected right now we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new x86 sbc called the hackboard 2 but this 2 has now been delayed talking of new boards fairly soon we will see the launch of the first sbcs with risk 5 processors risk 5 is a free and open isa or instruction set architecture which is trying to remove the barriers to entry in the microprocessor marketplace and in theory this could usher in a whole new generation of sbcs but do not rely on arm or intel cpus a particularly interesting new risk 5 board is the beagle 5 which is currently in testing and which is expected to be available for general sale in september 2021 for 119 and so again we are looking at hardware that cost considerably more than a raspberry pi and for which a constraining factor will be the development of high quality software whilst many maker boards are sold for personal use sbcs are also employed for industrial applications that include iot robotics edge computing and machine learning as i've discussed in a previous video edge computing allows devices that would have relied on the cloud to process some of their own data so for example a networked camera may perform local vision recognition sbcs are prime candidates to run edge computing machine learning applications however to achieve this they need to be powerful enough to perform neural network inference this is increasingly being achieved by the development of specialist sbcs that feature a neural processing unit or npu or else gpu technology similarly suited for machine learning examples of sbcs intended for machine learning include this board the jets and nano which are featured in several videos on this channel plus the far more powerful jetson xavier nx as well as the bugle corral prototyping development boards in the next few years the market for powerful industrial machine learning sbcs looks set to expand rapidly however such boards will have less and less in common with entry-level makerboards like the raspberry pi we should therefore expect the sbc marketplace to increasingly segment with relatively expensive high-end hardware at one end and cheaper sbc makerboards at the other across the world demand is growing for low-cost computers and the future therefore looks very bright indeed for the raspberry pi and other sbcs in a similar price bracket such boards are likely to become increasingly common in the home in education and for industrial control and iot applications that do not require a lot of computing power this said i suspect that both consumer and industrial buyers will be increasingly less tolerant of sbcs at any price if they have poor software support today the sbc marketplace is both expanding and maturing with most buyers now expecting reliable hardware that will run the applications they require straight out of the box when the first raspberry pi was launched in february 2012 it catalyzed a new frontier in makerboard sbcs that felt a lot like the pioneering age of microcomputing in the mid to late 1980s the raspberry pi was absolutely not the first single board computer but it captured many hearts and minds in a new manner and arrived with the educational and maker support necessary to expand and transform the market since 2012 sbcs in all price brackets have become a lot more sophisticated with high-end industrial models now offering powerful platforms for machine learning and other edge computing applications meanwhile in the consumer and low-end industrial space raspberry pi's now reigns supreme due to their superb software and community support thirty years ago personal computing emerged from its pioneering days when it became clear that software and platform standardization were at least as important as producing hardware with a cool new specification and i suspect we're now seeing a similar evolution in the sbc marketplace today due to this evolution i think in the years ahead we will see fewer and fewer launches of low-cost arm-based sbcs with manufacturers other than the raspberry pi foundation increasingly focusing on more expensive hardware for applications like machine learning as well as making single board computers with x86 or risc-5 processors what this will mean for the type of sbc hardware i cover here on explaining computers i'm not quite sure but certainly in the immediate future i do plan to look at the hackboard 2 and also the beagle 5 when it arrives on the market and of course i'll always be on the lookout for new raspberry pi models if you've got particular ideas about what you'd like to see me covering and doing with singapore computers here on explaining computers do let me know down in the comments section but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very [Music] soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 160,574

Keywords: Single board computer, SBC, Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, RISC-V SBC, Hackboard 2, Beagle-V, x86 SBC, Jetson Nano, SBC machine learning, SBC AI, SBC applications, industrial SBCs, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, SBC market review, SBC market overview, SBC marketplace, SBC market analysis

Id: RcvMxC81r_g

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021

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