sbc

Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, hundreds of clones have adopted the Pi's form factor (from the diminutive Zero to the 'full size' model B). Often they have better hardware specs, and yet they remain a more obscure also-ran in that generation of Single Board Computer (SBC).

So when I saw Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's SOQuartz, I wanted to see if either would be—as they advertised—'drop in, pin-compatible replacements' for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

tl;dr: They're not. At least not yet.

Hardware and Specs

Both boards are technically pin-compatible. And both will boot and run (to some extent) on pre-existing Compute Module 4 carrier boards, including Raspberry Pi's official IO Board:

I recently got an Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit, and I read through and followed the Developer Kit Getting Started Guide straight from Nvidia's website.

I downloaded the 7 GB(!) microSD card from their website, and flashed it to a 128 GB microSD card using Balena Etcher.

Then I popped the microSD card into my dev kit board, plugged in HDMI and a USB-C 3A power supply, and waited... I kept seeing a giant NVIDIA logo on my display, and after about 20 seconds, it would seemingly reboot to black screen, then the logo... and repeat forever.

Searching around the Nvidia forums, I eventually found this issue: Nano 2GB boot looping, and finally found the problem: apparently the default image download is only for the 4GB Nano model.

I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways to use their strengths to my advantage.

Three generations of multi-core Pi: model 2 B, model 3 B, model 3 B+

Whether it's been a 6-node Raspberry Pi cluster running Drupal 8, or a distributed home temperature monitoring application, I use Raspberry Pis for a wide variety of fun projects. The Raspberry Pi model 3 B+ is the latest iteration of the 'top of the line' Pi, with all the bells and whistles, and it still comes in at just $35. This year's iteration improves the CPU frequency, wired LAN performance, and WiFi performance, among other smaller changes, and I ordered one and have taken it for a spin.

What follows are my benchmarks and impressions after a couple weeks poking and prodding the new model 3 B+.