Firefly, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, and FriendlyARM are names familiar to those who have worked with development boards, but most people may not have heard of these brands. In fact, many large companies have launched development boards, but they are not widely known. Here, I will review the development boards produced by these major manufacturers.

The first one is a brand that many people recognize:

NVIDIA

In the computer world, it is a giant in the graphics card industry, essential in the field of artificial intelligence. Almost all AI development is done using NVIDIA; others like Intel and AMD still fall short. In the realm of development boards, NVIDIA has also invested heavily in AI, making it a leading player in the embedded field.

Most major AI frameworks are based on the NVIDIA platform. During the research and development stage, powerful desktop computers with high-performance graphics cards are typically used. Transitioning these programs to a development board is much easier when using NVIDIA’s development boards.

On other platforms, there is often a conversion process, and success or efficiency can be uncertain.

Unless you develop under their self-developed AI framework, which leads to an increase in labor and time costs. This directly results in NVIDIA being the only option in many cases.

This monopolistic operation has led NVIDIA to dominate the AI embedded field. Their software advantages are significant. However, the downside is that it can be quite expensive.

NVIDIA has three series of embedded products: Jetson, DRIVE AGX, and Clara AGX. Clara AGX is specifically targeted at the medical field, DRIVE AGX is aimed at autonomous driving, while Jetson is focused on edge computing and is the most accessible development board we can purchase.

Starting from the lower-performance Jetson Nano to the current most powerful Jetson AGX Orin, with computing power ranging from 472 GFLOPS to 275 TOPS, you can choose from various computing powers based on your financial capacity.

ASUS

ASUS produces a wide range of products, including monitors, laptops, smartphones, motherboards, and routers.

They also manufacture development boards, and they seem to do quite well with their Tinker Board series, which is defined as part of ASUS’s IoT product line.

From RK3288 to RK3399 and RK3399Pro, the Tinker Board primarily uses Rockchip’s SoC, putting it on par with many domestic development boards.

The Tinker Board is known for its refined design and good build quality, and it supports a variety of operating systems, including its own Debian-based Tinker OS. There are many fun operating systems to choose from.

ASUS also produces the x86 development board, which is quite rare.

But it feels quite similar to those standard systems.

Google

Google also has its own brand in development boards called Coral, which has released several models. The main feature of these development boards is that they are equipped with Google’s Edge TPU, offering 4 TOPS of computing power, with 2 TOPS per watt.

These development boards mainly use NXP SoCs, such as:

The Dev Board (yes, the name is simple and straightforward) uses the i.MX 8M SoC (quad-core Cortex-A53, Cortex-M4F)

The Dev Board Micro uses NXP i.MX RT1176 (Cortex-M7 and Cortex-M4)

However, they have also used MediaTek SoCs.

The Dev Board Mini uses MediaTek 8167s (quad-core Cortex-A35)

The most powerful Dev Board currently available is priced at 1399. The official price is $129.9.

The Dev Board Mini is priced at $99.99.

The Dev Board Micro is priced at $79.99.

You can also purchase the core board of the Dev Board for $99.99.

Additionally, there’s the USB Accelerator, a USB interface computing stick with a computing power of 4 TOPS, priced at $59.99.

Sony

It is a bit surprising that Sony has also produced development boards. This is their first development board, which is an open-source audio player development board and currently their only product:

Sony Spresense Board

It adopts a core board and expansion board structure.

The core board is equipped with Sony’s own CXD5602

6-core Cortex-M4F, equipped with CXD5247 power management and audio processing chip, an 8MB NOR Flash storage chip, and a CP2002N USB-to-serial chip.

The expansion board has interfaces consistent with Arduino UNO, and it also provides a 3.5mm interface and a MicroSD card slot.

The development environment includes Sony’s official Spresense SDK, and it can also be developed using Arduino. Recently, I found that CircuitPython has also supported Spresense. The ecosystem is quite good. The documentation provided by the official source is also very helpful, progressing step by step and even available in Chinese, which is very user-friendly. However, the price is quite high. The core board is priced at 529, while the core board plus the expansion board is priced at 988.

A single MCU development board is more expensive than many boards that can run Linux. However, I think people may want to buy this not just for the price.

Intel

Yes, Intel has also produced development boards and has several models. If you have used Arduino, you may have noticed Intel’s presence in the development board manager, where three Intel development boards are found:

Intel Galileo

Intel Edison

and

Intel Arduino101

I searched for information about these development boards on Intel’s official website for a long time but found very little. I only found a usage tutorial on Arduino’s website. Currently, I believe that Intel’s development boards can be considered relics of the past. Intel has completely abandoned support, and it is very difficult to even find their pages; Arduino has already listed these boards as deprecated.

Lenovo

Lenovo has also produced development boards, which may come as a surprise.

Lenovo Leez P710

However, their development board, aside from its white color, is rather unremarkable.

It uses the RK3399 SoC, which is somewhat outdated, and it seems Lenovo does not intend to update it. The price is also quite unreasonable. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about it.

Who would have thought that so many major manufacturers have released development boards? However, I believe most of them have given up on the market, mainly because the prices are high and they lack competitive advantages in the development board market. Of course, if you buy them for fun, especially that Sony development board, I think it is quite interesting. This concludes this section; if you found it helpful, remember to like, and if you have anything to say, please leave a comment below. See you next time.

ASUS Tinker Board 2

https://m.tb.cn/h.Um7HvXc?tk=07l7d6lfMOu

Google Coral Dev Board

https://m.tb.cn/h.UNykxJJ?tk=LceLd6l5T4l

Sony Spresense Board

https://m.tb.cn/h.UNdQozw?tk=HRIMd6l5EOJ

Lenovo Leez P710

https://m.tb.cn/h.UNyla20?tk=zkI3d6lUxQn

Recently, we created a development board selection website. Although it is not yet perfect, we have already listed around 400 development boards. If you are interested or have any needs, you can check out our selection website. If you have any good suggestions, you can mention them in the group or leave us a message.

We recently launched the Raspberry Pi alternative section, which you can check out if you’re interested.

The domain name of our website is: findboard.cn

(We have not yet adapted our site for mobile, so if you are accessing it on a mobile device, the experience may not be very satisfactory. We recommend using a desktop browser for access.)

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