Introduction

This blogpost covers most SoC boards:

• Raspberry Pi
• HummingBoard
• CuBox
• Arndale board
• Cubietruck

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi popularized the ARM board concept:

Raspberry Pi model B

The truth is that it's using Broadcom BCM2835 SoC which has louzy specs for mainstream use:

• ARMv6 with floating point and SIMD extensions clocked at 700MHz
• 512MB RAM
• 100Mbps ethernet
• HDMI video output
• 1080p h264 video decoder
• Videocore 4 GPU
• 2x USB 2.0 ports
• 3.5mm audio jack

Boot methods:

• FAT32 partition on SD card

Community is of course massive:

• https://github.com/raspberrypi/
• #raspbian @ Freenode IRC

Origenboard

Origen 4 Quad Evaluation Board is based on Samsung Exynos 4210.

Arndale board

Arndale has two boards, the latest one called Arndale Octa Board Package ships with Samsung Exynos 5420 octacore SoC:

The board seems to be manufactured by InSignal which is a Korean company. Pyrustek ships the board from Korea for 199 USD pricetag excluding VAT and customs.

Arndale Octa Board Package specs:

• Four ARM Cortex-A15 cores with max clock at 1.3GHz
• Four ARM Cortex-A7 cores
• 3GB LPDDR3e RAM
• 100Mbps Ethernet
• 1080p 60fps video decoder
• Mali T628 MP6 GPU
• HDMI 1.4a connector
• 1x USB 3.0 port
• 3.5mm audio jack output (24bit DAC @96kHz)

Boot methods:

• eMMC internal storage
• MicroSD (?)

Community:

• http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/O_WiKi

HummingBoard

HummingBoard <http://imx.solid-run.com/wiki/index.php?title=HummingBoard_Hardware> is a Raspberry Pi compatible board oriented mainly towards developers:

HummingBoard will most probably sport following spec based on one of Freescale i.MX6 chips:

• Quad-core ARM Cortex A9
• 2GB RAM
• Broadcom BCM4329 802.11abgn wireless with Bluetooth 2.1
• Gigabit ethernet
• HDMI connector
• LVDS connector
• Coax S/PDIF digital audio output
• Infrared receiver
• MicroSD memory card slot
• mini PCI-E connector
• mSATA connector

CuBox

CuBox-i4pro is a pretty neat ARM box:

• Quad-core ARM Cortex A9 clocked at 1GHz
• 2GB DDR3
• Vivante GC2000 GPU
• Gigabit ethernet
• HDMI video/audio output
• eSATA port
• 2x USB2.0 ports

Boot methods:

• MicroSD card

Cubietruck

Cubietruck is Chinese Allwinner A20 SoC based board:

Cubietruck spec:

• Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1GHz
• 2GB DDR2 @ 528MHz
• 8GB NAND Flash
• Mali400 MP2 GPU
• CedarX 2160p video decoder
• Broadcom BCM4329 802.11bgn wireless with Broadcom BCM40181 Bluetooth 4.0
• HDMI digital video/audio output
• VGA analog video output
• SPDIF digital audio output
• 1Gbps Realtek RTL8211E wired ethernet
• 1x SATA 2.0 slot
• 2x USB2.0 host
• 1x USB OTG

Boot methods:

• MicroSD card via on-board slot
• Internal NAND Flash
• SATA (via kernel and u-boot on internal NAND Flash)

Community is alive and kicking and among Chinese ARM SoC-s it is probably the most progressive and upstream friendly:

• #linux-sunxi and #cubieboard @ Freenode IRC

Radxa Rock

Radxa Rock is another Chinese Rockchip SoC based ARM board:

Rockchip RK3188 SoC:

• Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, 2GB RAM
• 8GB NAND Flash mälu
• MicroSD memory card slot
• Mali400 GPU
• HDMI pesa
• 100Mbps LAN
• 150Mbps 802.11bgn
• Bluetooth 4.0
• S/PDIF heliväljund
• 2x USB2.0 host pesa
• 1x USB OTG pesa

Community:

• #linux-rockchip @ Freenode IRC