Just yesterday, we were greeted with the release of the brand-new Raspberry Pi 4. The new model ships with up to 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, making the device an even more convincing replacement for an entry-level laptop. While the 1GB base model still costs $35, the top-end version costs $55.
Even though owning a Rasperry Pi 4 won’t break your pocket, what if I tell you the latest Rock Pi S from Radxa costs just $9.90 and runs Linux-based operating system?
While the complete specifications of Rock Pi S aren’t yet available at the moment, it’s known to come with the new Rockchip RK3308 that features four 64-bit Cortex-A35 cores. All the four cores are clocked at 1.3GHz, and you can choose between 256MB or 512MB RAM options.
The low price of Rock Pi S comes with certain compromises like Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11n Wi-Fi, which is optional. However, you also get a 100 Mbps Ethernet port and a full-size USB 2.0 Type-A port in the base model, which makes it a pretty good deal for tinkerers and good Raspberry Pi Zero alternative.
There’s an updated Rock Pi 4 as well
Apart from the Rock Pi 4 S, Radxa has also unveiled the updated Rock Pi 4 v.14 that seems to target the newly released Raspberry Pi 4. The top-end Rock Pi 4 v.14 with 4GB RAM comes with a price tag of $74 — that’s about $20 more than Raspberry Pi’s price tag.
The biggest and obvious improvement to the board is the Rockchip RK3399 that supports LPDDR4 and high-speed NVMe SSD storage.
Apart from 802.11 Wi-Fi-AC and Bluetooth 5.0, Rock Pi 4 features four regular USB-A ports — two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0. You can read about it here in the detail.
New Pi-Top is also here with Raspberry Pi 4
Another related single-board computer update is here with the announcement of the upcoming Pi-Top version that’ll be based on the new Raspberry Pi 4. With the beefed up internals of the Pi, we can expect Pi-Top to be used in more innovative ways.
The new Pi-Top is expected to soon go on sale on Kickstarter and I’ll be telling you all the details in a dedicated post.
