The Raspberry Pi is a strong contender when it comes to the Single Board Computers. There are quite a significant number of Raspberry Pi competitors out there in the market, and a few of them are giving fierce competition to the Pi boards. Recently, FriendlyArm launched an updated version of their ARM board which is known as the NanoPC-T4. Today, we will take a quick look at this powerful Raspberry Pi alternative.
NanoPC-T4 Overview
The NanoPC-T4 is an upgraded version of NanoPC-T3 from FriendlyArm. It is known as the smallest RK3399 ARM board till today. Apart from having a more powerful processor than the Raspberry Pi 3, it provides stable performance by eliminating the I/O bottleneck issues.
Specifications of NanoPC-T4
- Quad-core Cortex-A53 1.5GHz and Dual-core Cortex-A72 2GHz processors
- PCB board dimensions of 100 mm by 64 mm
- Mali-T864 GPU
- Onboard eMMC storage of 16GB
- 4GB LPDDR3 RAM
- Support for the Bluetooth 4.1, Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi standards
- M.2 2280 connection port to attach PCIe SSD
- Two camera input ports, 3.5 mm audio jack, onboard microphone jack
- HDMI 2.0a supports 4K videos
- 40-pin GPIO header
- One USB 3.0 Type C port, one USB 3.0 port, and two USB 2.0 ports
- 4K VP9 and 10-Bit H.265/H.264 hardware video decoder
- Official support for the Android 7.1.2 Nougat and Lubuntu 16.04
- 12V/2A power supply
You can mount a heatsink which is included in the package on the two holes for keeping the board fresh. You can get the faster I/O speeds compared to the SATA-linked SSDS thanks to the PCI express 2.0 compatibility of the NanoPC-T4. The powerful Rockchip RK3399 System on Chip (same as on the Samsung Chromebook Plus) gives the best support to the Linux Kernel.
Price and Availability
The NanoPC-T4 comes in a package including the board itself, power supply, heatsink, radio antennas, and also a sturdy protective cover. All these together make the cost quite high. Compared to the $35 price of the Raspberry Pi 3 board which comes alone, the NanoPC-T4 bundle is available for the amount of $119. You need to buy an external power source, cooling components, storage card, heatsink, and other essential accessories for the Raspberry Pi though.
The NanoPC-T4 is available for sale on the FriendlyArm website as well as on some of the trusted online resources. You can also check your nearby authorized shop for purchasing NanoPC-T4 offline and on the hand.
Get your development board
Comparing to the Raspberry Pi, the NanoPC-T4 is a better option for the developers who are looking for a dominant competitor to the Pi. The board has the solutions for many of the bottleneck problems that generally be found on the Single Board Computers. With the mainline Linux support, NanoPC-T4 is more flexible than the most of the Raspberry Pi alternatives.
What are your thoughts on NanoPC-T4? Will you like to give it a try? The comment section is waiting for your inputs!
