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Comment by Arnor | Hacker News Reader

Apparently their market is developers who don't own computers:

> However, the MinnowBoard is still cheaper than most PCs and could appeal to developers looking to write and test commercial applications before they're deployed in servers, embedded devices and other computers.

I'm baffled as to why anyone would purchase this board. Raspberry Pi[1] destroys it on price/value so _will_ Parallella[2]. Why not wait a couple months and get a super computer![3]

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/ [2] http://www.parallella.org/ [3] Why do I think anyone here needs these links?

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The RPi isn't really comparable. The Minnowboard is a much (much!) more capable piece of hardware. Maybe 3-4x as fast at typical CPU tasks, 2-4x the DRAM, gigabit ethernet, PVR SGX vs. that weird Broadcom thing in the Pi.

Is it worth 6x the price? Certainly not for all uses (and I'll admit I'm disappointed to see this thing launch at $200 too). But there are tasks for which this board would work where the RPi wouldn't. And there it competes most directly with things like the Pandaboard, against which it appears to compete pretty well.

Relying on having spare computers for testing is also kind of a thing of the past in the age of cheap PC resources and virtual machines. I gave up keeping old computers around for software testing 5-6 years ago when I bought my first 4 core CPU. Also keeps my work area from getting really really hot in the summer.

Seems comparable to the Beagleboard, though.

I'm baffled as to why anyone would purchase this board.

Because it's small enough to be useful but a hell of a lot less work to get started on. I would much rather use this for a personal project (not a product) than spend a year learning a new architecture.

See zenlinux's comment below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134854

lets be honest the number of "developers" who can't afford a proper PC is trivial in the USA just buy a newish pc second hand one ebay.

Are these "PC" only for sale in the US?

You could probably find a computer better than this in the trash, some old Pentium 4 with 2GB of memory.

Unless you want something more power efficient. http://www.minnowboard.org/static/pdfs/Getting%20Started%20w... says this runs from 5V, 2.5A. That's 12.5W. Quite a lot for mobile, but a Pentium 4 CPU alone will use at least four times that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_f...), for a < 2GHz variant.

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