pcDuino3 Nano review

I got a pcDuino3 this past week. After doing some pretty extensive testing over the weekend I feel like I’m up for a review.
I now have 3 small arm devices. I’m pretty limited for space, so these little things are great for me. They take almost no room, and use very little power. I have:

pcDuino3 Nano – vs – Raspberry Pi

Let’s be honest, there is no comparison.  Spend the extra $5 and get the pcDuino3 unless you need something very specific to the Raspberry pi.
Not only are you getting double the memory, 10x the network speed, a SATA port, dual cores that run almost 2 times faster, but you get the ARMv7 based CPU instead of the ARMv6.  I found that the the floating point processing in the ARMv7 made the difference on what I could use the board for.
Also, you can run Fedora, without modification, on ARMv7 boards.

pcDuino3 Nano – vs – BeagleBone Black

This is a much better comparison.  Both boards are running the AllWinner A20.  Both boards can run Fedora, unmodified.  Both boards have 4 Gig of storage onboard, with a micro-sd slot.

pcDuino3 Nano bonus points:

  • 1 GB DRAM (512M on BBB)
  • 1 Gbps ethernet (100M on BBB)
  • SATA port (none on BBB)
  • Full size HDMI video port (micro-hdmi on BBB)

BeagleBone Black bonus points:

  • Boot off micro-sd card with no extra setup (pcDuino takes tweaking to boot off sd-card)
  • Boot into normal kernel (have to use pcDuino kernel for pcDuino)

Summary:
HARDWARE: pcDuino3 Nano wins.
SOFTWARE: BeagleBone Black wins.