The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)
> 3) Lower RAM;
> 4) Lower perf;
Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.
So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the BeagleBone Black probably performs better for most workloads.
In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.
It disappoints me greatly that people never seem to have a genuinely good answer for this when I ask.
> The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)
> Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.
Most people buying don't notice such things. Also, the BBB is at-least $10 more expensive.
> In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.
For people with principles in favour of Free & Open computing (like me) who are buying for personal use, perhaps. Unfortunately for this argument, most people don't care about that. In fact, I'm currently supporting a product shipping with the RPi 3B in quantities large enough to qualify as "real quantities".
We don't talk to Broadcom. As you note, they simply do not care if you're not very big fish. Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a big enough fish, and they do care, so we talk to them instead.
RPI has mainline kernel support for all its components, pretty much every other ARM devices has at least a closed source GPU driver, meaning you are going to be stuck on some old kernel forever eventually.
My Beagle Bone Black gets no use at all. I find its only redeeming quality the little deterministic helper cores, but in practice I'd rather use an FPGA/CPLD.
For everything else, memory size, network speed, and flash speed trumps everything. For me ODROID XU4 is the best, followed by ODROID C2. The thinker board looks like a contender but I was disappointed by the comparison to RPi3 whose strengths (community) and weaknesses (everything else) are long well understood.
The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)
> 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf;
Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.
So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the BeagleBone Black probably performs better for most workloads.
In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.
It disappoints me greatly that people never seem to have a genuinely good answer for this when I ask.