Libre Computer has been selling Raspberry Pi-like single-board computers for six years… but it’s been five years since the company has introduced a new device. That’s set to change soon.
The company says its first new boards in five years are on the way. The upcoming Libre Computer Sweet Potato appears to be a modest update over the existing Le Potato board. But the new Little Cottonwood and Big Cottonwood boards could be a little more interesting.
According to Libre Computers, Big Cottonwood will offer about twice the performance a Raspberry Pi 4, while the Little Cottonwood will be a cheaper device with a little less horsepower.
The company is being rather vague about pricing, saying that Little Cottonwood will cost about $10 more than Le Potato, while Big Cottonwood will cost twice as much as Le Potato. But it’s kind of hard to pinpoint what the actual price of a Le Potato board is.
Amazon is currently selling models with 2GB of RAM for $35, but the product page says this is a discount off a “list price” of $60. Or you can buy a 1GB version for $30, which appears to be the list price.
Using that as a guide, it seems like Little Cottonwood could sell for $40, $45, or maybe even $70. And Big Cottonwood could be priced at $60, $70, or $120.
There’s no word on what processor the new board boards will have, but a picture posted to Twitter shows what appears to be a credit card-sized single-board computer with USB-A and USB-C ports, an Ethernet jack, a 40-pin GPIO header, and a passive heat sink covering the processor.
The company’s current products support a wide range of operating systems including Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Debian, Armbian, LibreELEC, CoreELEC, and Android.
I haven’t seen many details about the Sweet Potato board, but according to a post to the Libre Computer forum last fall, it features an Amlogic S905X-CC-V2 processor, which is a modest update to the S905X-CC chip used in the original Le Potato board. I haven’t found any good explanation of the differences between the V1 and V2 versions of that chip.
via Tom’s Hardware and @librecomputer
My RaspberryPI 4 has no performance whatsoever. Isn’t 2X nothing still nothing?
Anyone have any idea about the Sweet Potato’s RAM?
While these boards are equivalent or better in the hardware department, their lack of community and software support make them a hard buy for me. I was really struggling with the Le Potato when trying to do simple things like using the GPIO
A lot of ARM boards coming out lately, but I’m still waiting for a Risc-V system. le sigh
There have been Risc-V systems on Liliputing. Try one of them and after you watch soft development on them is really immature you could go back to ARM for a few years.
Have you seen the Milk-V Mars?
Milk-V Mars has a JH7110 and that was benchmarked on a similar board to be equivalent to a RPi 3b+. It’s much slower than a RPi 4b.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/risc-v-business-testing-starfives-visionfive-2-sbc
Fine but justsome1 didn’t specify that it had to be more performant than a RPi 3B+, plus if it has more than 1Gb RAM then it’s already better!