Les Pounder
works with groups such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation to help boost people’s maker skills.
At Tom’s Hardware, I’ve recently been testing single-board computers (SBCs) that use Intel CPUs rather than the Arm processors found in the Raspberry Pi. The Intel N100, an Alder Lake N-based CPU, has four cores, four threads and turbos to 3.4GHz. Sure, it uses a little more power – 6W versus the Raspberry Pi 5’s 2.7W at idle – but the inclusion of an Intel CPU means that essentially we have a tiny desktop PC that can run any of the Linux distributions that we love. And yes, it can also run Windows 11, should you really want to.
The Radxa X4 (https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/) is the latest such SBC to cross my desk. It apes the Raspberry Pi form factor and provides pretty decent performance for less money than the Raspberry Pi 5.
Other SBCs often fall short of the Raspberry Pi in one key area: the GPIO. However, the Radxa X4 has a trick up its sleeve: it has a Raspberry Pi RP2040 on board. Yes, the same chip as the Raspberry Pi Pico, and the 40-pin GPIO mimics the Raspberry Pi pinout but provides all of the features found in the Pico. We just need to do a little Linux magic to communicate to the Pico via serial using Thonny, and we are good to go.
At the moment, it is still early days for testing, but so far I am pretty impressed with the mix of Intel performance and Raspberry Pi GPIO. Keep an eye on www.tomshardware.com/author/les-pounder for the full review.