Top 6 Linux Powered Single Board Computers!

1. Raspberry Pi B+

Raspberry adds to the already existing and powerful Linux based single board computers. DIY and gadgets fans, those who like Raspberry Pi, now have a reason to smile with Raspberry Pi B+.
The price remains same as $35, for which you get original Raspberry Pi Model B. This model B uses ARM based Broadcom chipset BCM2835, 512 MB RAM and 700 MHz low power ARM1176JZ-F application processor. The improvement includes a more efficient and space enabling MicroSD card slot in place of normal SDCard slot. 

It also has four USB 2.0 port in place of two ports in Model B. The new SBC(Single Board Computer) has 40 general purpose input/output pins in comparison to Model B’s 26. The B+ also has a single four pin port for both audio and video output capability. Audio circuit has been improved for better and cleaner sound with low noise power supply. B+ also uses a half to full watt less power and has extended battery life. If you require longer battery power, trust this board completely.

2.HummingBoard SBC family

These are expensive than Raspberry. The lease powerful costs $44.99 without $10 power supply and the most powerful board HummingBoard i2eX costs $116.99 a pop. On the other hand, you get powerful RAM and processor with one or two Cortex A9 processor running at 1 GHz with C880 GPU for the lower end model. Higher version comes with 1GB RAM. The storage purpose is solved by MicroSD slot and i2eX adds mSATA interface. The lower versions use ethernet and comes with USB 2.0 ports. These boards supports Android, Yocto, Ubuntu, Debian and FreeBSD.

3. CubieTruck

CubieTruck will cost you $89 a piece which is the most powerful of the current generations of CubieBoard SBC’s and powered by Allwinner A20 system on a chip with dual ARM cortex A7 CPUs and ARM Mali400 MP2 GPU. It has 2 GB of RAM, SATA interface, 100mbps ethernet, pair of USB 2.0 ports, built in Wi-Fi and bluetooth and MicroSD card for storage.The device can run Android 4.2.2 and several versions of Lubuntu.

4.Odroid-U3

If you are looking for speed, Hardkernel’s Odroid-U3 has Samsung Exynos 4412 Prime SoC with 1.7GHz Quad Core ARM cortex A-9 and 3D accelerator Mali 400 Quad Core 440 MHz. Costing you $65, you also get 2 GB of RAM, MicroSD support and USB 2.0 ports and 100Mbps ethernet port.

5.Parallella 

Adapteva Parallella has dual core ARM A-9 processor and 16 core Epiphany-III accelerator chip, 1 GB RAM, MicroSD card, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 ethernet and HDMI connection. The company has begun rolling out new devices, Microserver for $119, Desktop for $149 and Embedded for $249 and all model has 1GB of RAM. It supports Ubuntu, Debian and FreeBSD very well.

6.Arduino

It is not an SBC exactly but first important open hardware board which deserves a space on this list. It has been around since 2005 and always helpful in introducing people to embedding computing. There are 20 of these boards, some assembled and other are to be manually assembled. The best advice is to go with the starter kit and to make programs word, you need to download the open source software developer environment for Mac, PC or Linux. These boards lack any OS of their own. If you like your soldering gun, go for it!