If I were moving away from the Raspberry Pi 4, I'd definitely consider the Nvidia Jetson Nano. It comes with a massive cooler attached. Pi 4 needs a cooler which will run you around $20. That puts you rather close to the nano in price ($75 vs $100), but the nano also has a GPU that is enormously more powerful and well worth the extra $25. Not needing special HDMI cables (or adapters) for the Nano is another money saver.

The biggest factor though is support. Raspberry Pi has a lot of software support, so you aren't running into weird bugs here and there with nobody around to help. The Jetson community isn't nearly as big, but Nvidia's track record on their software support is generally quite good. In this case, they have an extra interest given their push for commercial applications and that the X1 sees use in the Nintendo Switch and Shield TV (among other things).

More like 10$ ? https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/fan-shim

I think you mean the RockPro64. The Rock64 only has 4 cores and no PCIe.

That being said, I missed the PCIe on the specs last time I was comparing SOCs and I had forgotten about hackerboards, thanks for the reminder!

http://rockpi.org/ :)

Not seeing a mention of PCIe there on the board?

Scroll down a bit. M.2 on the backside.

Listed under Storage in the specs.

Isn't M.2 storage specific?

eg not a useful PCIe slot for anything other than plugging in an SSD

M.2 has full four lanes PCIe, you can use M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter and use all the standard PCIe cards.

M.2 is a connector specification it has nothing to do with speed. M.2 supports applications such as WIFI, USB, SATA, and PCIe. M.2 SSDs are faster and store more data than most mSATA cards. M.2 SSDs support PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 interfaces, while mSATA only supports SATA. M.2 SATA SSDs have similar performance to mSATA cards, but M.2 PCIe cards are faster. SATA SSDs have a maximum speed of 600 MB per second, while M.2 PCIe cards can hit 4 GB per second.

PCIe support also allows M.2 cards to take advantage of the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol, which brings a large performance advantage over other types of interfaces due to reduced latency, increased IOPS and lower power consumption.

Thanks, hadn't heard of them before. This looks like the right kind of thing:

https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00AP-00018?Description=m.2%20ad...

RockPro64 also has 4x low power A53 cores up to 1.5 GHz and 2x A72 cores up to 2.0 GHz. Big-little style. Just for the curious, so don't need to look it up.

SoC: http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk3399

Amusingly, there appears to be no relationship between the "Rock Pi" and the Rock64/RockPro64 family. These names are really confusing.

They're both based on a Rockchip SOC and any copyrights around "Pi" and "Rock" or "Orange Pi" don't seem to be enforced.

There's a whole parade of micro-computers that don't differentiate each other.

The official heat sink is amazing, and can be used together with a PoE hat. That is a huge winner feature for me since the small fans are obnoxiously loud.

Not seeing a mention of PCIe as an option that can be searched?

Good catch. I search by checking M2 and NVMe then reading the product description on the SBC's website, but hackerboards should add a PCIe field.