Nvidia Jetson TX2

https://www.siliconhighwaydirect.co.uk/product-p/945-82771-0...

The price difference though...

Generally speaking you can choose either power efficiency or a wide bus, but rarely both. If you want a crappy underpowered m.2 slot, probably Intel Atom is the cheapest route.

High performance ARM with m.2 PCI, not sure, but guessing if it's around it probably isn't cheap

Let's say one has a friend who doesn't know what "a wide bus" refers to... What would be a good way of explaining it to said friend?

A single PCIe lane can draw 0.5 A, 4x rises to 2 A.

Separately, (random top Google result cutpaste):

    Architectural-level power optimization can target different system
    components such as CPU, caches, main memory,and buses [5, 6, 22, 4]. Power
    spent in off-chip buses can be a significant portion of the overall power
    budget. As an example, the core power consumption of Intel Celeron at
    266MHz is 16W, while its off-chip bus (for a standard configuration)
    operating at 133 MHz consumes 3.3W [12, 13]. The contribution of off-chip
    bus power consumption to the overall power budget increases even more for
    embedded systems with low-power processor cores and memories, making
    off-chip  buses  a  potential  candidate  for  power  optimization. Figure
    1 shows the power consumption due to off-chip data bus for several embedded
    benchmark codes as a percentage of the overall power consumption (which
    includes processor data path, caches, buses, TLB, register file,
    instruction issue logic, clock, and off-chip memory) for an
    embedded processor.  From this figure, we see that the off-chip data bus
    consumes between 9.8% and 23.2% of the total power consumed by the system
    depending on the benchmark being run. So, reducing the power consumption
    of the off-chip data bus would reduce the overall power consumption of
    the system to a considerable extent

More lanes on the freeway.

Yeah, that makes sense. I wouldn't expect the same price point as an RPi and would love a higher performance CPU, but I think they are not out there at the moment. Wouldn't mind having something like 8 graviton2 cores and an nvme slot :)

Maybe there's something out there, but I don't know of any other SBCs than the Pi4 having more or equal to 8GB.

If you can settle for 4GB, there's tye Rock Pi 4 which has a variant with on-board eMMC or an m.2 slot.

Also Friendlyarm's NanoPC T4.

M.2 PCIe x4, 4GB LPDDR3 (a bit old perhaps).

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Odroid has a 4gb with sata ports: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

The new pi compute module has an 8gb model with a pci-express slot that can take nvme: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...

Many systems based on Rockchip RK3399 have a native SATA/nvme interface, but only go up to 4GB ram.

Comparison of "Model B" single-board computers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jWMaK-26EEAKMhmp6SLh...

Considerably more powerful and expensive, but the Jetson TX2 or Xavier NX fits this niche quite well.

If you're going to spend $400 for a Jetson, you might add another $100 and just get a powerful tablet and bet better performance

Check out the upcoming Turing Pi 2. Seems very promising in every regard.

https://turingpi.com/

Seeedstudio ODYSSEY X86J4105800, $190. It has 2x M.2 slots and they have 5x SATA M.2 card too.

Rockpi M4V2, not ideal on RAM but does the job with eMMC or SD or NVMEe boot after reflash