I still use a lot of the Marvell Kirkwood units I had from 2009 or so. My first was a OpenRD board which was I think like $160, but there was a ton of low-end NAS & other gear. My favorite unit was the Iomega iConnect, a simple unit having a plush 512MB flash, 256MB ram, 4 USB ports, gbit ethernet, and an Atheros chipset, and could be had on ebay for $65. Havent had any running for a while, but for a good while these were all over the place.
The Kirkwood was fair. 1.6GHz ARMv5TE-ish cores, custom architecture, but sipping data through a 16 bit DDR2 channel. I had hope that Marvell would progress and keep it up, but they seemed to get harder to find and harder to use and less supported and only show up in some random Android STB as the years went on.
But this is the basis I had during RPi's 2012 arrival. Still flush with hope, of decent upstreamed cores, & it seemed rather like an unfortunate step back. That said, I was buying for twice the price of RPi while only paying rather discounted ebay prices, albeit for consumer goods with wifi, flash, cases, & warranties.
I'm still not sure what I'd point people to today if I wanted to suggest an alternative. The good work done in making blobless rpi happen, in building good upstream drivers has been incredibly impressive. I do wish Freescale had better recognized the need for low cost boards. Now a days, Atmel's SAMA5D3-Xplorer board has really good upstream, great peripherals, Arduino headers, and has fantastic power consumption, but it's three times the RPi price.
iomega iconnect: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/iomega/iconnect
The Kirkwood was fair. 1.6GHz ARMv5TE-ish cores, custom architecture, but sipping data through a 16 bit DDR2 channel. I had hope that Marvell would progress and keep it up, but they seemed to get harder to find and harder to use and less supported and only show up in some random Android STB as the years went on.
But this is the basis I had during RPi's 2012 arrival. Still flush with hope, of decent upstreamed cores, & it seemed rather like an unfortunate step back. That said, I was buying for twice the price of RPi while only paying rather discounted ebay prices, albeit for consumer goods with wifi, flash, cases, & warranties.
I'm still not sure what I'd point people to today if I wanted to suggest an alternative. The good work done in making blobless rpi happen, in building good upstream drivers has been incredibly impressive. I do wish Freescale had better recognized the need for low cost boards. Now a days, Atmel's SAMA5D3-Xplorer board has really good upstream, great peripherals, Arduino headers, and has fantastic power consumption, but it's three times the RPi price.