The world of SBCs, computers on a single board, has the Raspberry Pi as its dominant star, however, little by little alternatives are appearing. Some with much better hardware in performance and specifications. Others, however, much cheaper. In this case we bring you a board called Mango Pi MQ Pro, which has caught our attention. Do you dare to discover why?
NVIDIA’s attempted purchase of ARM Holdings highlighted the potential situation in which Jen Hsun Huang’s company would end up controlling the processor ecosystem with the ISA of the same name. This caused all the attention to be focused on RISC-V, a completely open alternative as it did not have any proprietary company behind it.
And no, we have not made the wrong article with the previous paragraph. And it is that the SBC Pi MQ Pro Handle is based on a RISC-V type processor instead of betting on one of the ARM type. An element that differentiates it from the rest of the Rasbperry Pi clones that we have seen so far and that means that the programs of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem will not be executed in this SBC due to incompatibility of the binaries. A bet that is less risky, and that indicates the intention from China to create an alternative ecosystem.
This is Mango Pi MQ Pro, the alternative to Raspberry Pi Zero W based on RISC-V
As you can see in the image below, the processor used is a All-Winner D1 with a single core at 1 GHz, which contains a RISC-V instruction and register set core, which makes it very interesting for those who want to experiment with such a processor. Let’s not forget that little by little its use is spreading, so it is a very good opportunity to get to know them. Unfortunately, at the moment they are only available in the Chinese province of Taobao, so we will have to wait for them to be made available outside of China through well-known platforms such as AliExpress.
The Mango Pi MQ Pro board is designed to be used as alternative to the Raspberry Pi Zero Weven having the same measurements. Its price? $20, making it much more expensive than the $15 SBC it claims to replace. Although remember, it is one of the cheapest boards with a RISC-V processor. That is if, as we have mentioned before, the software that you can use is limited, since you will only have access to certain Linux distributions such as Tina-Linux or Debian. So we completely forgot to use it to be able to load the emulators of your favorite retro systems, as well as the huge amount of utilities for Raspberry Pi.
Its specifications are complemented by configurations of 512 MB or 1 GB of RAMdepending on the model, a USB type C port, a slot for SD cardsa Mini HDMI output. In addition, it has classic Raspberry Pi connectors such as 40 pin GPIO. For network connectivitycomes as standard a WiFi and Bluetooth radio they serve and a 24-pin connector for wired network connection.
