LattePanda IOTA Palm-Sized Intel x86 SBC Is Here To Challenge Raspberry Pi 5
Lattepanda compares the IOTA against the Raspberry Pi 5 directly in the graph above, using Geekbench 6 results. It's no surprise that the relatively modern Gracemont cores trounce the older Cortex-A76 cores in the Broadcom SoC that the Pi uses, although it's worth noting that they have a 1.2 GHz clock rate advantage. To hit that speed, you'll need the active cooler that Lattepanda offers for the system, although you could probably rig up your own cooling just as well. Besides improved performance, the x86-64 ISA of the N150 means a vast library of software is immediately available, too.
As standard, the IOTA includes three 10-Gbps USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 jack, Gigabit Ethernet, a headphone jack, a MicroSD card slot, and a variety of tiny FPC connectors for things like eDP, I2C, and curiously, PCI Express 3.0 x1. You'll need an expansion board to access the latter, but it supports full M.2-2280 SSDs as long as you're fine with the 1 GB/second transfer rate cap. For other purposes, there's an M.2 E-key slot (typically filled with a Wi-Fi card), a GPIO header, and a power input header that can be used with a PoE or "UPS" add-on, the latter of which uses three 18650 lithium cells.
Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention pricing; you don't buy SBCs because they're super capable, after all. The Lattepanda IOTA starts at $129 for a device with 8GB of LPDDR5 memory 64GB of eMMC storage onboard. That's the bare board, though; if you want a kit with a Wi-Fi card and a cooling solution it's going to start at about $170. The version with 16GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage starts at $175 and prices go up from there. You can add four different expansion boards, an aluminum case, a dedicated (non-USB) power adapter, and an e-DP touch display to your order over at DFRobot.
