The world of SBCs, computers on a single board, has the Raspberry Pi as its dominant star, however, alternatives are gradually appearing. Some with much better hardware in terms of performance and specs. Others, however, much cheaper. In this case, we offer you a board called Mango Pi MQ Pro, which caught our attention. Do you dare to find out 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 brought all attention to focus on RISC-V, a completely open alternative as it had no proprietary company behind it.
And no, we didn’t go to the wrong article with the previous paragraph. And it is that the SBC Mango Pi MQ Pro is based on a RISC-V-like processor instead of betting on one of the ARM types. One thing that sets it apart from the rest of the Rasbperry Pi clones we’ve seen so far is that programs from the Raspberry Pi ecosystem won’t run in this SBC due to binaries incompatibility. A less risky bet, and which indicates China’s intention to create an alternative ecosystem.
Meet Mango Pi MQ Pro, the alternative to Raspberry Pi Zero W based on RISC-V
As you can see from the image below, the processor used is a All-Wiinner D1 with a single 1 GHz core, which contains a RISC-V instruction and register set core, which makes it very interesting for those who wish to experiment with such a processor. Let’s not forget that little by little its use is spreading, so it’s 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 until they are 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. His price? $20, making it much more expensive than the $15 SBC it claims to replace. Although remember, this is one of the cheapest boards with a RISC-V processor. That is if, as we mentioned before, the software 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 RAM memorydepending on the model, a USB type C port, a slot for SD cardsnail Mini HDMI output. In addition, it has classic Raspberry Pi connectors such as 40-pin GPIO. For network connectivitydelivered as standard a WiFi and Bluetooth radio they serve and a 24-pin connector for wired network connection.
