A new high-speed competitor to the Raspberry Pi could hit store shelves soon.Libre computer only announced on twitter The company’s next-generation line of single-board computers, dubbed Project Cottonwood, will arrive in the third quarter alongside its flagship “Big Cottonwood,” which offers twice the speed of the Raspberry Pi 4, currently the fastest Pi on the market. It is scheduled to be released.
Long known for making Raspberry Pi-sized boards, Company based in Shenzhen, China I posted just one image of Project Cottonwood, along with some details. These will be at least two SKUs. One is the “Little Cottonwood” which costs $10 more than the brand’s current “Le Potato” board. go for $35 The “Big Cottonwood” on Amazon is twice the price of Le Potato, but twice as fast as the Pi 4. Doing the math, the two boards seem to be $45 and $70 respectively.
The company has been very careful with its specs, covering the SoC with a heatsink in sample photos and only saying it’s some sort of ARMv6 processor when asked by users on Twitter. However, you can glean some information from the photos alone.
The board is very similar to the company’s existing Le Potato, having the same shape and size as the Raspberry Pi 3B, but with a white PCB. Like the Pi 3B (and unlike the Pi 4), it has a single full size HDMI output instead of dual micro HDMI ports. Like all Pi B models, the one pictured has a 40-pin GPIO, a CSI camera connector and a DSI display connector.
It’s an improvement over Le Potato, which boasts USB 2.0, and appears to have at least two USB 3.0 ports on the back. This is simply because the blue color shows through the metal in the image. Also, this board seems to use his USB-C power connector instead of the previous board’s microUSB power connector. However, the connector is blurry and not very clear.
We don’t know who makes Project Cottonwood’s SoCs, but we do know that Libre uses processors from AllWinner, RockChip and Amlogic in their current line of SBCs. Amlogic’s S905X drives the most Cottonwood and Raspberry Pi 3 looking Le Potato.
Le Potato can run a variety of operating systems including Ubuntu, Android, Debian, and the Raspberry Pi’s own Raspbian “Buster” platform. So it seems likely that the same OS set will run on Project Cottonwood. However, according to one reviews readLe Potato is not fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi HAT, but may work with software translation.
Libre Computers said in a Twitter post that it had been working on Project Cottonwood all through 2019, and that the product line, along with another product called Sweet Potato, would be the first new product in over five years. Coincidentally, the Raspberry Pi 4 was released in his 2019 and has been at the top of the Raspberry Pi product stack ever since.
Chip shortages have made it harder to find Raspberry Pi products in recent years, but availability appears to be improving, said CEO Eben Upton. recently told Jeff Gearing Stocks should improve significantly in the second half of the year. He also put on record that the Raspberry Pi 5 is not scheduled to launch in 2023.
If it can beat the Raspberry Pi 4 in terms of speed and availability, Libre Computer could secure its place among manufacturers. But the size of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, including HATs, cases, and other accessories, makes it difficult for anyone else to contend for his SBC throne.
