A speedy rival to Raspberry Pi
Single-board computers are remarkably popular at the moment, spearheaded by the success of the Raspberry Pi. They’re used by hobbyists to control everything from Morse-code transmitters to robots, but are also fully functioning PCs that can be used for browsing the web, watching videos and programming.
Imagination Technologies is best known for developing the PowerVR graphics chip used by a number of tablet manufacturers, including Apple and Samsung. Imagination’s new £50 CI20 single-board computer has a PowerVR SGX540 graphics chip, which broadly performs on a par with the Broadcom VideoCore IV found in the Raspberry Pi. Like the Pi, therefore, the CI20 has no trouble playing 1080p videos.
Whereas the Raspberry Pi uses a single-core 700MHz ARM1176JZF-S ARM processor and 512MB of memory, the CI20 has a dual-core 1.2GHz Ingenic XBurst JZ4780 MIPS processor and 1GB of memory, so it’s definitely more powerful. As our benchmark tests don’t run on single-board computers, we ran a simple encryption test instead. The CI20 was around a third faster than the Pi B+. Bear in mind, the CI20 uses a MIPS-based processor, so any programs you have for the ARM-based Pi won’t work unless you compile them again.
This superior performance level comes at a cost – higher power consumption. The CI20 drew 4W most of the time, peaking at 5W during a particularly demanding compile – we suspect this is also partially due to the inefficient power adapter included with the CI20. For the sake of comparison, we measured the Raspberry Pi B+ using an iPad USB power adapter (it doesn’t come with its own) at 2W idle and 3W active.
The CI20 only has two USB ports – two fewer than the Raspberry Pi B+. There’s also a mini USB port, but this can only be used when one of the full-size USB ports is not being used – you can’t use both simultaneously. There’s a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port and, unlike the Pi, the CI20 has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in. The headphone jack doubles as a speaker port.
The CI20 is built with electronics projects in mind, so there are plenty of options for connecting and controlling external devices – an ITU645 camera connector, 25 General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins, and two UART connectors for attaching serial devices.
Unlike most single-board computers, the CI20 is ready to use as soon as you take it out of the box, because it comes with Debian Linux 7.5 pre-installed. A special version of Android 4.4 is the only other officially supported operating system (OS), but many other Linux distributions will work and, conveniently, you can even run them from a microSD card so you don’t have to abandon your main OS. Android on the CI20 is an odd beast because it lacks access to the Google Play Store. You can manually install Android apps, and a handful are pre-installed, but the overall result is far less functional than Debian.
Although the CI20 is faster than the Raspberry Pi B+, we don’t regard this as a significant selling point, given the undemanding nature of most tasks and projects you’re likely to undertake on a single-board computer. The built-in Wi-Fi is useful, but we missed the B+’s extra USB ports. The MIPS-based processor runs Linux just as well as more popular Intel and ARM-based processors, and only a couple of niche programs failed to compile on it.
We’d have preferred the CI20 to come with more tools and tutorials to help budding new programmers, in the way that Pi came with the IDLE Python development environment. An even greater problem is that the CI20 lacks the multitude of tutorials, projects, active communities and enthusiast groups that the Pi benefits from – the CI20 community is barebones and moribund in comparison. We look forward to future versions of the CI20, but for now there’s little here to tempt you away from the Pi.
VERDICT
A fast and generally well equipped single-board computer, but most hobbyists and programmers, especially beginners, are still better off with a Raspberry Pi.
SPECIFICATIONS
1.2GHz Ingenic XBurst JZ4780 dual-core processor • 1GB memory • 8GB SSD • MicroSD slot • 200MHz PowerVR SGX540 graphics chip • 1x 10/100Mbps Ethernet port • 802.11b/g/n • Bluetooth 4.0 • 25-pin GPIO connector • 90x95mm (WxD)