[thom_nic]

I think "ecosystem" doesn't actually matter much (if "ecosystem" means maker/ tinkerer mindshare) for commercial applications. All you need is (1) kernel support for the chip including drivers e.g. for video/ peripherals, and (2) good userland support for aarch64. You can debootstrap a Debian rootfs that will work on any aarch64 chip. As mentioned elsewhere, it sounds like the H5 chip has good kernel support which covers (1.) Actually there's a (3), which is bootloader support. I don't know if the H3 typically uses u-boot or some other bootloader.

What differs is what each chip actually supports. E.g the Pi/BCM2835 doesn't have onboard ethernet MAC/Phy. Neither Pi nor H3 have onboard CAN but maybe neither of those things matter. Point is these days most of the details of the chip are abstracted away; if you have good kernel support there's not a lot to worry about.

[oneplane]

Ecosystem does not mean maker/thinkerer mindshare in this case. It means hardware, I/O, software, firmware and available knowledge from the board perspective, and active distro integration from a software perspective. There are enough people and there is enough momentum to build and maintain multiple software distributions for the Pi (and it's BCM SoC), as well as upstream patches and maintain those. Even in the commercial space you will not find such well supported boards.

This does not mean that other boards won't work or won't have a place, but are highly unlikely to cover the same global space the Pi does.

[imtringued]

There is no real demand for alternatives to the RPi.

People who buy RPis don't care about specs and price. They usually buy only one for $35 and use it to get linux experience or they already have a specific usecase in mind like retropi, pihole, etc.

I once wanted to work on the mali open source driver but now I'm thinking: What's the point? Nobody (including me) gives a shit about it anyway. Just spend $15 more on that RPi 3.

[thom_nic]

> There is no real demand for alternatives to the RPi.

Only if you quality that with "among consumers." There is tons of demand for ARM-based modules that are designed to be embedded in a commercial product. Comparing this product to any SBC such as RPi3 or Orange Pi completely misses the point. Just look at the headers on pretty much every SBC. If you see 0.1" pitch headers, it's meant for hobbyists, not commercial application.

As mentioned elsewhere, you can compare this to CM3, but there are tons of other players in this space (and there have been for longer than the CM has been around.) To name a few: Anything from Variscite, Myir, Toradex: note many of these cost well north of $50 because they're meant for commercial/ industrial. Samsung Artik 053, Chip Pro, Olimex SOMs and SOPINE are some newer players that have been pushing the price down a bit in this space. So this product is price competitive, esp since there aren't many aarch64 modules out there.

Specifically: if you were designing a product that needs Ethernet (esp GbE) you almost certainly would not choose the RPi CM because it's not on the BCM chip. i.MX and AM335x support 10/100 MAC/Phy, H5 supports GbE. If you were doing an automotive product, RPi and H5 do not have CAN, so you might choose an AM335x SOM. There is definitely a real demand for alternatives to the RPi in the space that this product is targeting.