Raspberry Pi 3+ vs Intel Cherry Trail Mini PC

Ozarks

I was considering the purchase of a Rpi 3+ for use with Retropie when a friend reminded me that I had an Intel Mini PC based on the Cherry Trail z8350 SOC, 4Gb RAM and 64Gb eMMC storage lying around doing nothing.
Their view was that the Intel box was far more powerful than the Rpi in all respects and would be a better candidate for Retropie and it's abilities to play pretty much anything better than the Rpi.

Would you agree with them?

Thanks.

mitu

@ozarks said in Raspberry Pi 3+ vs Intel Cherry Trail Mini PC:

Cherry Trail z8350 SOC

Based on specs alone, yes - it's more powerfull than a RPI 3B+. The question though, as with other SoC based systems, is how good is Linux software support for it - OS, GPU, storage ? If you get Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu running on it and it has accelerated video, then go for it.

Ozarks

@mitu said in Raspberry Pi 3+ vs Intel Cherry Trail Mini PC:

@ozarks said in Raspberry Pi 3+ vs Intel Cherry Trail Mini PC:

Cherry Trail z8350 SOC

Based on specs alone, yes - it's more powerfull than a RPI 3B+. The question though, as with other SoC based systems, is how good is Linux software support for it - OS, GPU, storage ? If you get Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu running on it and it has accelerated video, then go for it.

Thank you very much.

I am able to run Ubuntu with hardware accelerated video, so I will use it instead.

barbudreadmon

@ozarks I have a cherry trail mini-pc too, while it's better than a rpi3 for non arm optimized emulators, depending on your cpu frequency you'll potentially have issues with the following systems :

psx (pcsx-rearmed is arm optimized)
n64 (mupen is arm optimized)
sega 32x (picodrive is arm optimized)

praetorian55

I'm running an UP Core board with pretty much the same specs and it runs really well. I'm able to use pretty much all the lag reducing features (including runahead of 3 frames) on 8 and 16 bit consoles with no issues.

Getting the audio to work is a bit tricky, but check out "linuxium" blog that had excellent instructions on how to get it working