Hands On With The Atomic Pi As A $35 Intel Atom Alternative To The Raspberry Pi

After a successful Kickstarter campaign and honoring those obligations, the Atomic Pi recently hit retail channels (albeit sold out currently) as a $35 Intel Atom powered single board computer to compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi.

For $35 USD, the Atomic Pi comes in at the same price as a Raspberry Pi Model B.

The Atomic Pi offers an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 quad-core, 2GB DDR3L-1600 memory, 16GB eMMC, SD slot, USB 3.0/2.0 ports, 802.11ac WiFI, Bluetooth 4.0, and Gigabit Ethernet, It's quite a board for the price and to compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi.

The one glaring design defect is the lack of an easy power setup, which requires either a break-out board to be bought separately, a mini break-out board to be bought separately (only $3), or doing some hard-wiring on your own. I made this mistake myself when quickly ordering an Atomic Pi only to realize the headaches in the power connectivity and now the break-out boards also being sold-out, so waiting on that for testing.

It's certainly an interesting opportunity for a $35 Intel SBC... More details can be found at Digital-Loggers.com.

While I don't yet have my Atomic Pi powered up, others in the community have already been running benchmarks with the Phoronix Test Suite and uploaded their results to OpenBenchmarking.org.

Benchmarks of this Atomic Pi can be found by searching for AAEON MF-001 with Aaeon being the manufacturer of this board. Stay tuned for our formal Atomic Pi performance benchmarks soon.