Comparative Analysis of Common Development Boards

A microprocessor development board containing a printed circuit board, a microprocessor and some additional support logic serves users of the microprocessor as a method to prototype applications in products. We have a lot of development boards in the market today and it might get difficult to distinguish them at times.

The introduction of Arduino in 2005 made designing personal systems simpler for hobbyists and budding engineers. It consists of open source computer hardware and software. Intended for specialists, designers, and anybody intrigued by making intelligent articles, the simplicity of working with the board has made it into a means of learning with students.

The Raspberry Pi made waves due to the number of available features in the low price bracket. It can be easily plugged into a monitor, computer or your television. Also it uses standard mouse and keyboard.

Beagleboard is another low-power, open-source hardware, single-board computer developed by a a small team of engineers as an educational board for students. With the new Wi-fi and Bluetooth additions the scope of the board has significantly increased. This includes features for Internet of Things(IoT) development.

A recent launch is GR-Peach by Renesas Electronics. The board working upto 400MHz embeds an ARM Cortex-A9 central processing unit (CPU) core to handle the processing. The RZ/A1H 324 pin BGA includes a 32 Kb L1 instruction cache, another 32 Kb L1 data cache along with a 128 Kb L2 cache.

Board name	Dimensions	Processor	Power	RAM	Storage	Peripherals
GR-Peach	67.58 x 53.34 mm	ARM cortex-A9 @400 MHz	3.3v	10 MB	MicroSD	Ethernet, USB2.0, ADC, UART, GPIO, I2C, SPI
Raspberry Pi 3	85.60 x 56.5 mm	Quad core ARM cortex-A53 @1.2 GHz	4v	1 GB	MicroSD	Ethernet, GPIO, USB 2.0, Bluetooth 4.1
Arduino 101	68.6 x 53.4 mm	Intel curie two tiny cores, an x86(Quark) and an ARC	5v	25Kb		Ethernet, USB connector, BLE, PWM o/p
Beagleboard-x15	107 x 102 mm	ARM cortex-A8@720 MHz	5v	512 MB	MicroSD	Ethernet, USB OTG, USB 2.0, HDMI, Bluetooth