It is surprising that for so long, no one had come up with a variant or clone of the ever-popular credit card sized single board computer, the Raspberry Pi or the RBPi. Ultimately, there is a Banana Pi from Lemaker, a China-based company. Banana Pi, although an RBPi-alike, is not a direct clone, but rather an evolution. Lemaker has used a more modern dual-core processor – the 1GHz ARMv7 AllWinner A20 – in place of the single-core ARMv6 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835. Lemaker has doubled the RAM to 1GB and Banana Pi has additional connectivity such as a USB OTG port and a SATA 2.0 port with built-in 5V power supply for 2.5-inch storage devices up to 2TB.
Performance comparisons between the two are stunning. During testing, the 95th percentile SysBench time for the Banana Pi was 29.72ms, outshining the RBPi’s 51.45ms. Banana Pi took only 2.39s to compress and 0.21s to decompress a 10MB gzip test file. RBPi was much slower on the same test and clocked 8.64s and 3.08s respectively. This proves that the dual-core processor is better at multithreaded applications as compared to the single-core processor on the RBPi.
Banana Pi has a somewhat larger footprint than the RBPi, which makes it incompatible to the several RBPi cases and mounts available in the market. Although the 26-pin GPIO header is claimed to be pin-for-pin compatible electrically, its position is shifted from the RBPi’s layout to make room for a mounting hole. Therefore, larger piggyback boards foul with the composite video output on the Banana Pi.
The A20 chip on the Banana Pi lacks the CSI or Camera Serial Interface and uses a parallel camera interface instead. Therefore, none of the off-the-shelf camera modules meant for the RBPi will connect to the Banana Pi. Lemaker has promised a camera module of its own in the near future.
Rather than produce a distribution just for their board, Lemaker has taken the route to porting existing Linux distributions to the Banana Pi. Therefore, users are treated to flavors of Linaro, Arch, openSUSE, Raspbian and Google’s Android as SD Card images. These distributions had trouble addressing the GPIO ports at the time of launch. However, Lemaker has worked hard and removed these bottlenecks. Now, most projects based on Wiring Pi, Raspbian or RPi.GPIO libraries have no trouble at all working on Banana Pi.
The Banana Pi, along with its faster processor, also boasts of faster and more reliable USB ports. However, the most interesting addition is its SATA connectivity. This is not offered even in the newest RBPi Model B+. You can connect a mass storage device to the Banana Pi via the angled SATA port on the top side of the board, without tying up one of the USB ports. However, Banana Pi has only a 233Mb/s network throughput.
Overall, although Lemaker may have blatantly attempted to copy the RBPi, it has demonstrated possibilities of a few impressive improvements. On the positive side are the more powerful processor and the useful SATA port. On the negative side, there is the larger footprint, lack of CSI and altered layout along with a bottlenecked network and software bugs.
