Although Raspberry led the way, the competition has caught up very quickly and the options for competing with the Pi are currently vast. You just have to look at what the electronics manufacturer Aaeon has just done with its new model, which brings benefits far above what others offer.
PICO-WHU4: maximum power for a Pico-ITX board
We have seen for many years options as compact as NUCs from Intel itself. Powerful equipment and very complete in a space that is almost reduced to a minimum, with ridiculous consumption and in certain models, great features.
But, although Intel itself has designed systems like its Sticks, it has not entered the world dominated by Raspberry. It has been the Aaeon company that is going to give war and which wants to revolutionize this market with its PICO-WHU4.
With dimensions of 100 x 72 mm it is a little larger than the Raspberry Pi 4 B, but not by much, and it is that the size in this case does matter when you want to include everything that this model has inside.
The Raspberry board as we all know includes a Cortex A-72 Quadcore at 1.5 GHz It has raised good reviews, but this little has to do against the options that Aaeon faces on your device.
| Processor | Cores / threads | Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | L3 cache (MB) | Graphics | IGPU Base Frequency / Boost Frequency (MHz) | TDP (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core i7-8665UE | 4/8 | 1.7 / 4.7 | 8 | Intel UHD Graphics 620 | 300 / 1,150 | fifteen |
| Core i5-8365UE | 4/8 | 1.6 / 4.1 | 6 6 | Intel UHD Graphics 620 | 300 / 1,050 | fifteen |
| Core i3-8145UE | 2/4 | 2.2 / 3.9 | 4 4 | Intel UHD Graphics 620 | 300 / 1,000 | fifteen |
| Celeron 4305UE | 2/2 | 2.0 / 2.0 | two | Intel UHD 610 graphics | 300 / 1,000 | fifteen |
As we see, the options range from a Celeron Dual Core and without HT, to an incredible Core i7-8665UE with four cores and eight threads at an incredible speed of up to 4.7 GHz. As if that were not enough, the iGPU has not been disabled and it will have the UHD 610 or 620, so we will have enough power to perform certain calculations and to run games, all with a nominal TDP of 15W.
Great RAM support and amazing connectivity
Perhaps the most surprising section is that of RAM, since it manages to support up to 16 GB of DDR4 at 2400 MHz SODIMM, passing through LPDDR4-3200 in configurations of 1GB, 2 GB and 4 GB respectively, the latter all soldered clearly.
The connections are not short either, since we will have a SATA III, an mSATA or mPCIE x1, an M.2 2230 two COM and an RS-232/422/485, this to start.
It continues with two HDMI 1.4b capable of 4K UHD 3840 x 2160 resolution, two Realtek RTL81111G Ethernet with Gigabit compatibility, two USB 3.2 Gen2 ports and two internal USB 2.0.
To finish, this PICO-WHU4 is designed to withstand quite harsh conditions, as it is capable of withstanding temperatures of up to 60 degrees and humidity ranges of up to 90%. But if we want to improve temperatures, the brand offers a heatsink that can be purchased separately.
The only problem as we can imagine will be its price, since seeing its benefits it will not be cheap as such, and it is that it plays in a completely different league than the Raspberry Pi logically. Its price for the "mid-range" model with the i5-8365UE is $ 783, to which it would seem necessary to add the price of memory.
Therefore, this is a board intended for users with higher market demands that require a much higher power than what the original Raspberry Pi alternative offers.
