But certainly don’t imitate his choices, his economics aren’t your economics!
But certainly don’t imitate his choices, his economics aren’t your economics!
Then look at Apple’s ARM offerings, and AWS Graviton if you need ARM with raw power.
If you need embedded/GPIO you should consider an Arduino, or clone. If you need GPIOs and Internet connectivity, look at an ESP32. GPIOs, ARM and wired ethernet? Consdier the the STM32H.
Robotics/machine vision applications, needing IO and lots of compute power? Consider a regular PC with an embedded processor on serial or USB. Or nvidia jetson if you want to run CUDA stuff.
And take a good hard look at your assumptions, as mini PCs using the Intel N100 CPU are very competitive with modern Pis.
But single board computers with something external to do your GPIO is often way more compelling.
I would throw in the RP2040 for consideration as well, and nRF chips if you need wireless connectivity.
My cursory research indicates that a low end ryzen would make sense if you are building the board yourself. Right now, I haven’t found a new ryzen mini pc sub 200$. New N100 minis can be had for 150-175$, and if you don’t care so much about power N95 minis are even cheaper.
RockChip, maybe? Little bit pricier but more powerful than Rpi?