Beaglebone

Galileo in the Doghouse?

In one of my previous blogs I compared the Galileo board against the Raspberry Pi  Today we are looking at how the Galileo board compares to the affordable Beaglebone Black board. The Beaglebone is an initiative by Texas Instruments (TI). Unlike the Raspberry PI the Beaglebone board is all open source. Anyway let’s look at the key technical data:

Beaglebone Black Intel Galileo
Target price: US$45 US$69
SoC: Texas Instruments Sitara AM3359 Intel Quark X1000
CPU: 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8, NEON floating-point accelerator, 2x PRU 32-bit microcontrollers 400MHz 32-bit x86 Pentium Class CPU
GPU: SGX530 3D graphics accelerator none
Memory (DRAM): 512MB DDR3 RAM 256 Mbyte
PCIe ports: none PCIe 2.0
USB 2.0 ports: 1 Host,
1 Device
1 Host,
2 Device
Video input: none
Video outputs: HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4) none
Audio outputs: stereo via HDMI none
Onboard storage: 2GB 8-bit eMMC on-board flash storage
SD/MMC/SDIO 3.3V card slot
SD/MMC/SDIO 3.3V card slot
Onboard network: 10/100 Ethernet 10/100 Ethernet
Low-level peripherals: Power 5V, 3.3V , VDD_ADC(1.8V)
3.3V I/O on all signals
McASP0, SPI1, I2C, GPIO(69 max), LCD, GPMC, MMC1, MMC2, 7 AIN(1.8V MAX), 4 Timers, 4 Serial Ports, CAN0, EHRPWM(0,2),XDMA Interrupt, Power button, Expansion Board ID
16 × GPIO,
UART, I²C bus, SPI
Power ratings: 210-460 mA @ 5V 550 mA (1.9-2.2W)
Power source: 5 Volt 5 Volt
Size: 86.36 mm x 53.34 mm (3.4 in x 2.1 in) 106.68 mm x 71.12 mm (4.2 in x 2.8 in)

Both boards offer pretty similar technical data. One of the main difference is the absence of a graphics engine and HDMI interfaces in the Galileo’s X1000 Quark processor. This obviously makes the Galileo less of a choice for graphics application. The Beaglebone also offers a higher CPU clock speed which will give you additional punch. However, if you need a miniPCIe slot Galileo is the way to go.
To close the triangle  I also recommend the detailed comparison  of the Raspberry Pi vs. the Beaglebone published in Make Magazine.