Intel's homage to Raspberry Pi: The much pricier Minnowboard
Open source, or open your wallet? — The huge popularity of the British-designed Raspberry Pi has caught Chipzilla's attention, and so you can now buy a similar bare-bones x86 PC named Minnowboard with a similar caseless design running an Angstrom Linux build.
Context & Ripple Effects
The single-board Linux computer was already a proven category before this launch: a tiny quad-core ARM board from a Korean company sold for $129 back in mid-2012, and Raspberry Pi turned the format into a mass phenomenon. Intel's MinnowBoard is the first confirmed move by a major x86 chipmaker into that space — a caseless bare-bones PC running Angstrom Linux, explicitly framed as a response to the British board's popularity.
For Intel, the timing fits its broader small-device push: after failing to win a place in the iPhone and ceding smartphone silicon to rivals, it has been building out a devices unit under former Apple and Palm executive Mike Bell and chasing mobile wins like the Clover Trail-based Samsung Galaxy Tab 3. The MinnowBoard gives the company a developer-facing showcase for x86 in exactly the maker segment where ARM owns mindshare.
First-order effects
- Embedded and hobbyist developers gain an official x86 single-board option with Angstrom Linux support, letting them prototype on the same architecture they deploy in Intel-based products.
- Intel gets a low-cost vehicle to prove x86 viability outside PCs and servers, complementing its Haswell-era efficiency gains and its mobile push under Mike Bell's new devices unit.
Second-order effects
- ARM-based board makers, Raspberry Pi foremost among them, now face a chip-giant competitor whose pricing is admittedly higher — forcing the category to compete on ecosystem and software compatibility rather than price alone.
- Tooling and OS vendors gain a reason to treat dual-architecture (ARM plus x86) support as table stakes for single-board platforms.
Third-order effects
- If major silicon vendors keep entering the hobbyist-board market, single-board computers shift from a niche open-hardware movement to a strategic beachhead where chipmakers subsidize cheap hardware to seed their architectures in future embedded designs.
The trend: Single-board Linux computers are evolving from an ARM-led open-hardware niche into contested territory where major chipmakers deploy cheap reference boards to win over developers.