LeMaker Guitar Review
LeMaker announced their new Guitar SOM (system on module) and Base Board late June this year, and they were kind enough to send me a pre-release SOM and rev.B baseboard a couple of months later.
Let’s make some music!
(click on image for larger version)
When I review products, I give some leeway to pre-release products, as they have not been finalized, and the software is pre-release… so everything cannot be expected to work perfectly. I tell the manufacturers of any issues I run across, and give them time to fix so that hopefully they will correct any issues I run into before general release.
This also gives me a great opportunity to judge their technical support 🙂
Early in October, LeMaker sent me a second Guitar + Base Board sample, which had fixed most earlier issues (more about the issues later in this review), unfortunately due to other demands on my time I could not publish this article earlier.
I believe this base board and Guitar module are the same revison that was just released for sale.
In this review, I will go over what I found with both revisions of the Guitar, and present benchmark results for both revisions, along with comparisons to other SBC’s.
I did not run benchmarks on my Raspberry Pi Compute Module as it is a different animal – a development board bringing out the Broadcom SOC to more headers, with few on board interfaces, and is not meant for “normal” users. It also costs a lot more. If you are curious, the performance of the CM would be very similar to a Raspberry Pi Model B+ for compute bound tasks due to using the same SOC and memory.
Full Disclosure: LeMaker provided the Guitars and Rev.B base boards used in this review, but please be assured my reviews are always unbiased!
I intend to revise the review once alternate base boards are released.
Does the LeMaker Guitar with Base Board look like a Raspberry Pi Compute Module and base board?
(Guitar 1, Guitar 2, Compute Module – click on image for larger version)
No, it does not. Not even remotely.
As far as the base boards go, the Guitar’s has a LOT more I/O connectors, and the Guitar similarly has a lot more chips on the SOM.
Here is the rev 1.3 Guitar module and second Base Board compared to a Raspberry Pi Compute Module:
(Compute Module and Guitar 2- click on image for larger version)
Article Index
- Introduction
- A Closer Look at LeMaker Guitar & Base Board
- Feature Comparison
- Operating Systems, Software Compatibility
- Common Applications, WiFi, Bluetooth
- Hardware Compatibility
- More on Hardware Compatibility
- Benchmarks: Booting&Apps, Compiling Emacs, Sysbench
- Benchmarks: iperf client & server, NBench, UnixBench
- Benchmarks: hdparm, dd, Documentation, Support, Conclusion
