Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer

[MicroStrand]

It maybe has found a niche in ultra low power parallel computing, but the piss poor journalism goes for the hype instead.

Their price of $99 is only for the minimum configuration, the full price is $199. They say it is intended for research and education at universities. But anyway, the idea to put 16 cores in a SoC is nothing special, and without an operating system plus software, specifically designed for this type of architecture, meaningless.

[MicroStrand]

And the RPi hasn't been "the only game in town in this space" pretty much since the RPi came out, just the one with the lowest price; there've been an assload of cheap small ARM boards at similar price points to the Parallella, so I don't know why the journalist thinks that the Parallella is in any particular competition with the RPi specifically.

You're damn right, there are enough boards with a lot more learning potential, like for example the BeagleBoard xM, PandaBoard ES, or the SBC2100 by IC Nexus. They have not only more interfaces, but provide much more flexibility for software solutions. Sheer computing power is just not all.