Right now the most powerful ARM-based computers available to consumers are Chromebooks. The Raspberry Pi is a great deal and all, and a fully functional $35 Linux desktop, but it’s vastly less powerful than what most of us would deem acceptable for web browsing and actual work.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every flagship phone released these days has performance challenging that of a ultraportable laptop, at least in pure processing speed, and Huawei has just made the relatively obvious choice to sell its smartphone SoC (system on a chip) as a tiny little Linux computer.

Huawei’s $239 HiKey 960 board, as spotted by PCWorld, is based on its octa-core Kirin 960 chip, which has four high-end Cortex-A73 cores, and four low-power…

Continue reading…