LattePanda Mu takes on Raspberry Pi 5 with more powerful quad-core Intel CPU

The LattePanda Mu is the company's latest x86 single board computer, which takes a different approach than the boards it offered in the past. As a matter of fact, it borrows a page from Raspberry Pi. It's not actually a full-fledged computer per se, as you need to pair it up with a carrier board to make it work.

But the good part is that there are already two first-party carrier boards available. One of them is called the Lite Carrier Board, which costs $39, while the other is the Full-Function Evaluation Carrier Board, which costs $89. As a kit, the compute module with the first carrier board starts at $182.90, while it's $232.90 with the latter. As you can expect from the pricing difference, both carrier boards are widely different from each other.

The affordable carrier board for the LattePanda Mu measures 3.5 inches in width and offers a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. So, while it's called "Lite," you can pair the setup up with a GPU if needed. The Full-Function Evaluation Carrier Board, on the other hand, adds another PCIe 3.0 x1 slot, more USB, SATA, and 2.5G Ethernet ports. Like the name suggests, it's more for extensive testing with the compute module.

Of course, the Full-Function Evaluation Carrier Board is more of an ITX motherboard. So, if you want to build a compact single board computer with the compute module, the Lite board is a better choice. Another thing to note is that LattePanda has offered open source carrier board designs and libraries, which you can use to design and make your own.

Regarding the LattePanda Mu itself, it promises to offer more power than the Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB starter kit curr. $169.99 on Amazon). As the company shares, with the Alder Lake Intel N100 CPU, the new compute module is twice as powerful in multi-core and nearly two times better in single-core tests on Geekbench 6. To get a better idea, you can check out the performance comparison chart from the image attached at the end.

Besides, the company says that you can run a wide range of operating systems on a fully equipped LattePanda Mu single board computer. That includes most Linux distros and Windows. If all these sound good to you, you might want to check out the early bird promotion, as the current discount has dropped the starting price of the Lite kit down to $141.90.