Presently I’m running the roon core on my old macbook late 2010.
I’m wondering if I would be able to run the roon core (linux) on a raspberry Pi 3 or cubieboard 4 and use it as an output at the same time.
The CPU power of those boards should not be the problem. My old Mac is doing fine even with DSP engine switched on.
Will the low amount of ram (raspi 1GB, cubieboard 2GB) be the real problem ?
Has anyone tried this already?
Yes. Only minimal libraries will work with this little RAM, if that.
No, we don’t provide a Roon Core for ARM CPUs.
In raw processing power, you “old Mac” is running at Intel Core2 (unless you have that first Core Solo Macbook – very rare indeed) or higher, and even the ancient Intel CPUs in the Macs blows away the RPi3.
The Cubieboard is a different beast… it’s a much faster ARM, and although it may be able to provide a minimally good experience, it’s not one we wish to support until:
ARM performance goes up considerably
the amount of RAM is increased to 4gb commonly
the storage option is not limited to poor performing eMMC or SDCard (we’d like a proper SATA or NVMe based SSD)
the availability of such products is widespread
There are boxes that already meet the above specifications out there, but they cost similar to an Intel NUC.