x86 for professional-grade performance

“For all the people building robots and drones and wanting to do hardware hacking, BeagleBone Black has all that expansion hardware on there,” Kridner adds. “For some of these platforms, if you wanted to do anything real-time, like precision timing for motor control, you would have to go out and buy an Arduino or some other sort of microcontroller system. Here, there are two 32-bit 200 embedded computer that have direct access to the pins. They are real-time and can let Linux do some of the things that it is great at like networking, high-level language support, GUI development, and the big number crunching, and let the embedded computer live on those 200 MHz microcontrollers. You come to it with whatever development baggage you already have; if you want to go into real engineering design and make an end product out of it, there is no barrier to doing that.”

As the industrial market continues filling out with developers of varying skill levels and intentions, the need for different classes of development boards has also emerged. Recently, industrial maker boards have been released, offering increased compute power and high-speed I/O interfaces. Though slightly more expensive than their ARM-based predecessors, they target more serious development and are capable of scaling into traditional embedded applications.

refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/