As far as I can tell, it has no output pins. So it's not comparable to Raspberry Pi (or other ARM SBCs). More akin maybe to an Android TV box? Short of making something through USB - you can't make your own header boards or easily hook up sensors and whatnot
Is this on the ribbon cable? Okay with a breakout board, this would be really interesting and offer something quite unique
It's actually open space right now in the market. It's an annoyance/limitation that the easiest current way to do i2c/gpio/etc hardware-y stuff involves moving to ARM/Rpi. There aren't any real easy solutions for x86 and hobbyists. I had a friend who worked in touchdesigner (which is x64 only) and it was always a bit annoying he couldn't hook say LED strips directly to his laptop and to touchdesigner (so people spend a small fortune on DMX lights). We ended up doing wifi + esps. But that's much more fragile..
Maybe ideally you'd have a header on the side of laptop kinda like the Rpi400?
But even a separate machine/baseboard would still be awesome in the hobby and education sphere
We recently built a product that utilizes FTDI chips for i2c/gpio/jtag/spi/swd-protocol support. My dev kits and bench setup uses the Adafruit FTDI breakout boards (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264) to connect to various other circuitry. The driver and even the communication protocols are documented and open source (e.g. OpenOCD implemented their own based on the USB packets).
The breakout board doesn't have 40-50 GPIO pins an RPI has, but you can hook multiple of these breakout boards to a computer. I am using 4 breakout boards with one ARM SBC each as targets, with no problems on an Intel NUC. And they are much smaller and easier to get than a RPi.
Besides the FT232H, there are larger FTDI chips with more channels. I am uncertain if one can find USB breakout boards for them, though.
oh that's really cool. What's the driver situation with something like that? On Linux do I just write to some file and it's mapped to some hardware pins? Or it's more complicated than that?
For something this powerful, you might make it into a while-house automation controller or large CNC machine, and you probably wouldn't want to hook up the IO directly to the main CPU... You'd use Ethernet for distributed IO, maybe I2C for local IO (combined with something like this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/732, which would provide much more powerful, ESD-tolerant, robust, 5V-capable inputs and outputs). A tiny handful of 3V3, low-current IO are not particularly useful for realistic use-cases. Heck, even the Beaglebone, with its 1 GHz Arm A8 and 512 MB RAM has a pair of separate microcontrollers ("PRUs") for real-time IO on the SOC.
I wish there were some higher-speed, lower-level local busses for communication with subprocessors and other IO (SPI, CAN, etc), but Ethernet is fine.
