Not introduced this year, but I'd add Odroid C2 to your list for consideration.

FullyFunctional · on Dec 22, 2017

and the MC1, which is a XU4 married to a SATA bridge.

From my POV, the Top 10 was disappointing and boring. AFAIC, there's no SBC competing with the XU4 in terms of perf/$. I'd hope to see something even better than the XU4 or C2.

scottlamb · on Dec 22, 2017

Have you seen the Khadas VIM2 Basic? iirc it's $75 somewhere (there recently was a $50 deal; maybe there will be another). It has 8 1.5GHz Cortex-A53s, so in theory it's 2.5X as fast as a Raspberry Pi 3 (4 1.2GHz Cortex-A53s) for CPU-bound tasks with sufficient parallelism. YMMV.

FullyFunctional · on Dec 23, 2017

Thank you Scott for the pointer - here I thought I knew them all. This clearly belongs in the above list.

I'm particularly interested in the 3 GB RAM but the description is ambiguous, still I'll check it out.

FullyFunctional · on Dec 24, 2017

(Reply as I can't edit my comment anymore).

I missed the bottom: Basic @ $90 = 2 GiB, Pro @ $120 = 3 GiB.

That price is high and I was specifically talking about !/$ so this unfortunately doesn't really change the landscape.