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http://beagleboard.org/ Definitely consider the BeagleBoard for $150, especially if you are into building a custom low-power Linux box. Open-Source hardware, draws 2 watts. A little overkill with DVI-D / S-VID output ports, and currently only USB, but the price is right.

Try Texas Instruments' BeagleBoard - it's an OMAP3 (ARM Cortex A8) at 600MHz, has an OpenGL ES capable graphics card (10M polys/sec, HD video) and can run off USB power or DC5V. DVI-D + S-Video for the display and they can boot off either the internal flash or an SD card (cheap storage!)

They are $150 and run Linux in various flavours or even the free home use version of QNX if you need hard realtime capabilities.

The design is quite open - check out the System Reference Manual

Running off either 5VDC or USB power, it typically uses 350mA, so it's using just 1.75W of power.

Now, it doesn't have Ethernet built in, but there is an expansion board available that adds this, or there's a USB hub you can get for it with an Ethernet port and you're up and running. Cutting your home server's power usage by a factor of 50 will have a pretty positive ROI.

Installation is pretty easy, you can download a pre-built image, copy it to the SD card, plug the SD card into the beagleboard and up you boot.

Try Texas Instruments' BeagleBoard - it's an OMAP3 (ARM Cortex A8) at 600MHz, has an OpenGL ES capable graphics card (10M polys/sec, HD video) and can run off USB power or DC5V. DVI-D + S-Video for the display and they can boot off either the internal flash or an SD card (cheap storage!)

They are $150 and run Linux in various flavours or even the free home use version of QNX if you need hard realtime capabilities.

The design is quite open - check out the System Reference Manual

Running off either 5VDC or USB power, it typically uses 350mA, so it's using just 1.75W of power.

Now, it doesn't have Ethernet built in, but there is an expansion board available that adds this, or there's a USB hub you can get for it with an Ethernet port and you're up and running. Cutting your home server's power usage by a factor of 50 will have a pretty positive ROI.

Installation is pretty easy, you can download a pre-built image, copy it to the SD card, plug the SD card into the beagleboard and up you boot.

How about a BeagleBoard?

You can connect an external drive over USB2.0. I couldn't find its wattage on the page, but it should be pretty low. Its's $149 and can be powered over USB. I've seen it run the ARM version of Ubuntu.

• 600MHz Cortex A8, with C64x DSP and PowerVR (OpenGL 2 ES compatible) GPU.
• 256MB RAM, 256MB flash on package (some graphics on the site refer to the revision B board which had less).
• DVI-D and S-Video out.
• MMC+/SD/SDIO and USB interfaces.
• Three inch square form factor board.
• Typical power consumption under 1W.

There are also companies that sell these in cases and with a few peripherals. There are even some that provide a small LCD built in, so you can have a computer that fits in your pocket and is usable but can also drive an external monitor and USB peripherals.

Huh? ARM processors are always built into SoCs - System on a Chip.

An example is the TI OMAP3530. The chip uses slightly under a watt when going full throttle, with CPU, GPU, and DSP.

It features a Cortex A8 @ 600 or 720mhz (rivals a Pentium 3 at the same speed), which can be overclocked to between 800-900mhz.

It has an SGX 530 GPU (Basically a DX10 GPU with GF6200LE speeds - but it has immature closed-source drivers that only support OGL ES 2.0 and 1.1. No DirectX at all, despite the capabilities of the hardware.

It has a C64x DSP, which is a highly parallel and limited processor with massive throughput. Apparently it can decode 1080p H.264 - TI has licensed evaluation codecs proving this - but there are no free or open source DSP codecs available at the moment.

It has an ISP(Image Signal Processor) providing free S-Video out and upscaling.

And like I said, all with under a watt of power consumption. You can stick as much RAM as you want on it, in 128MiB blocks soldered directly to it. Most OMAP3530 devices opt for 256MiB because of the cost.

Perfect use scenarios are phones, consoles, and hacker toys. But with P3 performance, some will also make it into low end cheap Netbooks, paving the way for A9's.

Alternatively, there are these devices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400. These are MIPS-based (still a nice ISA), can run Linux and are the cheapest netbooks you can get. The best bet for getting one is to try an online auction site such as eBay and try searching for "MIPS", or the names that these cheapo devices go under.

Then users "buy" $800 devices for "$99" and make fun of uncrippled foreign cell phone brands because they're "so expensive"

I make fun of Americans for believing those $800 devices cost $800.

The manufacturing cost is probably $130, plus another $50 for licensing stuff, and then you have some transport costs. The rest is profit.

For example, the $799 iPhone 3GS has much of the same hardware as the Beagleboard. (Same SoC anyway)

Now, you have to ask - is an antenna, LCD/touchscreen, some accelerometers, 32GB of flash, and a bit more dev time worth $650, or are they rolling in profit on every angle? The most expensive parts would be touchscreen and flash, but even those won't add up to more than $150. (probably not even $100, judging by bulk SD card costs)

Even from an embedded perspective such as the beagleboard using the TI OMAP3530 SoC (PowerVR SGX530 + ARM Cortex-A8).

From what I've experienced you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get a chance to the closed source graphics libraries in order to utilize the SGX530 graphics controller and those libraries aren't quite stable either. If you look on youtube for demonstrations of the beagleboard and PowerVR's SGX530 controller you'll notice those who posted those videos are all TI employees or associates since they're the only ones who have easy access to such libraries at this time.

Of which I find to be a huge disappointment since the beagleboard developers are all showing off Linux on the board, yet give no love to the community to actually give them a helping hand. I have since figured out that the beagleboard project isn't very well organized when it comes to getting the thing up and running. Blackfin's uclinux community project is far more organized and at least gives you a good starting point by using their distribution. Beagleboard it's just references to a bunch of distributions of which have no actual documented use with beagleboard.

OK enough of my ranting, sorry.

This one http://www.dlp.com/regional/dlp_discovery/pico.aspx is targeted at the BeagleBoard http://beagleboard.org/

This is your lucky day!

good architecture

Don't you mean ludicrously good architecture?

I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.

The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...

CPU - about 20-40mw DSP - about 30-60mw SGX GPU - about 30-60mw

(Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)

The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.

Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...

If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!

I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!

To be fair, the Atom runs at 6 Watts max, where average TDP can down to as little as 0.4W. The problem with Atom, as you say, is all of the other hardware to make it work. Its current chipset is incredibly power hungry, but they're working on that (integrating more and doing even deeper clock gating). Future Atoms will likely use even less power, with Intel already shipping chips with a max 2.4W threshold.

And yes, you are being unfair comparing a device which has a hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes of space and a WXSVGA screen to a handheld device with a couple of gigs of flash memory and a HVGA screen. Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).

good architecture

Don't you mean ludicrously good architecture?

I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.

The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...

CPU - about 20-40mw
DSP - about 30-60mw
SGX GPU - about 30-60mw

(Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)

The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.

Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...

If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!

I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!

I can tell you that my BeagleBoard setup runs phenomenally fast on a 500/600Mhz ARM chip and 256MB of RAM. It's more than acceptable for 99.9% of all the apps I've thrown at it... be it basic web browsing, or even more complex stuff like GPS. It's silent, it's slick... and in fact the only weak point in my opinion is its reliance on SD cards for storage since they're SLOW. However, given its interfaces there's no reason you couldn't build something to interface to SATA or at least mini IDE interfaces... and the USB bus is at least 2.0.

Still, I can definitely see this going places. I bought the BeagleBoard to play with and it ended up becoming an actual usable system on my network. I am thinking of buying another one and building a car PC out of it :)

Then you're in luck... it's coming.

I recently bought myself a BeagleBoard setup and have had great fun and great luck running Angstrom and Ubuntu on an ARM platform. At the moment I'm playing with putting a Gentoo distribution on it, and while compiles are slow (come on, it's only a 500/600Mhz CPU) I think it's quite possible to build out a very free, open setup that is actually usable.

My plan with my board is to develop a car PC. Yeah, I know... how 2001 of me... but it's not because I want a PC in my car necessarily, but I want to play with embedded type tech in an harsh environment and all the integration that requires. It sounds like fun to me because... well... I'm a geek.

ARM is free. Just as any platform that Linux supports is free. In fact, the ARM architecture is far more free than x86 because you can choose so many different manufacturers for your ARM CPU. The BeagleBoard happens to use a really sweet TI ARM CPU that has an integrated DSP and rudimentary (though impressive) 3D acceleration. All this in a silent, fanless board that integrates most of the hardware you'd ever need from a project.

Yeah, there are some bad points... like the fact that you can't use much non-free software because it's just not available... but why would you want to? The free alternatives are more than acceptable and actually quite fun to play with. Hell, on my Gentoo desktop at home (built originally with a 2005.x install) I don't think I've used anything but free and open software in years.

Some ARM chips these days go far beyond what one would expect from a RISC micro-controller.

Two great examples are the BeagleBoard, which also uses the same hardware as the OpenPandora gaming platform. Both of the aformentioned devices are running a fully open-source Linux-powered stack, complete with a fully-functional Desktop environment. For developers, you can program for these devices using the standar GNU tools (c,c++), and of course several JavaVM's are already ported to the OMAP (JamVM,OpenJDK,Kaffee,etc)

.

The TI OMAP 3530 chip that powers the BeagleBoard and OpenPandora has a 3D graphics acceleration unit, a 2D (video) graphics acceleration unit, and a built in DSP for audio and general-purpose number crunching.

Without question a large majority of users do little more with their mobile computers than browse the internet, write email, and occasionally stream video - all things that are fully achievable with today's ARM chips.

ARM chip manufacturers are also starting to put multi-core chips on the market, and while the transistor complexity is nothing like Intel's out-of-order logic, multi-core, still means serious multi-threading. With clock frequencies approaching and exceeding 1GHz, I would not be surprised to see ARM take over the mobile and netbook markets, especially considering how little power they actually consume.

Furthermore, even high-end x86 laptops could benefit from having an ARM co-processor for instant-on and mobile operation, while the x86 processor could be used for more compute-intensive applications such as CAD or video processing. Imagine battery power extended by a factor of ten for everyone!

YouTube Videos:
BeagleBoard
OpenPandora

How many more $200-$400 game consoles does the market need? My opinion is that we need fewer than we have. I would like to see more $50-$100 game consoles. I think there is a place in the market for an inexpensive console that everyone can afford, that has some built-in networking for purchasing content and service.

It could be as basic as $50 + $7.50/puzzle game. Plus if you focus on online purchases you don't have to setup retail channels, and you don't have to battle the used game market.
Wii, 360, PS3, iPhone, and Amazon Kindle are examples where a consumer device is plugged directly into an online store for buying apps. But all those devices are over $200 (except maybe a used 360).

Specs don't have to be fantastic either, if you aim for simple games that "non-gamers" like to play. I'm just thinking out loud here, but there are a lot of options for the hardware while still being fairly economical. The 600MHz OMAP3530 (ARM) can do HD resolutions and 3D graphics, although I think a game system would have to be around $125 if you use that to break even. Maybe if VIA does a Nano with integrated chipset(System-on-Chip) the prices might be low enough for an x86-64 based console. But even if it was just an SNES with ethernet welded onto it, that would be good enough for a fair number of simple games. And SNES hardware is incredibly cheap to reproduce (I have an Chinese SNES clone that cost $30). But I think most of us would be willing to pay double or triple to have something that could do vector graphics and maybe light 3D.

Came perilously close to buying a beagleboard this morning for a roll-it-yourself home media server (NAS / uPnP and so on), and just generally playing around with, when I discovered that it doesn't have onboard networking.

I don't want to have to hang a USB network dongle on it and then deal with the driver issues, not to mention that 1Gbps networking would be nice and the 480mpbs of USB seriously crimps that already (though then again storage would be on USB as well, so I suppose it wouldn't be a real limit).

Anyone know any competitive products that feature good performance and onboard networking...and maybe eSata (and maybe a h.264 processor chip along with 1080p functionality? Maybe a kitchen sink)? The BeagleBoard looks 90% there, but for toying around uses the lack of a network port just kills it for me.

(Sidenote: I have a DS106j NAS and it is a great device but is brutally underpowered. Despite heralding its 1Gbps network connection, the thing can't push 1/4 of the speed of 100Mbps networking, which makes it very slow for larger files and media browsing)

Think of it as a BeagleBoard laptop.
http://beagleboard.org/
600MHz OMAP3 with 256 RAM.

Do these other systems you're talking about have touch screens? Do you have a link?

Here are those links.
http://beagleboard.org/
http://openpandora.org/

The OpenPandora project has a 4.3" touchscreen (at 800x480) and is really exciting to follow. I'll probably purchase their second batch. Many of the indie game developers for the system are testing on the BeagleBoard while waiting for the Pandora to actually ship as the two platforms are so similar hardware-wise. Full specs available through the links.

Sounds like you need a Beagleboard...

http://beagleboard.org/

Beagleboard is another. Same chip as the latest generation of Gumstix, circuit board double the size but with many more on-board connectors, for the same price as the Gumstix.

Yes it can run standard linux like ubuntu. Angstrom is a more popular distro for processors like ARM Cortex-A8, but can be a real pain in the neck to get up and running. To make standard linux run on an ARM you just have to recompile it for ARM arch. Take a look at the beagleboardhttp://www.beagleboard.org/ and the pandora handheld console, and you'll see what ARM is now truly capable of doing in the near future for mass consumers.

Why go with X86 if you want low BOM cost ? Any ARM/MIPS/PowerPC SoC with decent Mhz will do it better for lower bill of materials. Try TI OMAP35xx line for instance, one with Cortex ARM and PowerVR graphics all in one chip. Works out way cheaper than anything x86-based. Getting a Beagleboard is a good way to start.
And now with Canonical throwing official support for ARM-based Ubuntu, you have got your opsys covered as well.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html

The omap3530 can do HD, and it's not even an Intel processor, it's an ARM, so the power savings are enormous.

http://openpandora.org/

This device will be able to play HD in about the size of a DS lite. It's not out yet however.

http://beagleboard.org/hardware Right now, you can buy a beagle board which will do mostly the same thing, except not in a real handheld.

Does anyone have any idea what reference platform they are using to develop this and if there is a way for me to obtain it relatively cheaply?

My bets are on the beagle board as it is super cheap (and they have a posting on their front page about Canonical porting to arm7).

The beagle board is an awesome bang for the buck. I'm thinking of asking my work to grab one for me with the next digikey shipment (free shipping, woohoo).

The BeagleBoard is an interesting project, and OpenPandora is (I think) based on it.

http://beagleboard.org/

http://beagleboard.org/

It's an ARM Cortex based device, lots of built in goodies, probably about as powerful as many netbook computers that are hitting the market (I think the Pandora handheld was based on a beagleboard).

A beagle board is basically what you are looking for. Doesn't have ATA/SATA connections because it is so small, but they might be able to be added on the expansion slot by a determined hobbyist. Otherwise use USB and it's basically what you asked for and cheap too. - ~~~~

ARM (or OMAP

OMAP is an implementation of ARM. The current generation is based on the Cortex A8 series, and comes with a nice DSP core as well (some also come with an OpenGL ES 2.0-capable PowerVR GPU) in a package that can have a 128MB RAM chip clipped on top, so you don't need any motherboard traces for RAM unless you want more than 64MB. If you want one to play with, there's quite a cheap development board.

The next generation is to be based on the Cortex A9 MPcore architecture, which supports 1-4 cores on the same die, and they are rumoured to have 256MB RAM chips ready soon.

This handheld console has been developed in an insane short amount of time ...

Perhaps they cheated a little and bought one of these:

http://beagleboard.org/

I know I would have :-D

Not any more it's not...

Beagleboard brings that sort of hardware to you at a reasonable price-point...

Pandora's not out yet, but will be.

Not to mention that Maemo's intrinsically a Debian derivative and you can buy Nokia's web tablets storefront in a lot of places and online.

* ARM® Cortexâ-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux * 430-MHz TMS320C64x+â DSP Core * PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware * 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD * Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host * Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output * Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls * 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad * Around 10+ Hours battery life

It's no Indrema console, and better designed. At $350 per unit, It's not cost effective as a Sony PSP or Nintendo DS, but competitive to a mix between a QWERTY PDA with usable RAM/TV-out/redundant-expansion. In other words, it's a trade-off of a better Motorola A12000 CellPhone without the lock-in, more battery life, and better than the bulk of a laptop.

I'm somewhat nervous towards the that communist KOREA government-sponsored Gamepark Holdings' GP2x Wiz. It may be better designed as a gaming system, but it lacks the keyboarding of a Pandora

Arm9 533mHZ processor, 2.8" oLED touchscreen, 3D Accelerator, and 64MB RAM

GP2x Wiz is looking more like a MagicEyes Pollux SOC board.

I checked out the beagle board site and they are pretty damn cool. Definitely a lot more fun for playing with at home.

At 200MHz, it might struggle a bit. And with only analogue VGA it would be hard to connect to a modern monitor. More interesting is the Beagle Board with a 600MHz Cortex A8, a PowerVR GPU and a nice DSP. It takes SD cards, which are now cheap in 16GB sizes, and in terms of volume it's smaller than the Space Cube. Oh, and they're actually shipping to consumers now.

Great.. Yet another OMAP3-device. TI is really baiting the developers, eh?

You may also recall beagleboard. The specs seem familiar :-)

And what's all this talk about "open" system? The PowerVR on the OMAP3 will have binary-only drivers and the DSP-core has only a proprietary binary-only compiler.

ARM Cortex A8 system on chip, sporting up to four Cortex cores ...

Shouldn't that be four Cortext A9 chips, on the grounds that A9 has SMP support but not A8?

That said ... the reason the ARM market is so big is that it goes after a lower power market, with cell phones and other battery powered gadgets being the canonical example. That market has not yet felt a real need for SMP. So even if such an NVidia chip gets off the ground, it's unclear how much it would sell.

The first widely available ARM Cortex chips are TI's OMAP3 family ... as seen in the Beagleboard and, possibly more relevant in this context, the open source Pandora gaming thingie. NVidia? Haven't really heard of them in these contexts, though maybe it's just their usual closed-source mindset.

The way to do this is to get an Open Signed i.e. limited to particular devices.

http://developer.symbian.com/main/signed/

Alternatively I wouldn't be surprised a port turned up for something like:

http://beagleboard.org/

or some such future variant