First Menlow Board Released

nerdyH writes "German board vendor Lippert has unveiled what it claims to be the first motherboard based on Intel's 'Menlow' chipset for ultra-mobile PCs. The CoreExpress-Menlow is smaller than a credit card, yet clocks to 1.5GHz, has 1GB of RAM soldered onboard, has multiple PCI Express lanes, USB 2.0, HD audio, an IDE interface, and a digital LVDS video interface. The board is the first in a proposed 'CoreExpress' standard motherboard form-factor measuring 2.6 by 2.3 inches (65 x 58 mm)."

Comments

Re:And it's probably going to be damn expensive

[TheRaven64]

It's probably slow too. The Ars Technica analysis implied that it would be slower, clock-for-clock, and use more power than most ARM variants. It's a shame, considering that ARM is the most widely deployed architecture that there aren't many boards that are cheap in lots smaller than a thousand. Something like this would be really nice to play with.

Re:Power

[lenski]

There are several inexpensive ARM boards available in small quantities, look in any recent Linux Journal. I am currently running several systems built by Gumstix which work well for me and for my customers.

I have no financial relationship with Gumstix. I have several of their systems. Cheap, effective, and supported by an exceptionally active, friendly and supportive mailing list.

Your post doesn't describe required specs or desired features, so it's not easy to know what you're looking for.

Re:But does it have crypto instructions?

[TheRaven64]

It all comes down to battery life. Dedicated silicon almost always uses less power than trying to run the same algorithms on general-purpose silicon (assuming both were fabricated with the same technology). Think how much power your CPU would take trying to emulate a GPU, and then think how little power a GPU of equivalent speed would take.

The other aspect is, of course, performance. Ultra-mobile chips are underpowered by the standards of desktops or even laptops. While you can do full-disk encryption with a Core 2 without much slowdown, trying to do it with a much slower chip is likely to make things crawl, and network encryption is even worse. When I connect my MacBook Pro to my PowerBook with a FireWire cable and try to scp a file, the bottleneck is the PowerBook's 1.5GHz G4 CPU. 802.11n promises to be three quarters of the speed for FireWire 400, and even if it's only one quarter then it's still going to place a big load on this kind of CPU.

The big killer for battery life is clock speed. Power consumption goes up a lot faster than clock speed, which is why it's important to reduce the clock of mobile CPUs when they are not fully loaded to get the best battery life. If you have some dedicated silicon for a commonly-used algorithm, you can get the same overall performance by running the CPU at a lower speed, which can give a huge improvement to battery life.