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Gooseberry Launches Android-based Raspberry Pi Rival
New submitter masternerdguy writes with this snippet from Tom's Hardware about yet another tiny, Linux-capable single-board computer: "The manufacturer claims that the Gooseberry is 'roughly 3 x more powerful in processing power,' and twice the RAM (512 MB) [compared to] the Raspberry Pi. The Gooseberry does not come with analog video and lacks a LAN port, but supports Wi-Fi. At this time, the board only supports Android 4 ICS and Ubuntu without graphics acceleration. However, Gooseberry is offering premade images for Ubuntu. Support for Arch Linux is 'expected in the future.'"
Even the Raspberry Pi is nothing special. I've been working with cheap tiny COTS SBCs that run Linux for many years... Clearly the average person working in IT/software development/etc has absolutely no awareness of this market.
Good to see more manufacturers jumping on the pcb computer craze. So long as these can't run windows (which microsoft wouldnt do since it would eat into their profits), Linux marketshare will only grow. (I'm counting Android as Linux too).
It looks very probable that these pcb computers will be the starting point towards building smart automated appliances in the home.
Unlike the Pi, this board has an actual modern CPU (an ARMv7 Cortex-A8 at 1GHz), a more open SoC (Allwinner A10, which is a chinese ARM SoC and isn't bound by the aura of Broadcom NDAs, and also has a sane boot process unlike the Broadcom chip in the Pi that needs a GPU binblob to even boot), and its GPU (ARM Mali400), while closed (as all mobile GPUs are currently), is actively being reverse engineered and an open source driver is expected in the near future. It certainly is not perfect, but it seems a lot more palatable than the slow, outdated, and Broadcom-proprietary-to-hell-and-back Pi.
Finally, an affordable ARM SBC that doesn't actually suck. This one I'll buy.
This is nothing more than a tablet PCB some guys sourced from a manufacturer in Asia that they're selling as some sort of development kit when it lacks even the most basic of facilities for hardware development such as JTAG headers, or GPIO pins. Call me when somebody actually tries to compete with the Raspberry Pi instead of pulling this jump-on-the-bandwagon crap.
they'll make enough of these fucking things that I can actually buy one!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
While we're on the subject here's an overview of other tiny Linux PCs, including handhelds like the Pandora and the Ben Nanote. The list of course excludes what potentially could be the most widely deployd tiny Linux PCs, cellphones and 7-inch tablets running Android.
Any berry board running Slackware derivative ARMED Slack.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Does anyone have a link to page with useful information about this board? What is the physical size? What sort of I/O headers does it have? What is he power consumption (both active and idle)?
I sure hope your boyfriend doesn't mind it.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Every mention of the Raspberry Pi has comments to this glorious Allwinner chip the chinese seem to be pedaling. Sounds like Kim Jong Ill himself cast the silicon with his very fingerprint! The goal of the Pi is low cost, not performance.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Linux is projected/hoped-for, but without a date. From the FAQ, http://gooseberry.atspace.co.uk/?page_id=108
'Vaporware Class-3: May congeal with sufficient arm-waving.'
The price doesn't bother me so much as the dependency on non-free drivers/firmware for these devices. Even a $100 USD device wouldn't be that bad if it was freedom friendly. I would buy a few hundred if someone would design one without any proprietary dependencies. For a project that is geared toward education they do a lousy job at offering something that is truly hacker friendly. The alternative is for these projects to reverse engineer the "Intel" graphics chipset which all or many of them are using. Or whichever other graphics chipsets would work and then use them.
...that's been running as a bare HTPC for several years. OK, support still sucks for these boards in every sense of the word, shoehorning the drivers in has been a nightmare (on Windows and Linux) but fortunately I picked right first time and have only ever had to do that once.
It still runs Slackware 8.
If not for the stupid amount of money I spent on it (even back then nearly £200 for board and brick was a bit steep, but I needed compact and quiet), then I'd be binning it and investing in a pair of RasPis.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Who cares? Let me know when someone who can actually make these has bloody supply. I'm an IT Manager for a training institution and I'd love to deploy these.... if they fucking existed in commercial quantities!
Oompa loompa doompa dee durd
If you're into this, you are a nerd.
And you will live in nerdiness too
Like the Oompa loompa doompa di do!
Raspberry Pi presold sight unseen over 350,000 units while restricted to one-per-customer. They ramped up the factory to 4,000 units a day - a run rate of 1.5 million units a year. They're little bare project boards. We're not even sure what we can do with them yet. Now that the schools they were intended for can order them in the bulk appropriate to the use of entire school districts full of students they may ramp quite a bit. School districts order in the dozens of units for test/dev and for deployment up to tens or hundreds of thousands so in the launch enthusiasm for RPi they were pretty much shut out so far. It doesn't hurt at all that their HDMI video output is standard input for flat panel monitors and TV's these past few years, so displays for them are everywhere and likely to last far longer than the PCs they came with.
If a bunch of hardware OEMs aren't snapping to attention over this they should be. The march of tiny low power ARM platforms seems to not want to stop. Now we have the Android TV dongle, five of these SBCs including the one in the fine article, a Kickstarter for OUYA that raised $5.3 million so far in 11 days from 41,000 backers who have no guarantee the product will ever even be made, on the strength of the reputation of the participants and the description of a product that isn't anticipated even being made until 9 months out - if they succeed in making it at all. That so many would put so much of their own personal money on only the promise of a thing is evidence of immense underlying demand for something.
Of course over in China and India they're making about a thousand different kinds of low-cost Android devices including a 7" tablet that costs $40 and runs Android ICS. Then there's the Nexus 7 tablet which sold out in retail stores around the planet on launch day and the 16GB version is even sold out on the Google Play store until further notice and the 8GB version probably soon will be - most of them were presold before they even hit the shelves. This one alone may move 10 million units the first year or more. Maybe much more. It's a product that may have buyers camped out at retailers awaiting fresh shipments like they were iThings.
The iThings are going great by the way, moving about a 500,000 units a day between iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch - every one a neat little ARM PC. And they just opened up the China market, which is like a whole third of everybody.
At last report little Android ARM PCs that also happen to have cellular phone capability are also doing well, activating 1,000,000 units a day - a run rate of 365,000,000 per year and still growing at a 2.5x pace year over year. And early next year come little ARM SOCs with 75% more processing power and 2x the graphics power for about the same price - and the SBCs that are made from them. Wow, the pace of progress here is stunning. It's like the early '90s again in PC land.
The traditional PC is stagnant. If you have one that's not too old you probably can suffer through another couple years with it, or until it fails completely, and save the money you would have put to a new one on one of these amazing new things. It's not like your laptop isn't already overpowered for what you're using it for. People have a certain budget for neat new gear anyway, and with adequate laptops costing $300 it's not like there's not money left over in the US market even if it is time to update your PC. The traditional PC market isn't going to collapse right away but I think it has peaked, plateaued, and begun its long gradual decline. In time, all things end.
All of these new things work wonderfully together, a
Help stamp out iliturcy.
to where I can buy a cheap linux ($50 usd or less) board that's got ethernet & USB 2.0 and enough horse power to run Quake III at 30fps? Seriously, I've been looking and I can't find them.
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Yes, because Microsoft has been gunning for having Windows running on every refrigerator and dishwasher and having Linux on little PC boards that are merely conversation pieces for geeks who watch them boot up and do nothing else are a real threat to Windows.
Linux market share? There's no way these systems are competing with any modern Desktop / Laptop or even a Tablet.
These systems like the Rasberry Pi are hobbyist toys at best. They're pretty much limited to learning programming and embedded projects. Trying to use them as a desktop system (I own a Raspberry Pi and I've tried it) is an exercise in frustration. I can type faster than AbiWord or LibreOffice can display the characters (I'm just an ok typist, nothing special). I hate to say this, but my old Commodore 64 running GEOS was more responsive as a word processor. Trying to use any web browser is painful. Either you're using one of the stripped down browsers (Midori / Netsurf) which are functional but they're a bit slow and don't support features like javascript which most sites require or you're using Chromium or Iceweasel and it grinds to a halt at the first sign of a script.
Now if you're typing at a bash prompt or using vi over SSH then you're fine. Even using X under LXDE or fluxbox works fairly well as long as you don't do anything to heavy. You can certainly use a basic graphical text editor or something like IDLE and of course the basic operating system GUIs like file managers work. But that's really about the limit of what you're reasonably going to be doing on the desktop. They're just not up to fulling the role most people expect as a modern computer, even a low powered one. So I don't think it's fair to say you're increasing Linux market share in the sense it's normally used (Laptops / Desktops or even typical Android devices)
Linux systems are moving a half-billion units a year. That's quite a lot on a planet with only 7 billion humans, half of whom have no technology above the Iron Age.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, there are many little COTS SBCs that run linux. However, they don't give the mix of capabilities that the Raspberry Pi does for the price that it sells at.
Compared to gigE, it takes a LONG time to back up dozens of gigs of data via wifi. Even at 5GHz with wide channels and line-of-sight.
Twice the size, nearly 3 times the price, no GPIO headers, no expansion for the RasPI Cam and Display. Oh, and it runs Android (seriously, apples and oranges anyone??) Yep... I can really see it rivaling the Pi.
/., for shame.
This is the kind of headline I expect to read over at Gizmodo. For shame
A liberated version? Why not start w/ the Alwinner, and then use chipsets from companies that don't have much, or any IP w/ them. Leave out the GPU - and use any ethernet and WiFi SoCs that are fully documented. Using this combination, one should get a fully Liberated platform.
On the software end of things, why not use something like HURD? If you can get emacs running, nothing else should be needed - no X, no GNOME and no proprietary GPUs. Only that the footprint of the HURD is not well known as yet, but if they replaced the Mach microkernel w/ a fork of Minix, they could have the liberated OS that this platform needs. And teach a whole bunch of people the wonders of emacs, and let them work from there.
Not without getting a hell of a lot cheaper - I.E. down in the $3-5 range. Most appliances are in the sub $100 range, so adding $40 pcb computers is going to be a non starter.
The CPU is an Allwinner A10, designed and built in China and selling for about $7. It's an impressive piece of technology.
That board, though, looks like the guts of a tablet or notebook, not a development board. There are a number of development boards available at various price points. For $70 you can get an A10 in a box with connectors, suitable for entertainment applications.
Many people buy more than one thing. There may only be 7 billion people on earth and half of them may not have much technology but there are nearly 6 billion cellphone subscribers (as of last year, and still climbing) USA had 331 million cell phones and there were only 316 million people.
How does it compare to the AMD Geode (x86) based SBCs? I've slapped on Voyage Linux (debian) on one of those for a project I'm working on. The great thing for me is that I can simply copy binaries of my project over from my ubuntu dev box without any cross-compilation. Makes debugging much easier.
"I'm counting Android as Linux too"
Don't, its dalvic.
I was only counting smartphones, tablets, PCs and such things in the half billion per year. ARM processor sales have outnumbered the Earth's human population for several years if you include semi-smart embedded devices.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why use something weak like Android when you can have a real Linux distro?
Lacking in details. For years I've been looking for a decent robotics platforms beyond the virtually useless world of microcontrollers on the market. Android phones are almost ideal.. so I wonder.. The ideal board would have:
- Lots (30+) of fast I/O lines (USB to DB25 connectors crudely work for stepper motors and various sensors)
- Audio I/O (stereo out is common on smart phones but stereo in would be more useful)
- Video camera (smart phones have one but stereo would be ideal)
- GPGPU capability (e.g. Cuda or OpenCL; a build in FPGA would be truly sweet but an easy way to encode HDL into it would also be needed)
- Drivers for a broad range of computer peripherals
- Lots of fast memory (the more the better)
- A reasonably fast processor (2ghz Arm is fine)
This will enable building humanoids, autonomous quadrocopters, etc. One major key to good walking bipeds, for example, is rich sensory feedback.
Yet another GPL violating hardware device. Please people, don't support companies that fail to provide the sources to GPL binaries.
One serious use of these devices is as an emergency tool or temporary replacement. For example, I'll have to switch to a new motherboard in my PC at some time and intend to switch to one of these tiny machines for a few days until the new machine is ready. Of course, that's only possible as long as you're using GNU/Linux for your daily work, but who doesn't?
KInd of hard to have a "rival" board if there's none available for a while yet to come.
Besides, what in the f*ck is this obsession in trying to find/name "rivals" to things from these idiot pundits?
More importantly, WHY in the F*ck are we even giving these idiots the time of day?
The device runs a Cortex series CPU and it's got a "limited" Android (It's running ICS...it runs like ass without 3D...) without hardware acceleration on it. This means the Gooseberry bunch cobbled something together quickly to "rival" the R-Pi project and offered it at nearly twice the price. Worse, someone should've been able to have laid hands on the Mali userland drivers to get 3D accel working on this device fairly easily if they're developing this on the up and up. And, we won't get into the comparisons of "speed" people keep making. The Cortex A8 is typically about 40-60% faster per clock than an ARM 11 processor for most tasks. So...the Gooseberry is only twice the speed of the R-Pi for ideal instruction mixes.
Sorry...until it's full-function and can run a bit more than Android in a half-assed manner, it's NOT a "rival.
Cheap, tiny COTS used to be very dififcult to find, you had to roll your own linux and, frankly, they were expensive! The Pi has created awareness of this market and broken it wide open to a much larger audience
For the same price? Wow, where do I sign? /sarcasm
My laptop too is much more powerful... and much more expensive. Another piece of non-news. Shame on you /..
Let's all build SOCs for SBC hardware for cheap that are capable of 1080p H.254 decode, and then not document the graphics hardware so that no one actually uses them to ship finished machines!
Maybe at the same time we can all implement the shittiest memory bandwidth we can possibly implement so that we get crappy graphics performance on theoretically good hardware because it's impossible to use a binary blob driver due to the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL on the DRM interfaces, so we have to push all the graphics data across the user/kernel protection domain boundary once in full screen mode and 3 times when doing even simple 2D compositing.
Perhaps we could take a page from some vendors books and run our own hypervisor in the TZones on some ARM SOCs so that no matter how good you make your kernel and driver code, there's no way to guarantee things run in bounded time so you don't drop frames, because you have no way to predict when or why the damn code in the hypervisor will run.
Maybe we can make things worse by having a lot of crap that should be in the device tree hard-coded in board files instead. Heck, why not just have separate device trees for the boot loader and the kernel so that they can get desynchronized all the time, and if that isn't enough to make things suck, heck, why don't we make the kernel have to have board files too that go out and get values from the device tree which might as well be had-coded to run statically configured drivers, instead of just having the kernel iterate the damned device tree so it's all automatic.
Perhaps we can also avoid coming up with an ISA, and instead make everything similar enough to be tempting, but dissimilar enough so that it's hard to replace our chip with someone else's chip so we don't have to compete on our ability to deliver superior products (and hope Microsoft doesn't invent one and shove it down our collective throats with Windows 8).
Yeah, I'm sure the price of the thing is really an issue, like everyone's claiming. Yeah, that's gotta be why there's not wide adoption of ARM. It could not possibly be any other reason.