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Quad-Core Stick PC Runs Ubuntu
New submitter asola writes with this cool piece of small (ha!) news from Liliputing: "This Freescale i.MX6-quad based stick will officially support Ubuntu in addition to Android. This is a first among the newfangled category of ARM-based stick PCs. This Ubuntu may very well have the hw accelerated Gstreamer plugins created by Freescale for the i.MX6 so full HD video playing will be available under Ubuntu as well."
...in the picture.
Could we get some goddamn information in the summary? Who cares how many cores it has? How much storage capacity does it have? How good is the built-in screen? How good is the input device? How good is the network connection?
First Post!
What is this? YouTube?
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
If I can get 4 gb in a puny little PNY usb stick, surely we can do better than 8 on this thing.
...does it run Linux?
"Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yeah... No problem."
Wondering if anyone has tried making a mini render farm out of these small scale units, for 3D rendering, video effects rendering or even cracking passwords.
The only reason I see doing it is price point, GPU's these days kick ass on all of the above but typically can be more expensive.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Mess of cables is helping as well to hide the "stick"...
So its 100 dollars. Thats not cheap anymore. The Raspbery Pi has less memory and a slower processor and can play 1080p just fine, but your making a deal of the fact this will play HD. Theres a bunch of quad core tablets on the way with obviously the extra cost to the manufacturer of a touch screen etc, for around 100 dollars. And as discussed in orher threads, Ubuntu has become malware or even spyware. So what market is this going for exactly.
Got any URLs for good tutorials on how to get the thing up and running? [Yeah, "Google is your friend", blah blah blah...] Thanks in advance!
What these stick PCs need is a new connector that carrys full HD, 7.1 audio, power to the stick, mouse, keyboard, and remote control commands. Then TVs could include this format, you plug in your CPU stick and viola... your TV can run anything you want. Anyone could write their own TV OS or whatever. Ok kickstarter, kickstart this.
What's different between this and the numerous Android TV dongles? Like this $40 unit from same company?
http://www.geekbuying.com/item/In-Stock-MK802--New-Version-Android-4-0-Mini-PC-IPTV-Smart-TV-Box--Allwinner-A10-DDR3-1GB-RAM-4GB-ROM--Better-Than-MK802-307558.html
Ubuntu is destroying the Linux ecosystem.
http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G135341370451
and comes with an Ethernet poty.
There are many of this so called sticks pc's, minipc's or whatever. But none of them have full support (for now) for hardware accelerated drivers.
The first of them that has open drivers and support for XBMC is going to sell millions. What I don't understand is why manufacturers do not see it yet.
There are many of this so called sticks pc's, minipc's or whatever. But none of them have full support (for now) for hardware accelerated drivers. The first of them that has open drivers and support for XBMC is going to sell millions. What I don't understand is why manufacturers do not see it yet. (replied to myself 'cos I was not logged in...)
Then you would have two 700MHz cores on two boards, not four 1.5 GHz cores on one.
www.wavefront-av.com
It's a real shame too: the product is beautiful to gaze at. A real work of art. Here is a -slightly- lower resolution image of the product with no watermark.
What a great idea! Let's get rid of the machine and JUST have a nest of cables!
You'll probably get much more bang for the buck, for the watts, and for the physical space, if you use GPUs.
There are video cards with 4000 processing cores available for under $400, look for HD7970x2. That is $0.10 for each core. No way a cluster of small computers will beat that.
Take your meds grandpa.
Pictures: http://liliputing.com/2012/12/zealz-gk802-tv-stick-packs-quad-core-freescale-cpu-onto-a-99-pc-on-a-stick.html
http://www.geekbuying.com/item/Unii-GK802-Fresscale-i-MX6-Quad-Dure-Cortex-A9-DDR3-1GB-RAM-8GB-ROM-TV-Box-Dongle----Black-312807.html
http://blog.geekbuying.com/index.php/2012/12/12/quad-core-tv-stick-gk802-finally-stock-in-geekbuying/
Wonder what the Vivante quad core graphics is like, performance wise, compared to its peers.
I was just looking for more ways to run spyware! This is great news!
Netflix supported Ubuntu.
Were it me, I'd want one for a media center on the TV, running Android for the native Netflix support and XBMC, and then I would keep the other in my backpack or pocket or something for a go-anywhere backup machine. That said, it would have Debian or Archlinux arm installed, since Ubuntu is a steaming pile.
I really wish that bloggers and promoters would stop saying something "runs Ubuntu" without regard to other Linux distros. No device is exclusive to Ubuntu. If it runs a Linux kernel, it can run any Linux distro compiled for it's given architecture. This blind devotion to Canonical's sub-par distro is why we have so many retards clogging up Slashdot, various mailing lists, and forums with stupid questions beginning with "my Ubuntu is broken," or "Help me fix my Ubuntu." These people think Ubuntu is the end-all, be-all Linux without having tried anything else.
These ignorant people need mentors and education so that they can grow and evolve, trying other distros, and maybe even go back and improve Ubuntu to make it a bit less of an abortion than it is now. If you're a Linux vet, you've already gone through that circle, and need to pay it forward by helping educate the n00bs so that we don't get so many retarded questions - or over simplified crap - from Ubuntu and it's users.
Freescale's Linux support is a mess and looks to be getting worse, leaving anyone that want's to do anything useful with the iMX chips wasting a lot of bandwidth on the headwall interface.
For iMX51 and iMX53 they forked uBoot at around 2009, and took the kernel at about linux-2.6.35, then piled loads of stuff in - a lot of which isn't very pretty. Little of the changes made it into mainline, and those branches are now stagnant, though support the most of their hardware. Freescale also tried public git trees, but they weren't well maintained and just added to the noise. Linaro then came with great promise but (for Freescale) seems to have died, getting upto a 3.2 kernel, but still lacking basic things like USB and video support as well as power management and clock scaling. Since the end of 2011 there's been few signs of life from the Freescale Linaro landing team, though some of the stuff did make it back into the mainline kernel. During the same period their online communities changed from simple forums, to an iMX dedicated site and then again into something a bit flashier.
In part I think the struggle for Freescale is that the Linux mainline moves very quickly, but isn't ready to support all the advanced features these chips need (the clock trees on these chips are insanely complex and only recently has the kernel infrastructure got near to catching up, as well as there being crazy power domains and external regulators to throw into the mix). Additionally changes aren't accepted back without lots of chest beating and chin stroking, both of which take critical time. In some ways it's no wonder the arch code for ARM has exploded in duplicity since some of the sub-systems these chips need don't exist, and won't do for a long time.
On the other side Freescale seem incapable of making two chips similar, and even things like Ethernet peripherals have ever changing register sets and minor 'features' which create a plethora of driver variants if care is not taken. Additionally a lot of the peripherals are insanely complex and poorly documented (e.g. the micro-coded SDMA engine, which while being able to do almost anything, comes without the tools that would be needed to make and debug a small efficient linear DMA).
Apart from some big companies who probably got direct support from Freescale, I think all of this amounts to a very poor hobbyist platform, despite seemingly good intentions from Freescale. It's instead much better to stick with something already common and with a great community like the R-Pi.
Thanks!