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VIA Unveils $79 Rock and $99 Paper ARM PCs
Don't yet have one of those million Raspberry Pis, but you're in the market for a tiny, cheap ARM computer? An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from geek.com: "VIA has decided it's time to update the APC (ARM PC) board with new components and the choice of two configurations. The new systems are called APC Rock and APC Paper. The hardware spec for both boards is exactly the same except for the fact the Rock ships with a VGA port whereas the Paper doesn't. The Rock also costs $20 less at $79, whereas the Paper is $99. The reason for the price difference is the fact that the Paper ships with a rather novel case whereas the Rock is a bare board. The Paper's case is made from recycled cardboard attached to an aluminum chassis to help with strength, meaning it will keep the dust off the components and make it easier to carry while keeping weight to a minimum."
scissors?
When does Scissors come out?
think about it...
scissors??
this seems a far better product.
There is a big ceramic capacitor hanging off the end of a pair of twisted wires on that bare board. That's weird.
Kind of nice if it ever leaks and you need to replace it, i guess...
And the Scissors model comes out WHEN???
I'm holding out for APC Scissors, which will be priced above the APC Paper's cost of $99 because it is superior, but below Rock's cost of $79 because it is inferior.
So this is better Raspberry Pi at three times the price? They just added a twice-as-powerful CPU and 4 GB of flash. Or am I missing something?
Does anyone remember netbooks? I don't. Because they were trash and pointless.
In 6-8 months, these cheapo mini PCs will also be trash and pointless, and people will regret having bought them. There's no actual demand for these types of devices. People are just buying them because they're the "new thing" (even though they aren't actually new). They will soon be forgotten except for a handful of devices that a handful of nerds convince themselves they need for various pointless projects that no one gives a shit about.
If you want to do something useful, get a real computer and get on with it.
If you want to diddle about like a 14 year old taking a suspiciously long shower, there's about 93572385 Arduino things and 385269 Android things out there that will do just as well as a these new mini PCs. These things are only good if you want undercapable components for use in your sloppy implementation of a stupid and pointless project you copied from the internet.
MOD ME DOWN AND MOD DOWN THE TRUTH
when 60% or more of the posts so far attempt to make an extremely obvious joke about scissors? This article even says its from the what-no-scissors? department, so the joke isn't even that inventive.
For crying out loud... you guys call yourselves nerds?
What I want to know is what about the lizard and spock PC's.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In the computer business, VIA is the ultimate living humiliation. As a company, it always seeks to give the punter as little as possible (for the money), and always miscalculates, ensuring that one is better off buying from someone else.
512MB of RAM and a single grotty core. This time last year, and these specs would have been adequate (the reign of the Allwinner A10 SoC). A year later, and desirable bottom of the barrel is Rockchip's RK3066- 2 core (1.2+ GHZ) with quad MALI graphics.
VIA's graphics and x86 CPUs suffered from exactly the same issue- rubbishy specs and relatively high prices.
For less than VIA wants for this rubbish, you could buy AMD's micro motherboard with attached Brazos x86 APU, a proper x86 dual core system with modern ATI graphics built-in. Sure, you need to add the RAM, but that's cheap enough these days.
It is lucky for VIA's employees that this dreadful company is a pimple on a very much larger industrial group, so VIA's market failures (and financial losses) never seem to matter.
PS potential purchasers, with an interest in video playback, may well want to ensure that the 'theoretical' support of 1080P is matched by available drivers that prove this ability. Video playback on ARM SoC parts tends to be through 'binary blobs', so you either have proper support from the company making the MB, or you are stuffed UNLESS the CPU has enough grunt for software decoding, and one A9 core won't (for HD).
Have they fixed the memory controller yet?
The biggest performance bottleneck for graphics on ARM systems has not been the GPU; I've used Mali-400 systems (like this one is supposed to be), and I've used the nVidia system. Graphics performance sucked on both.
Part of this has to do with the fact that the graphics architecture in standard Linux penalizes you for not GPL'ing your drivers, but the Android graphics stack gets around this by duplicating some kernel interfaces with slightly non-GPL'ed versions - yet the performance is still terrible.
The blame rests squarely on the memory copy speeds, which comes down to the memory controller. Apple has completely addressed this in their ARM chips (but are not sharing), and Samsung has partially addressed this in their ARM chips (and are also not sharing). Has VIA addressed the memory controller bandwidth issues in the WonderMedia, or does "WonderMedia" actually mean "I wonder when they will get media support in their ARM chips"?
I wouldn't bother mentioning this when you have the MK802 for $40. Twice the ram, mind you.
I bought a CGCOLORMAX (a mostly-built version of Geoff Graham's excellent Color Maximite from one of the electronics magazines I frequent) for $49US (I actually bought two just in case).
Had to solder on the power connector (no big deal) and source an Aussie power supply, VGA monitor, and PS/2 keyboard (all of which I (and no doubt many others) have lying around in the man-cave). Also bought a 4G SD card for minimal dollars for storage and I have a full blown machine running BASIC (with boot times around about ... literally no time at all) just like the ones I grew up with (TRS80/Apple/etc).
The 8yo son has already started programming (12-times table) and understands the basics (sequence, selection, iteration, variables and so on), so well worth the money in terms of educating the kids.
And the CGCOLORMAX also has a breadboard for playing around, interfacing with other devices, so look soon for my guided missiles streaking across your airspace :-)
Which OS are they running on it? Chromium? Any other Linux? Windows 8? PC-BSD? Minix? Which one? Unless they can put together a box that has at least a proper Office suite on top of the usual browser & e-mail, I doubt this will go far.
I keep seeing on eBay these days you can get an Android tablet for about $40. And it has a screen, a touch screen at that. Presumably internally it is some kind of ARM PC with storage and everything. So why is a bare bones ARM PC, especially at these prices good? And what can you realistically do with the damned thing anyway?
The VIA Paper is the computer world's Trabant!
If it blows a constant cloud of blue smoke doing mobile computing, I will have to have one.
Do companies really have to design these project platforms when there are android cell phones that can be had for under $50? They come built in with a small touchscreen, wifi, a low res camera, battery, accelerometer, vibrator, mic, a weak speaker, and possibly a small physical keyboard. Virgin Mobile almost always has a no contract phone for $30-$50.
There is also an overabundance of bad ESN phones on ebay for $15-$30. While there are issues with supporting thievery, not all bad ESN phones have been stolen, some are really just lost and found by others. Either way, the phones have been branded bad and unless re-purposed, represent a waste on society. Do companies really need to design/build these platforms when there are so many used phones that already litter the world?
These boards don't seem to be worried about emitting radio frequency interference (RFI). That "paper" system case is slick but I don't think it effectively shields RFI.
Is RFI somehow not a problem with these? Is it because they are very low-power, or is it because they are somehow not regulated by the FCC for RFI, or what?
Would operating one of these make the amateur radio enthusiasts down the block from you curse you?
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Sometimes less is more. I have a tablet hooked up to a monitor, but Android constantly gets confused about the two screens and their resolutions. That means you keep having to fiddle with the touch screen. A dedicated device like this always uses the connected monitor for its output, and the mouse and keyboard for its input. Also, this has better specs than low-end tablets; in different words, at the same price, you get better performance for not paying for a screen.
The Rock and Paper offer a nice spec bump over the original APC, which shipped with Android 2.3, an ARM 11 processor, only 2GB RAM, and was only 720p capable in the graphics department.
*looks at Rock/Paper specs*
"512MB DDR3 RAM"
Huh?
Is the editor feeling nostalgic about a time when VIA mattered?
It's another ARM board with closed source drivers (ie useless). Neo-ITX and a cardboard box are all that's interesting here.
What is it still the 90's. I haven't used a VGA cable, for personal uses, for a few years now. Not even sure if my TV even has a VGA port. Do people use these device for Media PC's? I can't imagine they can run 720p content let alone 1080p. My apologies for sounding like I am a troll, but I just don't see any use for these devices.
My RasPi cost me a total of $35. Has HDMI and Composite. It's designed to work with a television set.
Nobody can beat God
"Real 1.4Hhz (will be upgraded to 1.5Ghz) clock speed"
for $99 id expect a dual-core A9, 1GB of RAM, Gigabit ethernet, a FPGA and a well documented 16core coprocessor. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
If cpu power was not an issue i'd just use a raspberry pi.
That aluminum-cardboard fusion is kind of silly. If you made the sides of aluminum, why not throw a top and bottom cover from aluminum too. Or, then make the whole box out of cardboard.
However I think the use of cardboard is possibly quite smart idea (ecologically). I assume this is much harder cardboard than what you would find from typical cardboard boxes. Computers have relatively short use age anyway and do not get beaten much, so they do not need cases that last forever.
There's the Cubox and the Cubieboard. I have the former running as NAS and (XBMC) media center with a couple of HDDs attached.
One reason I am pro-Raspberry Pi is that is has a huge user base. When you are dealing with trying to get Linux stuff to run on ARM and the lower system capabilities of an embedded system, it is nice to have 100,000 friends who are messing with the same system and already worked out the issues.
What is responsible for h.264 support? (it's not the mali gpu)