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Intel Rolls Out Raspberry Pi Competitor
Rambo Tribble writes "As detailed by Ars Technica, Intel has introduced the Minnowboard, an SBC touted as more powerful and more open than the Raspberry Pi. At $199, it is also more expensive. Using an Atom processor, the new SBC boasts more capacity and x86-compatibility. 'It's notable that the MinnowBoard is an open hardware platform, a distinction that Arduino and BeagleBone can claim but Raspberry Pi cannot. Users could create their own MinnowBoards by buying the items on the bill of materials—all the design information is published, and CircuitCo chose components that can be purchased individually rather than in the bulk quantities hardware manufacturers are accustomed to, Anders said. Users can also buy a pre-made MinnowBoard and make customizations or create their own accessory boards to expand its capability. And being an open hardware platform means that the source code of (almost) all the software required to run the platform is open.'" Update: 09/20 22:31 GMT by T : Look soon for a video introduction to the MinnowBoard, and — hopefully not too long from now — a visit to their Dallas-area production facility.
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
I read the internet for the articles.
yeah it certainly isn't a raspberry pi competitor. why buy this when you can buy a netbook for almost the same price??
and check this out, 8 gpio pins. whee... no idea if any da/ad pins.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hmmm !!
Hey, engineers to spin up this board got to eat you know. Their hours don't come cheap these days. I'm guessing this *won't* have much impact on PI sales. There are a bunch of hobbyist cards out there, and many existed before the PI. PI's claim to fame is that it is CHEAP.... And it lives up to that goal..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful trip.
They started with a project board,
using Intel's tiny chip.
TI has the BeagleBoard for just $10 more than a Pi. My personal opinion is that the price point is $50 and under.
Yeah, let's only hear about the things YOU want to hear about.
They're trying to do to the Raspberry Pi what Microsoft did to the netbook, and for the same reasons.
> ...There's just one exception: with the graphics processing unit, only the binary files required to drive the GPU are available, as the source code remains closed...
nuf said...
It's basically an MCU eval board: low PCB runs, low quantity orders for every part in the BOM, very generic capabilities. EVBs are expensive. Sure, the engineering time that goes into it is pricey, but on a per-unit basis it's the fact that these are very general-use, quasi-custom toys that increases the cost.
Hey, engineers to spin up this board got to eat you know.
Yes, but not that much.
..and I just looked in earnest at the capabilities. It's basically a caseless computer. Which is ALSO an eval board. Which means that $200 seems pretty reasonable, really.
It just costs ten times as much and lacks the same capabilities. ...
Other than the fact that it's a completely different class of product
For that price I'll wait for the PS4. :)
Hey, engineers to spin up this board got to eat you know.
Yes, but not that much.
Donut + coffee OR Mountain Dew + Doritos
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
6 times the price, way fewer GPIO pins, the processor isn't much faster (Raspberry Pi is typically overclocked to a matching speed), it's way bigger, and so on. How does this thing compete with the RPi? About the only real advantage it has is the SATAII port, but why even bother with that instead of just having USB 3 ports? USB3 would be faster, cheaper, require fewer components on the board (no need for USB2+SATA2 when you can just have USB3), and support more devices.
Intel, what in the actual fuck are you doing?
And what both did to the OLPC.
It's notable that the MinnowBoard is an open hardware platform, a distinction that Arduino and BeagleBone can claim but Raspberry Pi cannot.
There's nothing exotic about a Pi. It could be recreated with sufficient motivation. The schematics are available so it wouldn't be a major challenge to reproduce them and generate a compatible board layout.
Also, the average homebrew builder targeted by these products isn't going to have the resources to assemble a board with high density surface mount packages so the value of being able to reproduce them is dubious. At $35 it is far cheaper to buy an assembled Pi and not have to worry about the time involved in acquiring parts, assembly, and verification. Even for those that have the tools to build one it would be a phenomenal waste of time at that price point. If your production volume is high enough to beat $35 then you may as well do a custom design anyway that has exactly the hardware and interfaces you need.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
pppppffft!
For $200 I can get a ready made Atom with an Nvidia GPU.
This board is worse than useless. It's insulting.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
As in "...(almost) all the software required to run the platform is open."
That's like saying "We can stop almost all of the incoming nuclear warheads."
Yeah, let's only hear about the things YOU want to hear about.
Well, from Khyber's comment history, I would say that's hardware. He's pontificated over Monitors, both AMD and Intel CPUs & GPUs, some stuff about hydroponics, LEDs, etc.
Seems like Khyber just woke up on the hypocritical side of the bed today.
The most likely use cases today aren't hobbyist applications but industrial uses, Anders said. "The BeagleBone is a very small, low-power device, and it's targeted for some very specific applications for hobbying. You know, developing small proof-of-concept designs," Anders said. "Our initial offer for the MinnowBoard is actually more targeted toward industrial automation, industrial controls. What you'll find is a lot of manufacturers, companies creating products, if they want to create an x86 design, they have to buy a third-party reference platform which is closed. They have to buy large software support packages, support contracts, and they generally don't get the right to use the existing design as it is. They have to buy additional licenses and things to create the product."
In other words, this is aimed at a completely different market than the ones looking for a raspberry pi or a beaglebone. From Rpi's own FAQ: "We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming." David Anders says it may reach price point similar to the Rpi or Beaglebone in the near future, but there's no promises. I know this sounds like nitpicking, but framing the discussion improperly with a misleading title is something Slashdot desperately needs to stop.
The open hardware is nice, but Intel totally blew it on the reasons why the RPi is popular: it's "powerful enough" while being very small and very cheap. Minnowboard's extra power isn't by enough to justify that kind of a price jump, and the rest falls squarely under YAGNI, therefore making no difference.
This is something of a pity. I'd like to see an RPi with more expandability, but I was thinking more along the lines of a single Thunderbolt port. You could do that without increasing the price or size by all that much, and it's an option Intel could have gone with. But instead they got the RPi market mixed up with the build-your-own-gaming-rig market, and that's just plain not going to end well.
pppppffft!
For $200 I can get a ready made Atom with an Nvidia GPU.
This board is worse than useless. It's insulting.
Yeah, I know, this reply x1,000. It's almost like they held a secret meeting with Ballmer up in Redmond and agreed they could nudge the Wintel syndicate in on Raspberry Pi turf.
It will have its niche. Someone will find a use for it somewhere.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How did Gilligan, Skipper, and the professor stay so clean-shaven during their entire stay on the island. Did they happen to pack a unlimited supply of razors? Can you really get that clean of a shave with a sharpened rock?
TFA mentioned next gen will use Bay Trail core (Atom Z3770), which is available with AES-NI. Now that is suddenly very useful for servers, because the encryption is fast (but still passes through the processor).
What is the benefit of Intel's offering?
http://www.zdnet.com/acers-199-c710-2856-chromebook-laptop-includes-ssd-will-be-sold-at-walmart-7000017015/
Not so long ago, Acer relied on traditional hard drives as storage for its C7 Chromebook line, even if Google emphasized that the Chrome OS and systems running it didn't require huge amounts of local storage. But the company recently released the $199 C710-2833 Chromebook at Best Buy with a 16GB solid-state drive, and now it has released the C710-2856 Chromebook with the same storage and price, and has extended its retailer footprint to Walmart.
Aside from the 16GB SSD replacing a 320GB hard drive, the C710-2856 has similar specs to an Acer Chromebook released late last year, using an Intel Celeron 847 processor, 2GB of RAM, and an 11.6-inch LED-backlit screen. The 3.05-pound system also includes a webcam and built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and features four hours of battery life. By using flash storage instead of a traditional hard drive, the C710-2856 can boot up in just 8 seconds, according to Acer.
If they really intended for it to be used by industry for automation and industrial controls, then why does it have *fewer* GPIO pins? You would get more out of just about any other board if that's your goal.
Look, I am an EE, this is not the same thing as the Pi.
It's an order of magnitude more expensive, it's complicated, it has a part count from hell, it's bigger, in fact, it's different in just about every way imaginable.
Catchpa is "pretend". Giggle.
Try harder, Intel. ARM is coming for you..
..don't panic
yeah it certainly isn't a raspberry pi competitor. why buy this when you can buy a netbook for almost the same price??
Also, this thing is huge. Several times the size of a Raspberry Pi. It appears to require a wall wart, whereas a RPI can be powered from USB.
and check this out, 8 gpio pins. whee... no idea if any da/ad pins.
... and none of the GPIO pins can do hardware PWM. So this board is not much use for robotics.
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
The GMA600 is a real shit sandwich (Oh, sure, I really really want to fuck around with a PowerVR SGX545 and it's utterly shit proprietary driver on my 'open' dev board); but $200 is a steal by the standards of x86 boards designed for embedded purposes (I suspect that there are a bunch of PC/104-format users looking enviously at this board right now, and wondering why Intel didn't answer their prayers instead).
Now, given the prices of Intel's own faster, better, comes-with-case, consumer offerings (their 'Next Unit of Computing' boxes being a good example), this is a poor consumer offering; but it's pretty damn cheap by the standards of similar products.
The one thing that might prove interesting is that it is allegedly fullly open (aside from the PowerVR GPU drivers) which (assuming Intel isn't lying or using "'Open' as in a block of magic numbers" definitions, this board, although based on UEFI, might actually be the first Intel product in quite a while to be well documented enough to be a Coreboot/LinuxBIOS target. Even better, it might provide insight into some other products using the same chipsets.
Not really, OLPC was never intended to be for sale in the developed world. Which always seemed to be a mistake. Offering a portion of the production for a bit of a mark up could have been good for everybody increased volume and the extra funds could have been used to subsidize units for the developing world.. The closes they did was that buy 2 get one deal. Which was stupid.
$200? They miss the point.
Way too expensive. Maybe if this was $100 I would consider getting one, just not worth it when I can get a PI for $35.
Are there binary blobs? If not, I'll buy one. If so, are the hardware specifications detailed enough for people to replace the binary blobs with open source drivers? If so, I'll buy one when that happens.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The Raspberry Pi's main mission is education. I have no idea where they're at with that, but the commercial aspect of selling boards to the masses is a very slick way to raise funds. Would you give them money just because you like their cause? Not so readily. Intel isn't competing in this market and most likely won't do so any time soon.
If this board had an Nvidia card that did VDPAU, instead of that GMA cruft, I may have been interested - because I need VDPAU, and it works awesomely well with an Atom CPU and 1080p H.264 video on the ION platform. Not an ION? Not interested. (to Nvidia: wink, wink)
If people actually do switch to Intel's "competitor" board in the detriment of the Raspberry Pi, it's going to hurt Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals, the people who buy Intel's stuff will be a lot more out of pocket for not much in return (can you get the same or more power if you give the $200 to Raspberry Pi and build a cluster with their boards?) I somehow don't see that happening though...
Bottom line is that if you want a Raspberry Pi you get a Raspberry Pi, and if you want a crap x86 computer - just because it is small - you get the "competing" board from Intel.
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
I would gladly pay $300 if they made it with Bay Trail (or atleast an Atom chip with integrated GPU that works with Inel's GPL drivers) and added a second GigE port.
At least it doesn't have a ridiculous name like Raspberry Pi
It also gave me cold shivers when I saw the GPU spec. According to Wikipedia the GMA600 really is just that old stupid PowerVR core with the clock cranked to 2x speed. At least it supports programmable shaders, hooray. But I think I'm done torturing myself with the old world GMA crap-chips. No thanks.
I challenge slashdot to go a full month without shilling some fucking product or another.
I challenge Slashdot to go a full month without calling every another person a shill all the time!
Have fun getting PCIE, msata, and gig-e in your raspi buddy. FTFA "with I/O performance being one of the MinnowBoard's standout capabilities. PCIe, SATA disk support, and Gigabit Ethernet make it suitable for file servers and network appliances. . ."
Last time I checked the raspi didn't have any of those.
$200 is simply too far out of range of the $35/$50 Pi for it to be considered a competitor.
Datedness and relative power of components aside, the open hardware platform aspect is a good selling point. Hopefully this lends an economy of scale to the product that ultimately gets it into the same ballpark.
USB powered, typically, by a wall wart.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
How is a $200 board a raspberry pi competitor?
Actually, this isn't even a new product category for Intel. They already have the NUC (Next Unit of Computing), remember? The DCCP847DYE barebone box sells for €160. Sure, you have to add RAM and mass media storage, but it's still a nicer deal. Especially when it comes with a dual-core Celeron and an Intel HD Graphics GPU.
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow. The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi. The CPU has more horsepower, and yon don't have porting headaches to get reasonable things running on it. $200 seems like a good value to me. You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application. The pi will be straining. I have hopes for the minnow.
First, post your benchmarks, and BOM for all the add-on you needed to make it work. Then you can grouse about the price.
2009 called, they want their roboard back.
it should be at almost 10 times the price
If I had mod Points...... :)
It costs more then a Celeron NUC, which actually has cool features like full virtualization support.
Good-bye
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
Intel seems to have totally missed the mark on this one. People don't buy the Raspberry Pi because they want a desktop PC in an awkward form factor. They buy the RPi because they want a tiny general purpose computing device that sips power and costs so little as to consider it disposable.
The Minnow completely fails on all but one of those criteria - It costs 8x as much, has a 60% larger footprint (almost the size of a NanoITX board!), the CPU alone draws up to 4W (not even counting everything else on the board) vs the Pi's 2.5W total...
If anything, I would have to suspect Intel means to target this as a semi-embedded Epia/Jetway/ECS killer - Though even there, it costs more, still has a larger footprint than readily-available Pico-ITX boards, and lacks the standardized mechanical aspects (ie, mounting holes) you get with the ITX family.
DOA. Simple as that. You can already get more computer for less money, and less computer for a LOT less money.
Maybe that is why Arm boards are cleaning up. Who the fuck cares about x86; you're going to program it in C anyway. Let's face it, the price of this piece of shit is mortally insulting in any context.
Hey, engineers to spin up this board got to eat you know.
Yes, but not that much.
Donut + coffee OR Mountain Dew + Doritos
Fried rice + kim chee
You're on the right track, but WAY too undemanding. I'd pay MAYBE up to $100 for that. Tops.
of openness.
Isn't the only major component that doesn't have open source drivers the GPU on the Pi?
Regardless RK3188 boards are the ideal equivalent of these and they can reach much more competitive pricing in line with the Pi at minimum and half the Atom board at maximum, including 2 gigs of ram and 8+ gigs of flash.
And that's not including all the other really awesome Quad-ARM SoCs available in similiarly cheap packaging.
>some stuff about hydroponics, LEDs And now the DEA is knocking on Khyber's door.
The most likely use cases today aren't hobbyist applications but industrial uses, Anders said. "The BeagleBone is a very small, low-power device, and it's targeted for some very specific applications for hobbying. You know, developing small proof-of-concept designs," Anders said. "Our initial offer for the MinnowBoard is actually more targeted toward industrial automation, industrial controls. What you'll find is a lot of manufacturers, companies creating products, if they want to create an x86 design, they have to buy a third-party reference platform which is closed. They have to buy large software support packages, support contracts, and they generally don't get the right to use the existing design as it is. They have to buy additional licenses and things to create the product."
In other words, this is aimed at a completely different market than the ones looking for a raspberry pi or a beaglebone. From Rpi's own FAQ: "We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming." David Anders says it may reach price point similar to the Rpi or Beaglebone in the near future, but there's no promises. I know this sounds like nitpicking, but framing the discussion improperly with a misleading title is something Slashdot desperately needs to stop.
Stopping the use of misleading titles and properly framing the discussion would take all the fun and revune out of /.
The style of misleading titles and improperly framing the discussion was made very popular in "scandal rags" of the past to generate sales at the checkout counter. Now it's used by "online rags" to generate "unique views", "click-throughs", and assorted other stuff that generates revenue.
The past: /. == reasonable news /. == sensationalism
Now:
Intel is about 3 years late:
http://fitpc.com/
I'll stick with the Pi.
Anything from a major US company can't help but be suspect.
So. . .you're not imagining a Beowulf Cluster of those. . .
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Rpi needs 700 mA USB 2.0 can typically only supply 500 mA.
Of course you do, shill.
Slash $150 off it before I even consider it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
We were just playing with freshly unboxed Minnowboards at LinuxCon, and it was not a pleasant experience. Here are he issues we uncovered as a group:
1) The boards do not boot consistently. It sometimes requires reseating power and/or the SD card multiple times.
2) The included parts kit has a 3 Ohm resistor instead of 3k Ohm, so the included LED will not light up with what's in the box.
3) The Atom chip runs quite hot, enough for the other side of the board to be uncomfortable to touch. This is despite the huge heatsink on it. I cannot imagine this processor ever being used in a mobile, battery-powered device.
4) The GPIO ports are as flaky as they come. High one moment and low the next despite no input and no touching.
When you add in that this unit costs more than 6x what the high end Raspberry Pi does, or twice with Adafruit's whole Pi kit does, I cannot find a reason to like the Minnowboard.
Yeah, you can buy a chromebook for that knid of money. And the cb comes with a case. I'll keep using the raspberry or the beagleboard, thanks anyway Intel.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
With 1GB of RAM and no 64-bit instruction set, have fun running ZFS on your so-called file server, buddy!
Indeed - I can get an HP microserver for less, complete with case, power supply, and a boot drive.
I think Intel has an advantage when it comes to throughput or computing power, but realistically the Atom is not really that impressive, certainly not at this price.
This vs. BeagleBoard Black - why would I go with this? The Black is $10 more than a Pi and $144 less than a Minnowboard.
I can see putting a BBB vs. a RPi, but this is silly.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Hey, engineers to spin up this board got to eat you know.
Yes, but not that much.
Donut + coffee OR Mountain Dew + Doritos
That covers breakfast and lunch, what about dinner?
esp. considering you can buy atom-itx-boards starting around 50€ (so for all components sticking below 150€ is possible) - and you can even upgrade the components separately then instead of having to throw it all away if you run OOM
The only reason they are comparing it to a rasPi is that rasPi is a popular keyword.
Would they say they have a new mini board for $200, nobody would give a shit.
Vajk
Just slap on an 8bit mcu like an AVR of PIC or whatever over SPI/I2C/USART/... to do the real time stuff.
Yes I do. And yes I do.
I don't have porting headaches, all my code can be compiled to run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, etc. I have yet to find functionality I need for my embedded systems that is not available on the Debian or home grown Linux I run everywhere.
What is hard about using the I/O like GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C on most ARM boards?
For many of the embedded projects I work on a cheap ARM board is just fine. I don't use the Raspi there only because it lacks the temperature specs I need.
Sure if I need more horse power or I/O bandwidth I'll use something else.
Bottom line is that a 200 dollar Intel board may have it's place but it is as much a Raspi competitor as the Raspi is an AVR or PIC competitor. They are different beasts in different markets at very different prices.
How are you doing today, jones_supa_shill?
Yeah, I was totally disapointed by Minnowboard aswell. I hope they make a Baytrail version, which should have their own graphics core.
Sage/AMD has a competing product called the gizmoboard, which annoyingly enough lacks a HDMI output (but it's exposed in one of the open contacts, you'd just need to add a adapter).
A revised gizmoboard (which I think they've said is in the works) or a minnowboard with baytrail would be some great competition to the ARM $200 range. Not really against RPI tho.
They totally missed the point of RPi. AFFORDABILITY and ACCESSIBILITY were the main goals. This $200 monster is neither. It will fail BIG time.
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow.
Considering that the news just got here about the Minnow, no, I haven't "looked closely" at it. I've read the fine article about it, however.
The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi.
Richer as in "costs more", yes. The Pis I have have the hardware I need to do the job I bought them for. Putting lots of extra stuff on them would only raise the price.
The CPU has more horsepower, and yon don't have porting headaches to get reasonable things running on it.
The Pi appears to be able to be overclocked to 1GHz, although I haven't tried, and have no need to. I've had no problem porting the things I needed to port, I just copied the source code and compiled it. Well, the PC I developed the code on had a real serial port and the Pi doesn't, so I had to change the value of one constant from "/dev/ttyS0" to "/dev/ttyUSB0". Is that what you call "porting headaches"?
On the other hand, the PC didn't have hardware PWM, so if I used the PC I would have to come up with on outboard hardware solution to get the steady PWM signal I need.
You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application.
I wasn't aware that a CAN bus was a requirement for robotics. I thought servos made use of PWM signals. As for cameras, the Pi has a hardware camera. I haven't used it yet, but that's next on the list of things to do. Other people seem to be doing vision processing with it, so I'm sure that mine will do it eventually, too.
If you're concerned that the Pi has only one (AFAIK) hardware PWM channel (wait, it has two, doesn't it?), well, for the price of one Minnow you can get 6 Pis and they call all dedicate themselves to that one channel and not have to time share or suffer from task switching glitches. Hardware PWM beats the hottest Intel CPU doing bit-banging every day of the week, and twice on Saturday.
The headline on this article and on the Ars one is misleading. From what they quoted of the Intel spokesman, this is not intended to be a Pi competitor. They didn't say that. It's an open source/open hardware solution. But their justification is a tad off, I think. This board is aimed at developers who would pay $1000 for a development system -- and they don't say why anyone would pay $1000 for a development system when you could develop on the board itself.
The most amazing quote is this. This board uses old hardware because "We used an older one to get our feet wet, so to speak, and understand the design." In other words, Intel was not comfortable designing things with their current generation of CPU and glue, even though they are mass producing them and selling them to others. And the bit about this being an "open system"? Interesting that the major closed component on the Pi is the GPU, which is ALSO closed on the Minnow.
eSATA, PCIe, Gig-E? Because the Pi doesn't have that you can't use it as a file server or network appliance? Hmmm. So even though I can hook a few Tb of disk up to the Pi via USB, I can't use that as a file server? I can't hook up a temperature sensor or three to the Pi and hook it to the network and have a network appliance that measures temperature for me? The truth is, the Pi makes a fine file server or network appliance, it just won't be enterprise grade at either one or be really fast. No True Scotsman would have a USB disk on a fileserver, I guess.
but $200 is a steal by the standards of x86 boards designed for embedded purposes
What? I've been buying mini-ITX boards for embedded work, with first C7's then Atoms for $100-$129 for five years now, some even with a built-in DC regulator. And the only thing I hate about the Atom boards is the PowerVR GPU's.
Yeah, it's not PC/104, but if cost is the primary factor, PC/104 isn't that relevant.
At $50 it might be a RPi competitor, but at $199 I don't know who the target market could be.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No.
If it were an open hardware platform they would have released the designs for the atom and the board.
They didn't, so it's not.
It is you who remembers incorrectly or chooses to disregard the facts.
That blog post was very close to constituting deliberate deceit, as many open source software people explained in great detail both on the blog and on the Raspberry Pi forums.
Don't take PR at face value, read the analysis by numerous contributors which have since been confirmed repeatedly.
$200 and only 1gb ram?
The odroid looks enormously better: http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G135341370451
That's what it looks like to me. Maybe a bit smaller but not much. Also having a price that high defeats the whole object. It might be good but it isn't a competitor to the Raspberry Pi. Wrong size, wrong price backet.
Red Bull + Cheetos
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
I'd like to jump in and recommend trying out the Beaglebone Black. At $45, it's not much more than the Pi, and feels like what the Raspberry Pi should have been. It's much more stable (and uses less power!), has on-chip ethernet (avoiding horrible USB related problems that the Pi has), isn't plagued with USB issues and generally has better specs. Interfacing stuff to the Beaglebone is a dream, compared to the Pi, with more hardware supported modes and real analog pins.
Since finding the Beaglebone and the Black, my flaky old Pis get used much less often. Admittedly, I'm using these as embedded controllers for instruments and not as a media center. I'm not sure how the Black does in that area.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
This is an open platform, any one can build it, using parts available in one-off quantities?
Where can I buy a single Atom CPU or Northbridge? The two most important, most expensive parts.
Having created and published projects using both Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black, and speaking as someone who regularly publishes electronic projects and open source code (largely on the Arduino software), I'd echo what others have said... this thing really misses the mark, considering the high price and lack of I/O.
Beaglebone Black is really the one Linux-based board that's doing everything right (except for the head start Raspberry Pi enjoys). The price is under $50, size is small, there's a LOT of I/O with advanced capabilities, performance is ok, and the feature I love the most on BBB: it has a decent performing 2 GB flash disk soldered to the board.
As someone who publishes code for projects, a built-in flash disk with dependable performance a huge benefit. With a Raspberry Pi, you have no idea how their system will perform if disk I/O matters. They might use a SanDisk Ultra card (or whatever SanDisk is calling them now), which can do about 1 to 2 Mbyte/sec with random seeks, still slow by PC standards, but fast enough to be useful. But odds are they'll use a cheap SD card, where the random I/O performance can be as slow as 20 kbytes/sec.
If Intel really wants to rule this Linux-based project world, they'll need come out with something in the $40 to $60 price range, maybe with high-end options approaching $99. A good performing built-in SSD, enough RAM, lots of I/O, and good connectivity (USB, Ethernet, Wifi) are the killer features people need for real projects. A faster x86 processor on an overpriced, feature-poor board without SSD is never going to compete with great products like the Beaglebone Black.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Then as a serious question, how does this thing compare to existing embedded Atom or NUC boards? There's a Celeron NUC kit out there for $180ish and it's smaller than the Minnow to boot. There are also lots of fanless Pico-ITX boards with Intel chips.
Intel should really be putting something back into the community. While they are mucking around the engineers of the future are learning to use their greatest competitor's hardware.
What they should of done is make a $50 board, give away a cut down version of vxworks(which they own). However they are so scared of undercutting the bottom line they will not do this.
Seriously they deserve everything that is going to happen to them
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Didn't check the data sheet, but the Atom I was working with had a PWM for the LCD backlight.
Yeah, let Intel put out something @ $40, and then it may be worth a discussion
Hey kids! Why are you messing with those science-projects from the Bell Labs gang? C'mon! RSTS is the established and serious way to compute. We think you'll find that our shareholders appreciate the value provided by our additional cost.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
and they are doing it using same method M$ used coming up with WinRT and losing $1 billion in the process
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
That depends on what you want to do with it. If you don't want to hook it up to a monitor, you don't have to hook it up to a monitor. You can't do a completely headless install by putting the base Linux image on the SD card, and using SSH to remote into the machine. Assuming you already have another computer, the only things you need are, an SD Card, A Network cable, and a USB Power Supply. You can get those three items for under $15 total, and most people who would be interested in using a Raspberry Pi probably have this stuff sitting around already.
They way you're describing it, you might as well throw in the cost of the printer you can hook up the USB port of the PI, or any other peripherals. Also, if you don't have a TV that uses HDMI, you can use the composite video port on your TV if you really want a display. I don't think I've seen a TV recently that doesn't have either composite or HDMI.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've tried the RasPi, arduino, PICs and many other boards. but the most interesting boards rigght now are http://www.zedboard.org
Two arm cores and na FPGA in the same chip - can run decent Linux (Ubuntu) and X/desktop (xillybus).
$200 is a steal by the standards of x86 boards designed for embedded purposes
http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm
$95-$110
And that it's small
...
And that it sips power
And that it can interface with robotics sensors
GMA600 is that ultra crappy PowerVR based piece of shit, that not only has had terrible driver support under Windows, but also requires a useless piece of shit binary blob under Linux to work really badly. I think I'll pass on this one.
This is nothing more than a dev board on the cheap ( dev boards can be in the thousands) .
As with all development boards; they are meant to DEMO tech with no real world application. If you what "real-world" functionality and pricing, buy a consumer oreiented piece...
Pi competitor? No, obviously! And calling the pi "open", bullshit! Try and buy the processor alone to use in custom small runs of less than 100. If it can't be duplicated in full by an individual, then it isn't open, they call that proprietary!
I'm waiting for a (good, cheap and easy) software defined system package for programmable logic (FPGA). Why be stuck with one CPU/IO design? DIY ASIC, anyone? One day!
I'm interested in it... Try and find tech that Isn't for sale, its all shill, go back to school...
Exactly!
There are plenty of higher-performance single board computers in this price class. Cheaper, even. This is just one more, with perhaps slightly better performance.
I had to buy none of that, but then, I wasn't trying to turn it into a "desktop" computer. I didn't even have to buy an SD card as I was able to scrounge an old 2GB one (a bit constrained, but plenty of room for basic headless use I find. I get the feeling that if I HAD needed to buy one, I could have found one big enough for ~$5).
I did have to configure the boot image myself (i.e. mount the image on my computer and adjust the starting services, IP address settings, etc.) but from that point on it was just a matter of plugging it in and using SSH to operate it. I haven't tested it, but I suspect x2go or freenx might work on it as well if you need remote GUI.
I played with it as a webcam server for a little while, now my project is to turn it into a low-power (legal unlicensed) FM transmitter to rebroadcast streaming audio to the clock-radios in my house.
There's quite a bit one can do with just the basic RaspberryPi, an SD card, and a network connection without any additional hardware.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Not much 'additional' engineering was involved here! The profit margin is rather large on this! For a company a large as intel to produce (what was it) 5000 units a month(?), that would be the driver for cost.
If "they" (middle-men included) make $150 on each... $750k (ish) is not really a big flow for an entity that deals in billions of $... -VS- mass produced (1000k -or- 10,000k units) at $15 profit, then... Basic math!
True, for consumer folks!
Not true, for technical folks!
The Pi does not cost $25. I own one and that's a laughable claim. For starters I can't find one for $25 equivalent here in the UK, sure Farnell sell them imported but they'll charge you for shipping unless you order over a certain amount. Amazon sell them bare for £30 - or $50.
You need at least a 1A USB connection if you're using the network connection or using any USB periphs, so add on a wall wart - $5-10 for a decent one.
You really should get a case - $5
Need to connect it wirelessly? - $10
Add an SD card - $5
A proper breakout for the pins? - Between $5 for DIY and $10 for a kit. Gertboards are even more.
Suddenly you're looking at $50-60+ to actually get it running, not including any extra cabling, keyboards etc. Now that's still damn cheap, but it's not $25 cheap and don't let them convince you that it is.
I like to read about developments in the hardware, not stuff saying "Hey! This is for sale, now!"
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Try and find tech that Isn't for sale"
Yet we keep hearing '5 years away' and it never materializes.
And yes, as general as that is, you should know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
Take a look at Beagle Bone Black.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow.
Considering that the news just got here about the Minnow, no, I haven't "looked closely" at it. I've read the fine article about it, however.
If you count on SlashDot to keep you informed about embedded electronics you are about 9 months behind the rest of us. The minnow has been shown around as prototype hardware for at least 6 to 9 months.
The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi.
The Pi appears to be able to be overclocked to 1GHz, although I haven't tried, and have no need to. I've had no problem porting the things I needed to port, I just copied the source code and compiled it. Well, the PC I developed the code on had a real serial port and the Pi doesn't, so I had to change the value of one constant from "/dev/ttyS0" to "/dev/ttyUSB0". Is that what you call "porting headaches"?
No, I'm thinking of ROS and OpenCV. Which the ROS foundation is supporting BTW, but without them putting in a man-year or so on top of community effort, ROS on a raspi would not be as close to running as it is.
You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application.
I wasn't aware that a CAN bus was a requirement for robotics. I thought servos made use of PWM signals.
R/C servos, sure. That's what high school kids use to get started in robotics. That's legitimate. Bigger/better robots have better motors, and better communication systems.
I'm not dissing the raspi, it is a decent value for what it is. Mid-range ARM, limited I/O, delicate.
I argue that there is value in having the ATOM architecture available in a small form factor board with easy access to I/O. Price out your application, if raspi wins, good for you. raspi isn't up to what I need, and is therefore not a good a value in my applications. (BTW -- I *am* aware of what the raspi can do -- the originator of Raspian is a good friend, and the build farm lives in his basement. We meet almost every week to talk about robotics. We have explored the limits of robotics with the raspi quite thoroughly.)
Really, this is all about hitting the right spot on the price/performance curve. Raspi is simply in a different place on the curve than Minnow, or BeageBoneBlack, for that matter. Trying to compare them directly without reference to an application is pointless.
No, all those other items are supplied by many many other hobbyist boards. The Pi's advantage is purely price and of course now popularity.
Yeah no crap, AMD put out their own X86 micro last year (sorry I can't find the link, my Google Fu is off ATM) and at $199 it had a 64bit OOO Bobcat APU with a Radeon GPU powerful enough to do 1080p. This thing literally looks like its made from the chips that Intel couldn't sell and the price just adds insult to injury. At least the Bobcat held 4GB of RAM and had enough graphical muscle to be used for most video tasks. I have one of the E350s and with fast memory you can even do some halfway decent gaming on them, I play the Torchlights and Portals on mine no problem.
Speaking of the E series if you don't absolutely HAVE to have micro you can pick up an E350 board, complete with a PCI-E slot and the ability to hold 16GB of DDR 3 (kinda overkill IMHO) and its only $65 shipped. I have built several units with these boards, both HTPCs and office boxes, and I can say they are pretty damned nice. They are great for getting rid of those aging P4s many places still have and at just 18w under load it pulls less maxed out than a P4 did at idle. They also have plenty of graphical power, they make great media tank HTPCs and are even good for casual gaming, they also support hybrid crossfire so if you want even more graphics power you can slap in a dirt cheap HD5450 and be able to play a surprising number of games on the thing.
But $200 for a 32bit Atom with a GMA 600? That is beyond lame, hell its not even a dual core.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So poor suckers can be lulled into thinking they're getting a good deal. You know, capitalism.
Raspbian is also a great advantage of the Pi.
To tap into the Debian repositories means things are wide open for soft ware and then combined with the open hardware aspect (mechanical IO and robot type applications), lots of possibilities. Plus I like the camera.
I was seriously dissapointed in the raspberry pi. The price is good, but that is about it...
Once I got the pi up and going, I realized that much of the marketing hype about being an 'open' development platform for learning about computers was total garbage. You cannot get a schematic of the board, you cannot get the complete spec. sheet for the processor nor can you get much of the source code. It was not the product that I had hoped it was.
RPi was never sold on it's "openness". It was sold on:
- Being accessible. Being cheap was part of that.
- Using free software. Being Linux based, and using open programming tools, there are no software licenses to buy.
- Having access to hardware IO. The GPIO pins, along with simple programming of said pins, allows a mix of hardware and software projects that would probably not be practical with regular PC. Being so cheap makes them almost disposable should it get fried by mistake.
My RPi has not done much since I bought it, but that is more down to my laziness than any short coming of the hardware. It is merrily sitting next to my television, though flashing it's lights and waiting for me to spring into action.
You can get the same thing on a Bobcat board for $65, and those are dual core, support 8-16GB of RAM depending on the board, and most come with HDMI.
I'm sorry but there is just no way to spin a single core Atom with GMA (graphics My Ass) chip for $200 as a good thing, its just too overpriced and underpowered. if I had to guess Intel took the chips they couldn't move and dumped them here and just like the netbook which Intel crippled their offerings so they wouldn't compete with Celeron I wouldn't be surprised if some PHB made the selling price high, again to keep competition away from their precious Celery.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
and check this out, 8 gpio pins.
8 "buffered GPIO pins" on a nice pin header plus various interfaces including some more GPIO on a nasty expansion connector (one of those white fine pitch surface mount things).
Anyone know how the processor on this thing compares to say a quad coretex A9 (as is commonly seen on arm boards in this price range)?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Raspbian is also a great advantage of the Pi.
Having a fully featured linux distro on there by default is an advantage IMO. You can (and I do) put debian on other arm boards but then you can start to feel cut of from the communities surrounding those boards.
OTOH it's sad that raspbian needs to exist (and I say this as it's main developer). It needs to exist because the Pi ended up on a CPU core that is basically one step below what all the major hard float distros had chosen to settle on.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
wait, it has two, doesn't it?
IIRC (and this is off the top of my head, may be wrong) it has two but only one is accessible on the GPIO header. To get at the other as a plain PWM signal you would have to hack the audio circuit. Hacking the audio circuit is likely to be a pain due to the fact that some of the components you would need to swap are "in the shadow" of the audio connctor and would hence be difficult to replace.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's not priced like a modern board. It's WAY MORE.
They should have put out the Atom+FPGA version at this price, with programmable power gating of course.
If I had mod Points...... :)
Done !
The Pi does not cost $25. I own one and that's a laughable claim. For starters I can't find one for $25 equivalent here in the UK, sure Farnell sell them imported but they'll charge you for shipping unless you order over a certain amount. Amazon sell them bare for £30 - or $50.
As a fellow brit who has been buying embedded linux boards for a while I can tell you that the disconnect between nominal price claimed by the creators and what you actually end up paying is far from unique to the PI. Delivery costs, taxes and distributor markups all add up :(.
A raspberry pi model A from CPC* is £20.05 all in. A model B from CPC is £28.07 a minnowboard from Farnell is £162.83 all in. So at real UK prices (including VAT and delivery) so at real UK prices a minnowboard is about 8x the cost of a Pi model A and just under 6x the cost of a Pi model B.
Accessories do drive up the total cost if you can't scrounge them up from the junk box. Again not unique to the Pi though the Pi's low price does make it more noticable.
* CPC have been handling this Pi thing MUCH better than their parent company Farnell who have been pushing consumer Pi buyers to a crappy microsite.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well, in terms of having onboard sata on an itty bitty board, I could go with a cubieboard for $49-$69, depending upon features desired. It is about the size of a beagleboard, and runs an ARM A10.
If I wanted faster for less money, I could go with an Asus fanless series board, and have more configurability.
The only thing I can see this board competing with is Jetway, which already is within this price point.
Indeed. They are just shamelessly trying to profit from the Raspberry name. This is not even in the same class in any of its aspects, and, except for computing power, quite inferior to the Raspberry Pi.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Does it have "Me2" inside?
When will companies get that the most important thing about these devices is that 100% of the code be available. If you aren't shipping the source code for all the critical parts you might as well not have shipped it at all. That means wifi is free, ethernet is free, GPU is free, BIOS is free, etc.
There may be some boards that get really close. Unfortunately they aren't close enough for my tastes.
And yea- it does seem too damm exspensive for what it is.
There are several ARM boards for less than half the price.
Because it's smaller than a netbook and better suits other needs. Also, contrary to the pi, this one is actually open with proper documentation, which means that a larger variety of OSs will run, and not just linux.
There are "da/ad", it's the audio input and output. Audio input can be used as a ghetto ADC for one thing. PCs used to have the joystick connector for that too :)
Microsoft made the netbook gain a hard drive and sell umpty millions.
Also if you don't have a TV.. Then you have to cart around a huge ass old CRT TV to use the composite on, negating the low footprint of a pi, both in physical space and power use. So what is it for? You can use an old Pentium II or Pentium III PC if you want a crappy machine, that will be cheaper ($0, but uses more electricity). If you want some headless toy you ssh into, you can have a VM (or a virtual private server). If you want to flash LEDs there's Arduino, though a Pi might be more convenient with ssh and linux. It's great for some projects maybe, homemade industrial stuff, frontend to Arduinos or whatever but not so much as a generic computer toy or children's toy, and it mostly sells to people with too much money who have no idea what they need it for.
There's just one exception: with the graphics processing unit, only the binary files required to drive the GPU are available, as the source code remains closed. Anders said that's a sticking point for some purists
After having to deal with the nightmare that was the GMA500 blobs with intels on and off again linux support you can shove your new binaries were the CRT's don't shine.
Oh god anything other than VxWorks! Please. A 30-year old monolithic design 'kernel' (really just one big object file -- link your app with the supplied 'operating system') with not-invented-here syndrome processes (sorry, 'RTPs') added on which are a piss-poor imitation of UNIX processes, decades later. Yes it's powerful, deterministic and arguably lower memory-footprint than Linux, but wow can you blow your foot off with it. And debug tools that are nigh-impossible to set up and use.
Oh, and a gcc toolchain which they refuse to release actual, compilable sources for (when you call them after trying for weeks to build the toolchains for a Linux->VxWorks 6.x cross-compiler, they'll tell you they own the copyright to header files which are required to build gcc targetting VxWorks so you have to buy a license).
Why have they not been sued into oblivion by the FSF yet?!
You'd be better off hiring a pair of *good* embedded engineers to write bare-metal code for your app.. if you need multiple threads/processes and high-level net connectivity, just go Linux.
A DVI to VGA adapter costs $4.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=It%27s%20a%20trick.%20Get%20an%20axe
has on-chip ethernet (avoiding horrible USB related problems that the Pi has),
Do not understand your sentence. There is an ethernet port on Raspberry B.
Interesting - i bought an hdmi to vga on ebay for mine for the equivalent of about $15. And if you spent $40 on a usb keyboard and mouse...? $10 should have done you!
What I want is something the size or a little larger than raspberry pi, with VT extensions, low power, to run a XEN host.
In the case of the Pi, you can use your Router's mass storage/printer sharing USB port if it has one.
The ethernet on the Raspberry Pi is provided via a USB-to-ethernet chip.[1] USB devices on the Raspberry Pi have been known to give all sorts of problems when there is insufficient power,[2] which was likely to happen if one powered it using a standard compliant hub which only provided 500 mA instead of the requisite 700 mA. Since the network connection was provided via USB, it was also affected.
Citations:
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs#Why no Gigabit Ethernet?
[2] http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Power_Supply_Problems
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
is not competitive. know your market
I have been considering the Beaglebone Black for an embedded project but the one thing about it that bothers me is the lack of HDMI 1920x1080 support. I do not need fast graphics performance but being able to use x1080 displays at native resolution is important.
Absolutely. The UDOO board is better than both and costs less than the intel board... Comes daring ready, quad core, with nic and wireless...
This device is nowhere near a Raspberry Pi competitor. For the same price, you could build a mini-Pi cluster! The headline makes it a Troll post. 'nuff said.