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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Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it?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.
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.
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.
..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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
No, sharpened rocks would be absurd. They used razors made out of coconuts.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
$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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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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.
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.
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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 $50 board, give away a cut down version of vxworks(which they own). However they are so scared of undercutting the bottom line they will not do this.
Seriously they deserve everything that is going to happen to them
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
and they are doing it using same method M$ 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 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.
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