Intel Upgrades MinnowBoard: Baytrail CPU, Nearly Halves Price To $99

DeviceGuru (1136715) writes "Intel and CircuitCo have revealed a smaller, faster, 2nd-gen MinnowBoard open SBC based on an Atom E3800 SoC and supported by both Android 4.4 and various standard Linux OSes. The MinnowBoard Max, which will ship in Q3 starting at $99, blows past the original MinnowBoard (Slashdot video) on price, performance, and energy consumption. The 3.9 x 2.9-inch Max's $99 starting price includes a 64-bit 1.46GHz Intel Atom E3815 (Bay Trail-T) CPU, 1GB RAM and 8GB SPI flash, and coastline ports for MicroSD, Micro-HDMI, GbE, dual USB, and SATA. Unlike the original MinnowBoard, the Max provides two expansion connectors: a low-speed header, with signals similar to the Arduino's Shield connector; and a high-speed connector, which can support mSATA and mini-PCIe sockets on expansion modules, among other interfaces. Although the Max's design supports CPUs up to Intel's quad-core 1.91GHz (10W TDP) E3845, only two choices shown initially at MinnowBoard.org, with the higher-end $129 model stepping up to a 1.33GHz dual-core E3825 plus 2GB RAM.."

Comments

Best MAME motherboard ever?

[ArcadeMan]

Powerful enough Intel CPU for MAME and direct Arduino-style ports for all the inputs and outputs of modern, home-made arcade cabinets?

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, at least its finally a RasPi killer that actually has a target market, as opposed to people who want to pay more for something larger and less useful.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me ... you're paying the Intel (TM) premium. Someone will do it better, cheaper. Just give it time.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone will do it better, cheaper. Just give it time.,

That is true of about any computer product.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about as powerful as a Pentium II, at a fraction of the thermal power. Perfectly fine for 15 year old computer performance. This is probably not the part you are looking for if you are actually trying to make a MAME cabinet, but it's better than the people who were previously using pentium 4's and celerons that had 90 watt thermal power envelopes.

People need to remember the purpose of these things is to go into battery-operated devices, not be some kind of laptop/desktop replacement, because these devices are in the same cpu-power range as the early netbook fad that later crashed because nobody wanted to run linux, and instead wanted windows XP because Vista was too good for it.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

For inputs, skip the GPIO header and just use HID USB. Less hassle, and they perform wonderfully.

Also, JVS to USB options exist too, if you want to use a cabinet made sometime this century.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[tepples]

It might run an older NES emulator at acceptable speed, or perhaps a native remake of the old game.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

GPIO is for just that: general purpose input/output. You can hook up damn near anything to those pins and easily write code to control whatever device(s) you want. USB isn't quite as simple. GPIO is perfect for what these devices were designed around.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Powerful enough Intel CPU for MAME

Chea, if you only want to play Pac-Man.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could do N64 and PlayStation games too. I used to emulate those well on an old K6-2 400MHz with 64MB RAM, dual Voodoo 2 cards and a Matrox Millennium II using UltraHLE and Bleem. The problem with MAME is it's horribly slow and unoptimized, so you'll want to use better emulators.

I recommend Kawaks, Final Burn Alpha, Raine, Zinc, ePSXe, pSX, Project64, higan, Kega Fusion, Nestopia and Stella.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[Blaskowicz]

I don't understand that netbook meme on slashdot, they were hugely successful and ran real software, not cell phone/PDA/Psion stuff. They made laptops affordable, for the better or the worse. There are probably more people running Photoshop on netbooks than playing with their Raspberry Pee. You're slightly wrong about the CPU power, an old netbook's CPU is around 3x more powerful than a Raspberry's one I think. The newly announced MinnowBoard is perhaps the first "single board computer" that surpasses a first-gen netbook.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[TheRaven64]

Things like the Pandaboad and Wandaboard have been faster than most Netbooks for a while. The RPi wasn't, but it was never meant to be - it was meant to be so cheap you could buy them as almost disposable things and not worry about children breaking them. The SoC they used was cheap because it was originally designed for set-top boxes, where GPU performance was important and the CPU was an afterthought, but was a few generations old so now the GPU was no longer a major selling point.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Trust me ... you're paying the Intel (TM) premium. Someone will do it better, cheaper. Just give it time.

You'd better be certain that you actually need all that power before you go and pay a little less than half as much for a Beaglebone black; but ~$100 is actually pretty much the going rate for a 'dev board' style arrangement with properly punchy ARM application processor, and those tend to have extra happy-fun-dicking-around-with-the-worst-graphics-driver-on-god's-black-earth, as opposed to 'Install Debian, have Intel's nonthrilling-but-endurable and in-kernel driver just work'.

The Intel Galileo seems like a product in pathetic search for purpose (can't bitbang even as well as a 16MHz AVR, rather more expensive than an arduino, weird and limited enough that the slightly less costly BB black or rPi is a better move, etc.); but this Minnowboard revision is markedly more compelling.

If you don't actually need that much power, you can get weaker-and-still-runs-full-linux ARM boards for about half that; but if you want a devboard (as opposed to hacking up some tightly integrated AllWinner SomethingSomething from ebay that may not even have serial debug headers), with a high end ARM application processor, you are looking at about $100 and not wildly dissimilar energy consumption.

If anything, the main competition (outside of space-constrained scenarios), is probably the (surprisingly aggressively priced) full bay trail motherboards (some other vendors as well). That will be a bit bigger, and you'll need a 24-pin PSU of some kind; but no need for expansion boards just to get PCIe/miniPCIe sockets, more I/O, and enough change to buy a low end arduino to substitute for the low-speed expansion.

I don't know if ARM scared intel good and hard, or if this is some price-dumping long game; but they appear to be practically giving 'Bay Trail' dice away.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It might run an older NES emulator at acceptable speed, or perhaps a native remake of the old game.

It probably depends more on what games you want, and how fanatical about fidelity you are. Reportedly, 100% timing-accurate simulation of even the humble NES is surprisingly computationally intensive, and nothing less will do to hunt down every last oddball that exploited weird edge conditions in the hardware and run it glitchlessly in its original form; but 'usually good enough' emulation was happening back when we were rocking PIII 450s on the desktop and worse than that on the laptop side.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Unless the GPIO pins are exposed to mame as some sort of controller, you're going to have to write some kind of driver. As it stands now, I can wire up a couple of boards from MadCatz and have it working in under an hour. Well under an hour if I just use two TE sticks.

Re:Best MAME motherboard ever?

[NJRoadfan]

NES emulation was no problem even on a low end Pentium II. Baytrail isn't 15 year old computer slow. The new crop of tablets equipped with it are actually quite speedy for what they have to do and appear to be selling quite well.

SPI typo...

[__aajbyc7391]

err... that should say "8MB SPI flash," not "8GB SPI" (sorry!)

Re:SPI typo...

[unixisc]

Is the clarification complete? Traditionally, 4Mb (as in bit) was used in BIOSes, which used to be parallel flash at one time before they migrated first to an LPC/Firmware Hub interface, and then SPI. Those are typically NOR flash with low densities. So I would have thought such a board would have 8Mb of flash - enough to contain Coreboot or EFI, but obviously not to contain the OS itself.

Cool but expensive

[afidel]

Seems pretty expensive considering you can get a Dell Venue 8 with 2GHz dual core/2GB ram/32GB flash/battery/screen/case for $179. Still, for a lot of projects it would be useful.

Re:Cool but expensive

[timeOday]

The Dell Venue 8 has a Clover Trail Atom, not Bay Trail. Bay Trail was a big step forward for the Atom!

Re:Cool but expensive

[damn_registrars]

Seems pretty expensive considering you can get a Dell Venue 8 with 2GHz dual core/2GB ram/32GB flash/battery/screen/case for $179.

That really isn't the point. The Venue 8 is a tablet while the minnowboard is made for building embedded systems. Places where the minnowboard would be used would often have no use for the screen on the Venue.

While they have vaguely similar hardware, they are really after very different markets.

Re:Cool but expensive

[afidel]

My point is it seems whenever you add the words embedded PC or hobbyist to the description you get an instant 50% bump in cost relative to the same/similar hardware in other uses. Perhaps it's because of the much smaller runs relative to a consumer device, but PCB's aren't really that expensive.

Re:Cool but expensive

[damn_registrars]

The low volume runs definitely increase the production cost. And as the other reply pointed out, the minnowboard also has a superior Atom CPU to the Dell tablet that you mentioned. If you could find a tablet with the identical CPU it would be a much better comparison.

Re:Cool but expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Bay Trail.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/dell-venue-8-pro/pd
http://ark.intel.com/products/78416/Intel-Atom-Processor-Z3740D-2M-Cache-up-to-1_83-GHz
http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/55844/Bay-Trail

Re:Cool but expensive

[dutchwhizzman]

While the price point is obviously not as good as the Dell, the Dell only works with windows 8.1 and has almost zero IO capabilities. Yes, the hardware is still more expensive than it should be, but at least it's useful and getting closer to raspberry pi territory than the first generation.

Re:Cool but expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of such boards (I haven't looked this one in particular though) are sold for less than you can get the components as a hobbyist. Some you can build for slightly cheaper if you use a homemade PCB, but still would be cheaper to buy already made than if you tried to use a professional PCB. Volume discounts factor heavily into the price of such things for parts, boards, and assembly. And you still have fixed costs like someone designing and laying out the circuit. That said, depending on the target market, some are sold near at cost or below costs if trying to promote a new chip through dev boards, although maybe not so much if intending it to be a final project for hobbyists.

Re:Cool but expensive

[timeOday]

The "pro" model you linked is $250, not $179 as cited above!

Re:Cool but expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte...

Re:Cool but expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing preventing you from installing a different OS and the USB port on the Venue is a full USB host, which means external storage, peripherals and displays (using a UGA adapter) can be connected.

New expansion slot.

[x0ra]

From the article, it would seem the new board has a new expansion slot (two actually). I already cannot find any usable expansion card from the v1, it will certainly not help for the v2... By the same logic, in a year, the v3 will have yet-another expansion slot format which is mandates new schematics.

I miss standard expansion capabilities...

Re:New expansion slot.

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a post on the minnowboard mailing list that addresses you concerns: http://lists.elinux.org/pipermail/elinux-minnowboard/Week-of-Mon-20140331/000026.html

Re:New expansion slot.

[viperidaenz]

It appears the expansion headers have been split in two to enable a high speed one with SATA and PCIe and a low speed one for GPIO.
Makes it much more useful, since it can be a 0.1" header for low speed signals, while its still possible to connect PCIe 2.0 devices.

Re:New expansion slot.

[Anonymous Coward]

We should all chip in and buy that guy a shift key.

Re:New expansion slot.

[Microlith]

It has a header with a documented pin-out. If you're among the target audience for these boards, then you'll probably be able to have a board fabricated for your uses.

I miss standard expansion capabilities.

Then stick with standard hardware.

Re:New expansion slot.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The usual nuisance is tracking down 'Unobtanium custom connector of inscrutable density' more than any real terror of pinout documentation. It's amazing how often the vendor fails to specify "We used connector X, you want connector Y to mate with it. Try Mouser catalog number X or Digikey catalog number Y, the part itself is a HiRose FOOPART in case you buy elsewhere." and how poor the search tools among part vendors(not just electrical, any sort of part that has two complementary pieces) can be for "I have a gizmo type XYZ. FFS, man, I want to give you my money! Just tell me what gizmo type XYZ mates with!"

Re:New expansion slot.

[SiChemist]

That made me chuckle.

Intel vs ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel may very will win and beat ARM!

Re:Intel vs ARM

[TheRaven64]

It's quite possible. ARM is a tiny company compared to Intel, and Intel has a history of outspending its opponents by an order of magnitude until they go away. The advantage that ARM has is the ecosystem - companies like Marvell and even Apple can design their own custom ARM-compatible cores, with assistance from ARM, and produce them in any of a number of ARM's partners' fabs. This makes them a bit harder to trample than the other RISC manufacturers.

The big problem for Intel is the same as for Microsoft, and now Google. They're a very big company in a lot of parts of the supply chain and it's difficult to get anyone to work with them because everyone knows that they'll decide in a few years that the part of the chain where you were making money looks attractive and squeeze you out of it. ARM is sufficiently small that the other companies like having them as a mostly neutral arbiter.

Re:Intel vs ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus the fact that some (even large ones, like Google) companies are becoming scared at how powerful Intel has become.
I'm old enough to rmember the time when IBM had a stranglehold on the computer landscape, the Intel one right now is much worse.
Hopefully ARM is large enough and (indirectly) sells enough chips to survive. Otherwise it's x86 (from Intel, AMD is dead) all the way from the smallest phone to the largest supercomputer.
Monoculture is bad, it has always been and always will be.
Why, oh why did IBM select Intel in 1981?
 

Re:Intel vs ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel also has a history of producing superior CPUs. I remember back when the argument of RISC vs CISC was raging and people were talking about how inefficient the x86 architecture was. Fast forward to now and x86 are the highest performing out of all processors, including IBM's POWER architecture.

Re:Intel vs ARM

[TheRaven64]

Not really. Intel CPUs were inferior to the likes of Alpha, POWER, and even MIPS and PA-RISC quite a lot of the time, but they could sell them for a lot less because of their economies of scale. When Intel was welling 100 times as many processors as their closest competitor, they could sell a processor that was half the speed for a quarter of the price and still make more profit. As the PC market grew and the workstation market shrank, that became Intel selling 1,000 times as many as their nearest competitor, and even with a CPU twice the speed it's hard to get enough sales to cover the development costs if you're selling it for ten times the cost of an Intel chip half the speed.

Add to that, Intel managed to convince HP (who owned the PA-RISC and Alpha lines at the time) and SGI (MIPS) that they should outsource CPU design and that Itanium was the future. That left IBM and Sun/Fujitsu as the only real competitors and both focussed on the extreme high end at the expense of the mass market. If you don't know how that story ends, ask SGI and nVidia...

Re:Intel vs ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be why the fastest workstations, servers and supercomputers are all x86 based.

Beaglebone Black

[flyingfsck]

Hmm, I think the Beaglebone Black still beats it for embedded jobs.

Re:Beaglebone Black

[chihowa]

It does, but there are some legitimate uses for a modern embedded x86 board.

8 GB SPI exists

[tepples]

Wouldn't an "8 GB SPI" be an SDHC slot?

Can you run Windows on this?

[Neo-Rio-101]

Crazy idea, I know... but given that would be the drawcard of an x86 architecture over an ARM CPU...
  I have to ask if it would be possible and if there would be driver support.

Re:Can you run Windows on this?

[Neo-Rio-101]

I guessing that it can't unless we're talking windows embedded.
Normal desktop windows throws a fit if it can't find a honest-to-goodness Hard drive or SSD to install onto.

Re:Can you run Windows on this?

[symbolset]

Since it has SATA ports that should not be a problem. Firmware compatibility problems are more likely.

Re:Can you run Windows on this?

[NJRoadfan]

It has UEFI, so it should boot Windows x64 without a problem.

Raid Card

[Anonymous Coward]

If I can get a pci-e expansion card for this thing and throw my hardware raid 5 into this rather than my desktop, it'd make for a cheap and easy network share.

Re:Raid Card

[Joe_Dragon]

only pci-e X1 2.0 will likely hurt raid IO maybe if you can find an board with an E3800 and a full X4 slot.

http://www.portwell.com/produc...

at least a X4 slot is at X2 so it's better then boards with only an X1 bus open.

Re:Raid Card

[Blaskowicz]

Why go to great lengthes to find obscure industrial mobos on websites where the price is "fill a form to ask for a quote"?
Here's a list of easily available stuff (sadly all the Intel stuff is crippled to having a PCIe 1x or PCI slots, except for server grade Atom stuff with 4x or 8x PCIe)
http://www.ldlc.com/informatiq...

Or PCIe 2.0 1x is a limit you can live with (500MB/s theoretical)

Crashplan appliance?

[Fencepost]

I think I'd like one of these with Debian, Java and Crashplan. Slap it on a 4TB SATA drive, put it in a box, seed a backup onto it and ship it to a family member with broadband. Handy offsite backup.

Re:Crashplan appliance?

[symbolset]

Lots of nifty things to do with a board like this. I have a 16 channel servo controller that would go great with it.

Re:Crashplan appliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora 20, Java and Nodescan Server

http://thinklightly.com/wordpress/tech/cubietruck-project/

Dual interface ?

[x0ra]

All these SBC are nice, but I would really love one with two network interface. So far, my quest has not been successful. I'm not looking to route 1Gbps, but "normar" traffic. I know of the soekris & alix, but I would prefer an ARM based model. I was hoping to find an expansion board that would do the job, but still no luck.

Does anyone know any which would do the job ?

Re:Dual interface ?

[Manfre]

If you're not routing gigabit, get a usb network port or configure it to have two IPs for its one port and route between.

Re:Dual interface ?

[symbolset]

There should be a high speed IO board that supports another Ethernet port come out for it. That is a pretty common desire for a board like this.

Re:Dual interface ?

[vjoel]

http://utilite-computer.com/we...

The "pro" model is a bit expensive ($220 or so, plus shipping), but it has 2xGbE, wifi, bt, quad ARM.

Or you could just add a USB network interface to something like Odroid U3: http://hardkernel.com/main/pro....

(I have both of above.)

Re:Dual interface ?

[x0ra]

I thought about that, but an external USB network adapter is a hassle, especially prone to connection issue. I'd prefer something wired in (even if it is on a USB bus).

Re:Dual interface ?

[bugs2squash]

plug it into a cheap mikrotik switch and run VLAN on it.

Re:Dual interface ?

[x0ra]

I'd rather avoid microtik MIPS boards. They might be great to route traffic, but they are too much under powered for the use I would have. My requirement is at least dual core +1GHZ CPU with at least 1GB of memory and possibility to attach storage

Re:Dual interface ?

[xrayspx]

Here's an RSN product, Bunnie Huang has been building his own completely open hardware laptop, and demand has been such that they're looking to sell them sans-screen in a router case with two NICs: Novena

I have no idea about availability, but they're around, Jake Appelbaum was playing with one the other day in a recent talk.

Re:Dual interface ?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

All these SBC are nice, but I would really love one with two network interface. So far, my quest has not been successful. I'm not looking to route 1Gbps, but "normar" traffic. I know of the soekris & alix, but I would prefer an ARM based model. I was hoping to find an expansion board that would do the job, but still no luck.

Does anyone know any which would do the job ?

Conveniently, most home routers are ARM (sometimes MIPS) based embedded devices with plenty of NICs (100mb in the cheap seats, GbE doable). Find one with good OpenWRT support, ideally a USB port because they never come with enough storage, and you are ready to rock.

Re:Dual interface ?

[bugs2squash]

I meant just to act as an ethernet port expander. One 1G ethernet with 4 VLANs plugged into a $40 5-port managed gigabit switch (eg. mikrotik, but there are others) gives the equivalent of 4 x 250Mbit/s ethernets, arguably faster if your application allows slack on one VLAN to be taken up by another.

Re:Dual interface ?

[DamnOregonian]

In my experience, most are Broadcom MIPS SOCs.
ARMs are a distant second in the segment. (Again, in my experience.)

MIPS is a bizarre architecture. I can't really see why it gained so much traction in the embedded market, short of much higher power than ARM devices at the time when embedded SOHO routing solutions exploded.

Re:Dual interface ?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The 802.11AC-era devices seem to have turned the tide a bit (even for Broadcom). Still lots of MIPS further down the pile; but the future doesn't look so rosy for them.

Price is ambiguous

[frnic]

It appears the price is $99 for the board with slower CPU, and another $99 if you would like to have memory with that board...

Re:Price is ambiguous

[Anonymous Coward]

no, $99 is for the single core 1.46GHz processor with 1GB memory. another model of the board is being offered with the 1.33GHz dual core with 2GB of memory for $129. the board can be populated with different configurations of memory and processors on request, but those are the two basic models that will be offered...

low power?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can they claim it is low power when the datasheet does not contain power consumption?

Vajk

But does it run

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8.1 update 1? No? FAIL!

UEFI BIOS, Closed-source

[Anonymous Coward]

pass.

Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

The price at the European distributor (listed on http://www.minnowboard.org/) is 199EUR. That's for the cheaper model that is supposed to sell for 99$.

Re:Pricing

[frnic]

$99 USD is without memory, it looks like, so the article is extremely misleading. I always ignore any product that the company feels requires misleading advertising to promote - and that seems to be most products lately...

Re: Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

The 199 is for the CURRENT model, the new Max is not released yet (sometime in June I read).

Dell Venue 8 is Android and is Clover Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dell Venue 8 is Android and is Clover Trail. The Dell Venue 8 Pro is WIndows 7.1 and is Bay Trail. Happy Trails.

./ed

[Anonymous Coward]

linuxgizmos got /.ed

Could be useful for hosting Arduino development

[Required Snark]

Cheep enough to have a dedicated system for hosting Arudino development, so you don't worry about frying your main system.

Just saying...

TFA Down

[fellip_nectar]

I'm guessing their webserver is running on one of these MinnowBoards...

HDMI CEC

[rem1313]

Does it support HDMI CEC? I would love this as a HTPC, with XBMC/Plex client

Re:HDMI CEC

[richy freeway]

XBMC was the first thing that sprung to mind when I saw this. Looks ideal for the job.

Re:HDMI CEC

[Anonymous Coward]

HDMI Mini supports CEC so there's no real reason that this wouldn't support it. However, the only reason to use a MinnowBoard instead of something cheaper is if you want to run other things on it as well.

...I guess there is one reason for XBMC on this instead of the usual suspects is if you want to playback media that uses a codec that isn't supported by hardware decompression, however there's no guarantee that the Baytrail CPU is powerful enough to decode it. Since this board's CPU is shipping in other devices, you may be able to find out if it is capable before throwing your money at it.

I'd love to see a home router based on this

[Dr. Spork]

I've been looking for a router that can also host a HDD for network storage, and give me global access the data on it through FTP and HTTP. I've done this with various USB routers running TomatoUSB and the like, but the USB bus on those is so painfully slow that it's basically useless. This thing wouldn't suffer from the same problem, and the price and energy consumption are router-competititve. And compared to the price of NAT, this thing is a bargain! The way I picture it, you would need to add an 802.11AC radio to the USB3, and then you'd be set.

CircuitCo is the contract manufacturer for BBB...

[Anonymous Coward]

This might partially explain the on-going Beaglebone supply problems.

Do what you want to Servo...

[Dareth]

Do what you want to Servo...never liked that guy anyway, but you better leave Crow alone!

Might be worth cost over RPi

[bsharitt]

I've been really impressed with my Baytrail powered Windows tablet, and this might not be a bad option to turn an old monitor into an all in one PC(it looks like Windows 8 is doable as well as Linux in general) for most tasks that aren't too intensive like gaming. Though if my tablet is any indication, the dual core version with 2GB of RAM should be able to hand Civ V to an extent.

Yes - instructions on minnowboard's website

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you can: http://files.minnowboard.org/pdfs/Installing%20Windows%20on%20the%20MinnowBoard.pdf

Re:Yes - instructions on minnowboard's website

[ChunderDownunder]

A smart move by Intel. They need to grow the mindshare of hackers - much like the beagleboard made OMAP a popular choice for people hacking on smartphones.

For the poweruser an Intel smartphone can then multi-boot Windows 7/Ubuntu/Firefox OS/Android according to their whim.

i.e. develop a community with Android & FFOS mature on a single board computer and the results will flow to x86 phones and tablets. With Intel favouring Intel HD over PowerVR solutions, mature FOSS drivers are an advantage over the vendor blobs of Mali/Adreno/Tegra.

Re:Yes - instructions on minnowboard's website

[Anonymous Coward]

I like that the last pic shows that they left the Minnowboard sitting on an antistatic bag.
On the outside of an antistatic bag -- the part that conducts electricity.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really exciting. The atom e3800 is no toy chip. It's intel's new low power/embedded/light server CPU based off their latest Baytrail SoC design.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent-systems/bay-trail/atom-processor-e3800-family-overview.html

64 bit. AES acceleration. Vt-x vitalization support (No VT-D. You need their 8 core server atom for that) Models with 1 to 4 cores, including some that support ECC memory.

Granted, this is probably going to be equipped with one of their lower-speced chips but you''d be pressed to come up with a 99 dollar arm board that could compete performance wise.

RPi GPU is still a major selling point

[billstewart]

The RPi's GPU may not be the top gaming rig out there, but it's fast enough to play 1080p television. For me, that's fast enough that sometime soon I'm going to get around to getting one and hooking it up to my TV, probably to run XBMC as well as using it as a home file server. The interesting alternative would have been the Beaglebone Black, but it looks like the BBB's GPU is more limited, and can only do 1080 at a really low frame rate. (And of course now the BBB seems to be sold out and backordered - it does have a better CPU.)

MOD PARENT UP PLEASE!

[billstewart]

Yeah, that's becoming really annoying for a lot of newer systems. One of the good things about the RPi and Beaglebone Black is that both of them have HDMI connectors for the video, uSDHC storage, and USB for other I/O (SATA would be nice as well, but USB gets the job done.)