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]

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?

[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?

[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.

SPI typo...

[__aajbyc7391]

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

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!

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: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

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?

[NJRoadfan]

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

Re:Beaglebone Black

[chihowa]

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

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: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.

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.

Do what you want to Servo...

[Dareth]

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