[u-u] Yet another tiny development board

[Greg A. Woods]

On 2015-03-09, at 6:30 AM, arocker at Vex.Net wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/09/review_imagination_technologies_mips_creator_ci20_development_board/
> 
> Which may or may not find a niche.

I think it has too much on-board, which makes it far more expensive than
the rPi, for it to really compete with the rPi line.  If that's a full GPS
in its SoC then that's another interesting feature though.

As the article points out there's also a major issue with the lack of a
ready-to-use OS distribution with easy access to all the features.

There are also dozens of similar MIPS based boards available.  I was
working with this one five years ago and I think it was only $80 then:

http://www.cavium.com/newsevents_caviumnetworks_Atheros.html

The MIPS architecture was licensed to more than 100 SoC makers back then,
and I think it was more than ARM at the time as well.  I think the success
of rPi is at least in some small part responsible for how well ARM has done
in getting their design out into more inexpensive SoCs in recent years.

A friend who was getting tired of waiting for his new model 2 rPi to ship
ordered one of these little guys, and it has already arrived in the USA
and he's got it up and running:

http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G141578608433

You'll see it's priced exactly the same as the rPis, but has a somewhat
faster set of 4 CPU cores, and a different GPU.

He's still waiting for the rPi2 to ship.

The odroid also has some higher-priced big-brothers that are even more
interesting.

There's a huge list of somewhat similar hardware here:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start

A big difference with rPi and similar newer boards is their price, and
the fact that their SoC has a built-in GPU that's pulled out to HDMI (or
VGA), so they can be used more like a PC and so appeal to a wider audience
than many of the "embedded" boards in that list.

Personally I'm going to stick with the BeagleBoard Black and rPi B+ that
I already have for now as they'll keep me too busy as it is.

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