What I'm looking forward to next are Cortex A15 boards, the first CPUs are shipping (In the new Chromebook), so hopefully we'll start seeing them on small hackable boards soon.
With WiFi. Other alternatives are at the same site.
I have a few Mali devices next up on the chopping block after I finish reversing the VideoCore IV.
Hehe. Reversing a GPU is a lot of work. From my experience it usually involves zillions of commands, state bits that subtly change handling, and different instruction sets for different kinds of shaders and other sub-processors... (even figuring texture formats can be lots of work) I can't even imagine starting such a project again, though it was fun, wish I'd still have the time...
I wish you the best luck of course!
I've only just stumbled across details of your efforts in the past couple of days.
I wish you every success, if you were to be successful, you would open the door to impressively cheap possibilities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fxAQv_KDV0
In short, the class 10 SD card I got for my Raspberry Pi is rated for 10MB/s. An SSD drive can do 1GB/S (I imagine the numbers vary for reads vs writes). Also, SD cards seem to be able to take a lot fewer writes per block before they wear out.
Most of the speed advantage SSDs have comes from having a dozen or more flash chips that are internally treated as something like a RAID array. Memory cards and USB sticks usually have only one or two chips.
FTFY ;-)
1 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227...
2- http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT064V4S...
There's nothing that special about this that I can see. And giving loaned Chinese money back for free when they have such a massive comparative advantage seems an exercise in market distortion to me.
OK, I've heard that's changing, but it's not Silicon Valley.
I had been looking at the ODROID-X (hardkernel.com) and various other single-board machines for a while. Whilst this isn't particularly powerful (ODROID is quad core exynos), it does have an advantage I haven't seen anywhere else - SATA.
Does anyone know of any other boards that have a SATA connector?
I look forward to the day when I can get a Cortex A9 or A15 board with a USB host good for the full 480mbit/s, SATA, and gigabit Ethernet.
I also look forward to that day. We seem to be at the stage right now that we can have some but not all of those things. Soon, soon...
Wandaboard (http://www.wandboard.org/) should have a SATA connector on future configurations, but nothing concrete has been announced.
I recommend reading this page and its links: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10_devices and http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
Apple called their ARM SoC the A4 and then Allwinner probably designated their SoC the A10 to play off that marketing.
The specs seem to match the dime-in-a-dozen Allwinner A10 Chinese tablets/phones/set-top-boxes/...
I have 3 of these A10 devices, and the performance isn't that bad. It's also not great, but it's sufficient for all the things I tried with it.
There are many alternatives which are much faster but none are within a factor of two of the rpi's price, so people keep buying the rpi and walking away disappointed.
It's nice that it can, incidentally, play other roles, but those other roles are not it's purpose. It's not an "embarrassing system"; low cost, "universal" peripherals (common televisions as the "monitor", for example), enough portability to get the unit to and from school are its primary concerns. It's an OLPC for the western world, a BBC Micro reborn for the modern age. Y'all rabbits might like these Trix, but they're for kids.
How many of those families are going to buy a rpi, have the knowledge to teach set it up and teach their kids, etc? What's going to get kids programming is a really cheap "normal" computer, just like it always has.
Whilst it may not be the quickest thing out there, it is a start, and I think this is the most important thing about the Pi - it is a statr. It is so cheap it will get people interested in and tinkering with this kind of technology. As a result more people will move into this space, surely the Cubieboard is testament to that. (As well as the Parallella[1] which sadly I don't think will make it's Kickstarter goal)
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-su...
[1] http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/meng/wmr/projects/uav/...
Example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205...
What strikes me though about this, the Pandaboard, the Chumby, Etc, is that one of the effects of the 'post PC' momentum shift is that people who were building general purpose computers have switched to building these things which are tailored more for browsing and content consumption, and perhaps business content (documents, spreadsheets, reports) generation.
That shift has once again opened up the market for a general purpose hobbiest computer. That is pretty refreshing to see.
Honest question, isn't there more simple SoC (armv6 + basic 2d gpu) with sane default and i/o chipsets ?
How much of the closed source binary is due to the GPU ?
With a simpler and open source system, I think it would have provided a better learning substrate than what it is now.
Here is the link - http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/
Thanks Henry
I do wish someone would build an ITX sized motherboard with SATA, actual ram slots, and gigabyte network ports. Perhaps when the 64-bit version is more available someone will.
Or am I missing something? (Ah, you probably want ARM rather than x86[_64]).
It surprises me that Pi compatibility is a criteria for stuff, though I know it's popular. Are we talking pin-compatibility?
AFAICT the Pi is just another linux on a single board device. It's low cost but otherwise fairly unremarkable.
