Intel's efforts to put an x86 processor in your pocket have been rather varied, from the old Minnowboard, the Compute Stick and recently the new Intel Galileo and Edison chips. Apart from the new Galileo and Edison releases, the hobby community have not adopting them in the same way that they have Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Hack a Day has a post about a new product that might be a bridge between Raspberry hackers and x86 hackers called the UP Board.
It is the size of a credit card and is powered by a quad-core Cherry Trail Atom x5-Z8300 clocked at 1.84GHz, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC Flash. For peripheral support it has a Gigabit NIC, five USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port, HDMI and most importantly, the same 40-pin GPIO pin connector the Raspberry Pi Model B Plus uses as well as DSI and CSI connectors for the Raspberry Pi camera and touch screen. This offers familiar hardware for those already familiar with the Raspberry and means that the kits they currently have could be transferred. It will be interesting to see if this brings x86 functionality and interfaces into hobbyist scene.
"Efforts to put x86 on a dev board have included the Minnowboard, the Intel Galileo and Edison, and even the Intel Compute Stick. These have not seen the uptake you would expect from a small x86-powered board, but that tide may soon turn. The UP board is exactly what you would expect from a Raspberry Pi-inspired board with a real Intel processor."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Microsoft offers to PAY YOU to trade in your old computer for a Windows 10 device @ The Register
- Standards body wants standards for IoT. Vendors don't care @ The Register
- Windows 10 will nag you not to ditch default Microsoft Edge browser @ The Inquirer
- $65m write-down, ARM chips ship: A 90-second guide to Planet AMD @ The Register
- LEAGOO Elite 4 Smartphone Giveaway @ TechARP
I’ll take 5.
I’ll take 5.
I guess we know where the
I guess we know where the contrarevenue is flowing.
I am curious who would want one of these and for what.
Also, I think the USB header is mislabeled. That should probably read USB 3.0.
Oops, nevermind, the USB 3.0
Oops, nevermind, the USB 3.0 header is on the back.
Waiting for maybe a Carrizo,
Waiting for maybe a Carrizo, not Carrizo-L Mini form factor basd system, the ACE units will make for better compute/graphics! AMD’s embdded APUs also! This Intel SKU only has 12 execution units!
edit: basd
to: based
edit:
edit: basd
to: based
edit: 12 execution units
to: 12 GPU execution units
Meh eMMC? That will be pain
Meh eMMC? That will be pain if doing anything random R/W. With so many headers why not one slot for SD or CF card for higher quality “storage”.
eMMC is generally several
eMMC is generally several times faster than SD. CF is a poor choice as it’s bascially PATA–uses a lot of pins and has a low data rate.
Possibly eMMC has gotten a poor reputation in some cheap tablets or phones, but in embedded boards, it’s considered high end I/O just short of a SATA port with an SSD on it.
Looks good. Would be take in
Looks good. Would be take in a heartbeat if it comes with a Micro-SD slot.
It looks really good, but is
It looks really good, but is it $35 and why is Intel so desperate to assimilate someone else’s work, the internet of things will run on $5 hardware
Intel isn’t trying to
Intel isn’t trying to assimilate someone else’s work. This is a kickstarter project.
If that CSI connector is more
If that CSI connector is more accessible than on the Pi (the Broadcom GPU on the Pi is a totally opaque blob, and the RPi foundation have ruled out any further camera development) this could be VERY useful for machine vision systems. Image capture and on-board processing, AND a network link. Very nice.
AMD’s Merlin Falcon would
AMD’s Merlin Falcon would make for a nice device that could run much faster and support ECC DDR4 memory! I’d like to see what the Fitlet PC folks will do with Merlin Falcon! I hope that AMD could get some design wins for its Carrizo based systems for devices like this. The Merlin Falcon SKUs support AMD’s all-open Linux driver including Mentor Embedded Linux from Mentor Graphics and their Sourcery CodeBench IDE development tools. Maybe Carrizo will make it into some Mint Box SKUs.