One interesting thing about the Cubieboard is the SATA port, otherwise it's very similar to a lot of other ARM boards out there (e.g. Beagleboard, Pandaboard, etc). This makes it much easier to stick a low power SSD on the device, rather than rely on a hugely slow SD card.<p>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.
I'm sort of amused that an outfit from Shenzhen China, perhaps the worlds great manufacturing centre for options like this, is asking for US dollars to make 1000 boards, when firms like ARMJISHU can knock ARM boards out in no time and sell them cheap as chips.<p>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.
This is kinda cool actually.<p>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.<p>Does anyone know of any other boards that have a SATA connector?
If you consider buying one, just don't assume it will be useful for your application. Do some research first, especially when it comes to the gpu/vpu.<p>I recommend reading this page and its links: <a href="http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10_devices" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10_devices</a> and <a href="http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page</a>
Realize that the A10 does not have mainline kernel support and part of that reason is because the code is so bad no one wants to even try to get Linus to add it.
Are these by any chance built around the Allwinner A10?<p>The specs seem to match the dime-in-a-dozen Allwinner A10 Chinese tablets/phones/set-top-boxes/...<p>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.
This is good news— the rpi is really an embarrassing system. It is shockingly slow compared to other small arm systems clock per clock. A lot of people seem to be trying things on it that would be fine on almost any other arm SBC but fail on rpi…<p>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.
I am looking for a portable i386 compatible chip&board instead of ARM for running windows programs (wine doesn't work on arm), does anyone have tips?
I've looked at the Cubieboard in the past, its an interesting take.<p>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.<p>That shift has once again opened up the market for a general purpose hobbiest computer. That is pretty refreshing to see.
Reflecting about all this, I find the rpi design curious. Most of the SoC is wasted and impose heavy side effects (lan over capricious usb). The graphical applications (video processing, etc) seems to be limited by what is already in the GPU blob.<p>Honest question, isn't there more simple SoC (armv6 + basic 2d gpu) with sane default and i/o chipsets ?<p>How much of the closed source binary is due to the GPU ?<p>With a simpler and open source system, I think it would have provided a better learning substrate than what it is now.
Sorry if slightly OT but we organized a "Raspberry Pi's Impact on Hacking" Web Show with forensics expert DJ Palombo. Thought might be of interest to y'all!<p>Here is the link - <a href="http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/" rel="nofollow">http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/</a><p>Thanks Henry
Looks nice, a little worried about how low some of the funding options were.<p>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.
If they are this late in the cycle, they should've gone with the Cortex A7 CPU and Mali 450 GPU. They might even be cheaper than A8 and Mali400, since they are targeted at the mass-market.