Intel Rolls Out Raspberry Pi Competitor

Rambo Tribble writes "As detailed by Ars Technica, Intel has introduced the Minnowboard, an SBC touted as more powerful and more open than the Raspberry Pi. At $199, it is also more expensive. Using an Atom processor, the new SBC boasts more capacity and x86-compatibility. 'It's notable that the MinnowBoard is an open hardware platform, a distinction that Arduino and BeagleBone can claim but Raspberry Pi cannot. Users could create their own MinnowBoards by buying the items on the bill of materials—all the design information is published, and CircuitCo chose components that can be purchased individually rather than in the bulk quantities hardware manufacturers are accustomed to, Anders said. Users can also buy a pre-made MinnowBoard and make customizations or create their own accessory boards to expand its capability. And being an open hardware platform means that the source code of (almost) all the software required to run the platform is open.'" Update: 09/20 22:31 GMT by T : Look soon for a video introduction to the MinnowBoard, and — hopefully not too long from now — a visit to their Dallas-area production facility.

GMA 600? Last years Atom? $200?!?

[jandrese]

Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.

Re:GMA 600? Last years Atom? $200?!?

[Nerdfest]

They're trying to do to the Raspberry Pi what Microsoft did to the netbook, and for the same reasons.

Open?

[DogGuts]

> ...There's just one exception: with the graphics processing unit, only the binary files required to drive the GPU are available, as the source code remains closed...
nuf said...

Re:GMA 600? Last years Atom? $200?!?

[ShanghaiBill]

yeah it certainly isn't a raspberry pi competitor. why buy this when you can buy a netbook for almost the same price??

Also, this thing is huge. Several times the size of a Raspberry Pi. It appears to require a wall wart, whereas a RPI can be powered from USB.

and check this out, 8 gpio pins. whee... no idea if any da/ad pins.

... and none of the GPIO pins can do hardware PWM. So this board is not much use for robotics.

Re: Open?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But oddly stupid since Intel have open drivers for their own GPUs

It's an ugly story. In their quest to hit lower TDPs a few years back, Intel puked out a bunch of Atoms that are based on SGX540(maybe 545, I forget, doesn't matter from a driver standpoint) GPUs licensed from PowerVR. The 'GMA500', 'GMA600', 'GMA3600', and 'GMA3650' are all of this cursed race. Any of the other GMAs are Intel GPUs, which do indeed have decent drivers.

I have no idea why they went with the horribly shit Atoms for their 'open' board; but they did.

Re:GMA 600? Last years Atom? $200?!?

[Obfuscant]

So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.

I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.

You haven't looked closely at the Minnow.

Considering that the news just got here about the Minnow, no, I haven't "looked closely" at it. I've read the fine article about it, however.

The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi.

Richer as in "costs more", yes. The Pis I have have the hardware I need to do the job I bought them for. Putting lots of extra stuff on them would only raise the price.

The CPU has more horsepower, and yon don't have porting headaches to get reasonable things running on it.

The Pi appears to be able to be overclocked to 1GHz, although I haven't tried, and have no need to. I've had no problem porting the things I needed to port, I just copied the source code and compiled it. Well, the PC I developed the code on had a real serial port and the Pi doesn't, so I had to change the value of one constant from "/dev/ttyS0" to "/dev/ttyUSB0". Is that what you call "porting headaches"?

On the other hand, the PC didn't have hardware PWM, so if I used the PC I would have to come up with on outboard hardware solution to get the steady PWM signal I need.

You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application.

I wasn't aware that a CAN bus was a requirement for robotics. I thought servos made use of PWM signals. As for cameras, the Pi has a hardware camera. I haven't used it yet, but that's next on the list of things to do. Other people seem to be doing vision processing with it, so I'm sure that mine will do it eventually, too.

If you're concerned that the Pi has only one (AFAIK) hardware PWM channel (wait, it has two, doesn't it?), well, for the price of one Minnow you can get 6 Pis and they call all dedicate themselves to that one channel and not have to time share or suffer from task switching glitches. Hardware PWM beats the hottest Intel CPU doing bit-banging every day of the week, and twice on Saturday.

The headline on this article and on the Ars one is misleading. From what they quoted of the Intel spokesman, this is not intended to be a Pi competitor. They didn't say that. It's an open source/open hardware solution. But their justification is a tad off, I think. This board is aimed at developers who would pay $1000 for a development system -- and they don't say why anyone would pay $1000 for a development system when you could develop on the board itself.

The most amazing quote is this. This board uses old hardware because "We used an older one to get our feet wet, so to speak, and understand the design." In other words, Intel was not comfortable designing things with their current generation of CPU and glue, even though they are mass producing them and selling them to others. And the bit about this being an "open system"? Interesting that the major closed component on the Pi is the GPU, which is ALSO closed on the Minnow.

eSATA, PCIe, Gig-E? Because the Pi doesn't have that you can't use it as a file server or network appliance? Hmmm. So even though I can hook a few Tb of disk up to the Pi via USB, I can't use that as a file server? I can't hook up a temperature sensor or three to the Pi and hook it to the network and have a network appliance that measures temperature for me? The truth is, the Pi makes a fine file server or network appliance, it just won't be enterprise grade at either one or be really fast. No True Scotsman would have a USB disk on a fileserver, I guess.

Re:GMA 600? Last years Atom? $200?!?

[chihowa]

I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.

I'd like to jump in and recommend trying out the Beaglebone Black. At $45, it's not much more than the Pi, and feels like what the Raspberry Pi should have been. It's much more stable (and uses less power!), has on-chip ethernet (avoiding horrible USB related problems that the Pi has), isn't plagued with USB issues and generally has better specs. Interfacing stuff to the Beaglebone is a dream, compared to the Pi, with more hardware supported modes and real analog pins.

Since finding the Beaglebone and the Black, my flaky old Pis get used much less often. Admittedly, I'm using these as embedded controllers for instruments and not as a media center. I'm not sure how the Black does in that area.

Re:A netbook is not open. Neither is the pi.

[CastrTroy]

That depends on what you want to do with it. If you don't want to hook it up to a monitor, you don't have to hook it up to a monitor. You can't do a completely headless install by putting the base Linux image on the SD card, and using SSH to remote into the machine. Assuming you already have another computer, the only things you need are, an SD Card, A Network cable, and a USB Power Supply. You can get those three items for under $15 total, and most people who would be interested in using a Raspberry Pi probably have this stuff sitting around already.

They way you're describing it, you might as well throw in the cost of the printer you can hook up the USB port of the PI, or any other peripherals. Also, if you don't have a TV that uses HDMI, you can use the composite video port on your TV if you really want a display. I don't think I've seen a TV recently that doesn't have either composite or HDMI.

Re:A netbook is not open. Neither is the pi.

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I had to buy none of that, but then, I wasn't trying to turn it into a "desktop" computer. I didn't even have to buy an SD card as I was able to scrounge an old 2GB one (a bit constrained, but plenty of room for basic headless use I find. I get the feeling that if I HAD needed to buy one, I could have found one big enough for ~$5).

I did have to configure the boot image myself (i.e. mount the image on my computer and adjust the starting services, IP address settings, etc.) but from that point on it was just a matter of plugging it in and using SSH to operate it. I haven't tested it, but I suspect x2go or freenx might work on it as well if you need remote GUI.

I played with it as a webcam server for a little while, now my project is to turn it into a low-power (legal unlicensed) FM transmitter [icrobotics.co.uk] to rebroadcast streaming audio to the clock-radios in my house.

There's quite a bit one can do with just the basic RaspberryPi, an SD card, and a network connection without any additional hardware.