Dual-Core Allwinner A20 Powered EOMA-68 Engineering Card Available 98
A year after the first schematics were completed and a few months after the first prototype board shipped, Make Play Live has released Improv, the first engineering card for EOMA-68 (EOMA-68 is a specification for modular systems that splits the cpu board from the rest of the system, allowing the end user to use the same core with several devices or upgrade e.g. a tablet without having to pay for a new screen shell). From Aaron Seigo's weblog post: "The hardware of Improv is extremely capable: a dual-core ARM® Cortex-A7 System on Chip (SoC) running at 1Ghz, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of on-board NAND flash and a powerful OpenGL ES GPU. To access all of this hardware goodness there are a variety of ports: 2 USB2 ports (one fullsize host, one micro OTG), SD card reader, HDMI, ethernet (10/100, though the feature card has a Gigabit connector; more on that below), SATA, i2c, VGA/TTL and 8 GPIO pins. The entire device weighs less than 100 grams, is passively cooled and fits in your hand. Improv comes pre-installed with Mer OS, sporting a recent Linux kernel, systemd, and a wide variety of software tools. By default it boots into console, so if you are making a headless device you needn't worry about extra overhead running that you don't need. If you are going to hook it up to a screen (or two), then you have an amazing starting point with choices such as X.org, Wayland, Qt4, Qt5 and a full complement of KDE libraries and Plasma Workspaces.
Improv takes advantage of the open EOMA68 standard to deliver a unique design: the SoC, RAM and storage live on one card (the 'CPU card'), the feature ports are on a PCB it docks with (the 'feature board'). The two dock securely together with the CPU card sitting under the feature board nestled in a pair of rails; they are undocked from each other by pushing a mechanical ejector button."
Check out the specs and pictures. The card is available now for $75. Improv is open hardware, with the schematics licensed under the GPL and available soon.
Re:About the price... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the card that was supposed to cost even less than the RaPi?
In the literal sense (i.e. that some people did suppose this would cost less than the Raspberry Pi), yeah, pretty much; an EOMA-68 CPU card based on an Allwinner SoC was widely reported to have an estimated price of $15.
However, this figure was (1) a BOM cost, not retail price, (2) an estimate before the design was finished (e.g. at that time, I believe the A10 SoC was being considered, whereas the now-available unit has an A20), and (3) only applied to relatively high volume (100,000 units, IIRC). It was never intended to represent a retail price at any volume, but some trigger-happy bloggers repeated the number without describing what cost it represented, some other bloggers assumed it was retail, and ever since there's been a steady stream of people whose only prior knowledge of the EOMA-68 project is that "a CPU card is supposed to cost $15, so it's cheaper than a Raspberry Pi!", and who are consequently disappointed and frustrated to learn that it costs more than that.
Re:How is it compared to Rasp Pi ? (Score:5, Insightful)
> How is this thing compared (hardware wise) to Raspberry Pi ?
RPi is a single core 7o0 MHz ARM11 with 512 MB RAM and no on-board storage; Improv is a dual core 1Ghz Cortex-A7 with 1GB RAM, 4GB NAND flash and a more powerful GPU. Improv is also modular so you can swap out the CPU card as well get feature boards with additional features in future. So Improv is several times more powerful and quite a bit more flexible. You also get things like SATA with the Improv.
As for software, anything that runs on the RPi run on Improv, while the reverse is not true. Some ARM Linux OSes require hard float, such as Ubuntu, which RPi does not provide but Improv does
Re:I hope the laptop shell's monitor is LED. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole idea of the EOMA concept should (if/when it takes off big) mean that you won't have to "hope the laptop shell's $ATTRIBUTE is $VALUE". There's two reasons for this.
First, you can build your own laptop, because a lot of the complexity that makes designing your own laptop mainboard a ridiculous proposition for almost every hobbyist is now inside the CPU card -- some professionals designed, built, and tested that 6-layer PCB, and then millions (eventually, in the big picture) were run off. For your special laptop, you could if you put your mind to it do most, if not everything, with a 2-side PCB and old-school through-hole components, the main obstacles being not that you can't fit it in a full-size laptop without SMT, but that you can't find some components in through-hole versions. You can pick whatever display you want, slightly tweak the PCB design from some other EOMA-68-based laptop to suit, and have one made. And all this is much more practical than it sounds because you invest the effort once, then keep that laptop for life (ok, realistically for a decade or more) and just swap CPU cards when you need more performance.
The other, and even bigger, reason, is because some manufacturer, somewhere, will make a shell with the characteristics you want. Sure, your concern might only occur in a fraction of a percent of consumer (actually, your concern about the backlight is IMO a horrible example, because the whole industry is moving from CCFL to LED for a number of reasons), but when some small Chinese factory is looking for a profitable niche to exploit, that fraction of a percent is a prime target. Because of EOMA, they
(1) have less design work to do to make a new model (just like the hobbyist)
(2) can keep selling that model without investing in a periodic redesign, and without it becoming obsolete and unsellable due to last year's CPU -- just every year buy a load of the hot new CPU cards and receive a magic spec bump, or ship it without a CPU card and let the user slot their new or old card
(3) even if/when they go out of business (or just abandon your market segment) and stop selling new shells, all the used ones keep going (until they break/wear out) without obsolescence.
(1) and (2) mean less cost to pick up tiny market segments, which means niches will be more profitable and thus better served; (3) means that even if you're part of a niche market that looked big enough to make a good profit, but turned out not to be, you get to reap the benefits of some company's "mistake" in pursuing that niche long after the company's learned and moved on.
Regarding the last point particularly, contrast that to the Fujitsu U820 I bought a few years ago, because I really loved the form-factor and the high-PPI screen. At the time, the 1.6GHz Atom processor was slowish and the soldered-on RAM was cramped; it's flat-out obsolete now. The "successor" UH900 is a straight clamshell, lacking the flip-screen which lets the U820 become a paperback-sized tablet, and I'm left casting about amongst gadgets like the Asus Transformer series looking for a near-enough equivalent. If the U820 had been EOMA-based, then Fujitsu could go their way, selling UH900s with better mass-market appeal, but I could keep going mine, swapping up to (say) a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM card in that same delightful chassis.