Intel Upgrades MinnowBoard: Baytrail CPU, Nearly Halves Price To $99 92
DeviceGuru (1136715) writes "Intel and CircuitCo have revealed a smaller, faster, 2nd-gen MinnowBoard open SBC based on an Atom E3800 SoC and supported by both Android 4.4 and various standard Linux OSes. The MinnowBoard Max, which will ship in Q3 starting at $99, blows past the original MinnowBoard (Slashdot video) on price, performance, and energy consumption. The 3.9 x 2.9-inch Max's $99 starting price includes a 64-bit 1.46GHz Intel Atom E3815 (Bay Trail-T) CPU, 1GB RAM and 8GB SPI flash, and coastline ports for MicroSD, Micro-HDMI, GbE, dual USB, and SATA. Unlike the original MinnowBoard, the Max provides two expansion connectors: a low-speed header, with signals similar to the Arduino's Shield connector; and a high-speed connector, which can support mSATA and mini-PCIe sockets on expansion modules, among other interfaces. Although the Max's design supports CPUs up to Intel's quad-core 1.91GHz (10W TDP) E3845, only two choices shown initially at MinnowBoard.org, with the higher-end $129 model stepping up to a 1.33GHz dual-core E3825 plus 2GB RAM.."
Re:Best MAME motherboard ever? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's about as powerful as a Pentium II, at a fraction of the thermal power. Perfectly fine for 15 year old computer performance. This is probably not the part you are looking for if you are actually trying to make a MAME cabinet, but it's better than the people who were previously using pentium 4's and celerons that had 90 watt thermal power envelopes.
People need to remember the purpose of these things is to go into battery-operated devices, not be some kind of laptop/desktop replacement, because these devices are in the same cpu-power range as the early netbook fad that later crashed because nobody wanted to run linux, and instead wanted windows XP because Vista was too good for it.