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.."
Cool but expensive (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems pretty expensive considering you can get a Dell Venue 8 with 2GHz dual core/2GB ram/32GB flash/battery/screen/case for $179. Still, for a lot of projects it would be useful.
Re:Crashplan appliance? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Best MAME motherboard ever? (Score:5, Interesting)
Trust me ... you're paying the Intel (TM) premium. Someone will do it better, cheaper. Just give it time.
You'd better be certain that you actually need all that power before you go and pay a little less than half as much for a Beaglebone black; but ~$100 is actually pretty much the going rate for a 'dev board' style arrangement with properly punchy ARM application processor, and those tend to have extra happy-fun-dicking-around-with-the-worst-graphics-driver-on-god's-black-earth, as opposed to 'Install Debian, have Intel's nonthrilling-but-endurable and in-kernel driver just work'.
The Intel Galileo seems like a product in pathetic search for purpose (can't bitbang even as well as a 16MHz AVR, rather more expensive than an arduino, weird and limited enough that the slightly less costly BB black or rPi is a better move, etc.); but this Minnowboard revision is markedly more compelling.
If you don't actually need that much power, you can get weaker-and-still-runs-full-linux ARM boards for about half that; but if you want a devboard (as opposed to hacking up some tightly integrated AllWinner SomethingSomething from ebay that may not even have serial debug headers), with a high end ARM application processor, you are looking at about $100 and not wildly dissimilar energy consumption.
If anything, the main competition (outside of space-constrained scenarios), is probably the (surprisingly aggressively priced) full bay trail motherboards [anandtech.com] (some other vendors as well [anandtech.com]). That will be a bit bigger, and you'll need a 24-pin PSU of some kind; but no need for expansion boards just to get PCIe/miniPCIe sockets, more I/O, and enough change to buy a low end arduino to substitute for the low-speed expansion.
I don't know if ARM scared intel good and hard, or if this is some price-dumping long game; but they appear to be practically giving 'Bay Trail' dice away.