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Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199
- vanderZwan 13y agoHow is performance per watt? I mean, that's mainly what makes older Atom boards interesting, isn't it?
- mtgx 13y agoOlder Atoms had about 10W TDP.
- pgeorgi 13y agoSo far their firmware isn't open source. Tianocore isn't useful on real x86 hardware without hardware initialization code (which Tiano doesn't provide). Let's see if an Intel group manages to coerce the chipset group to release those "precious" (but in reality, very boring) details on memory initialization to the world. So far I'm doubtful, even if it's "just" for Atom. [edit: In fact, their website (http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/ http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/) states "All software will be provided in image and Open Source form (with binary elements per IP restrictions)". That exception _will_ cover Platform Initialization code...]
- benjamincburns 13y agoI think internally this is a huge [1] experiment for Intel. They're saying "is doing the work to support the low-volume 'little guy' going to do anything for our high-volume sales?" I have a feeling were it up to the people leading the project, the init code would be made available. However Intel as a company is only going to take so much risk in support of this experiment. I have a feeling that init code and firmware for softloaded peripherals will be "business as usual" for quite a while. That said, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If this is successful and if customers are very vocal about not wanting "half-assed" open systems, it might eventually get there. 1: Actually, in terms of resources I'm sure it's tiny. In terms of culture on the other hand...
- pgeorgi 13y agoI'm involved in the open source firmware struggle with Intel for a number of years now. There are Intel customers with solid business cases, but it actually got worse in the last few years.
- benjamincburns 13y agoCan you say more? What's made it worse recently? I was witness to some struggle between GumStix and Intel/Marvell back around when Marvell bought the XScale processor line, but I've been out of touch with Intel on this issue since then. However I've seen countless peripheral silicon manufacturers maintain strangleholds on their softloaded firmware... Though with things like wireless chipsets and DSP algorithms, it's arguable there's real IP there worth protecting.
- yuhong 13y agoYea, I wish they could release their entire BIOS Writer Guide including MSRs used for cache as RAM for example.
- pgeorgi 13y agoI don't think that particular part changed much over the years, and it's also relatively easy to figure out with SerialICE (www.serialice.com), since CAR is one of the first things to happen these days. Since Intel wants everyone to use their code (preferably in binary form), I'm not sure how useful the BIOS Writer's Guide still is. Probably just a guide on how to integrate their code into whatever you're doing yourself.
- cottonseed 13y agoI couldn't find the schematics or design files for the board.
- zenlinux 13y agoProject member here. The hardware design files will be released in about a week.
- jzawodn 13y agoWow, is it just me or is Intel missing the market on this one? The price is about 4x too high for what you get (compared to other ARM based boards) and the size is a little big as well. Who is this really aimed at, anyway?
- shawabawa3 13y agoMy guess is schools and universities, who will buy in bulk at massive discounts.
- yitchelle 13y agoOK, why are they discriminating the rest of the maker, hacker, tinker, population by pricing it so high? They need to take a page of the play book from one of the ARM board folks.
- rjsw 13y agoYeah, why buy an x86 board with an undocumented GPU when there are plenty of ARM boards with undocumented GPUs available.
- mjolk 13y agoI think the fact that it's an x86 board makes it an attractive first step from Intel into the super-small form factor market -- not that I'd buy an Atom-based snail when I already have a Raspberry-pi turtle at home.
- Arnor 13y agoApparently their market is developers who don't own computers: > However, the MinnowBoard is still cheaper than most PCs and could appeal to developers looking to write and test commercial applications before they're deployed in servers, embedded devices and other computers. I'm baffled as to why anyone would purchase this board. Raspberry Pi[1] destroys it on price/value so _will_ Parallella[2]. Why not wait a couple months and get a super computer![3] [1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/ [2] http://www.parallella.org/ http://www.parallella.org/ [3] Why do I think anyone here needs these links?
- andyl 13y agoYou can already get a 4x4 Intel NUC machine on amazon for ~$150 with case and mounting bracket. They are capable machines. NUC with haswell processors (less wattage) coming this fall - price TBD.
- zenlinux 13y agoProject member here. I was disappointed with the way the PCWorld article described it as an "open source PC". MinnowBoard is really an open hardware embedded platform. If you're looking for a small form factor PC, the NUC is definitely the way to go. MinnowBoard is for embedded applications or product development where interfacing with custom hardware (whether I2C sensors, or custom FPGAs through PCIe, etc) is needed.
- chj 13y agoI can't believe you guys price it at 199$, totally unacceptable as embedded platform. at 1/4 of the price, there are plenty of ARM solutions. Why even bother?
- benjamincburns 13y agoIt depends on what you're doing. If you're making an internet toaster, go buy an arduino. If you're doing anything CPU intensive, or if you're not familiar with embedded systems tooling, cross-compilation, Yocto or similar build systems, Atom >> ARM. I'll very happily pay $200 for this.
- zokier 13y ago> CPU intensive it's a 1GHz single core CPU from 2010. While Atom might have some IPC advantage over ARM, I doubt that as a whole it would be competitive against high-perf ARM boards, like the ODROIDs (up to 1.7GHz quad-core, beginning at 89 dollars).
- benjamincburns 13y ago
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSort of like the Pandaboard. Not as many GPIOs though. Interesting that Intel is dipping its toe in here, At one level it validates the ARM SoC market that is percolating around the embedded space but its also typical in that this doesn't put any of the 'good stuff' Intel could put out there into the market. Perhaps most interesting has been the continued fraying around the windows/intel empire, what with Microsoft offering an ARM version of Windows on the RT and Intel building clearly not PC compatible motherboards.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dholowiski 13y agoONE ethernet port. Why won't anyone give us nerds TWO ethernet ports??
- tinco 13y agoIt apparently has a free PCIexpress lane, so I think we can go nuts with the expansions :D
- AsymetricCom 13y agoWe'd prefer if you'd parse your network packets on the CPU. We even built a special part of the chip to do it for you and hardwired your existing com ports to it! I'm sure you developers don't want to touch that stuff anyway.
- jjindev 13y agoIt's interesting, just yesterday I scanned the low cost system boards looking for one with SATA. I was wondering if I should replace the old PCs I use as filestores with something smaller, lower power, that could just run linux and rsync for me. This does it ... but as others have said, the price is not really attractive compared to a used pc. I don't fault the design team for this. It looks like a great little board ... but probably for strategic reasons Intel would rather have us continue with those old pcs, rather than risk cannibalization of low-end pcs. Update: I think I was slow to see the embedded focus of this board and it's IO. So of course it is priced against that world, and not the world of low-end or used PCs.
- joshu 13y agohttp://www.bigboardlist.com/ http://www.bigboardlist.com/ (note that this is my project) Cubieboard and Wandboard Quad both have SATA.
- jjindev 13y agoExcellent, thank you. FWIW also, comparing that $200 pricepoint, Newegg recently had a Lenovo server Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GH Dual-Core; 4GB RAM; DVD ROM, no-disk, no-os, for $250. (reputed backdoor at no extra cost!) Update: I just went to techbargains and searched "server", that one was recently expired. When I'm in shopping mode I just keep an eye on a couple such shopping sites to see what comes by.
- joshu 13y agoPlease add links for that! I'm actually thinking of building a hadoop cluster at home so something cheap would be nice. Foxconn has cheapo machines on newegg as well. A while ago I bought a Fujitsu P180 and it was a lot of machine for the price but the prices went way up.
- voltagex_ 13y agoI think the Cubieboard is OK on this but: Which boards are speed limited by using USB internally? (I'm thinking of my Dreamplug, mainly)
- benjamincburns 13y agoThis is exactly the type of marketing effort Intel needs in order to steal the embedded systems market back from ARM. As an embedded systems hacker who normally works on projects with budgets well under $10m, Intel has never really been on my radar. They're incredibly unapproachable until you're a bigger OEM, and chances are if you've started from scratch you're already used to (and tooled for) designing for ARM. Creating an open platform around Atom makes Intel much, much more approachable. With regard to price, I'm not discouraged at all. $200 is well within my personal budget, and I've got a vision-heavy robotics project in mind that I'd love to use this for. Why not use an Raspberry Pi or a more powerful ARMv7 SBC? ARM software support is getting better every day, but the vast, vast majority of software is still written for x86. As examples, libBLAS, LAPACK, libav, OpenCV - all of these were written and optimized for x86 MMX, then SSE*, first. Their performance on ARMv7 has come a long way very quickly, but ARM performance is a secondary goal for a lot of these types of projects. Shit, how well does Matlab or Octave run on ARM? I know more than a few people who'd salivate at the chance to write sensing/control code in Octave and run it on a $200 SBC...
- wolf550e 13y agoI don't know, but I guess HPC-type packages don't optimize for Atom. They optimize for the performance oriented micro-architectures.
- knodi 13y ago$199 seem a little high.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- benjamincburns 13y agoFor some of you scratching your head about why this board is the way it is, check out this Google+ thread from Darren Hart: https://plus.google.com/101378268367730737515/posts/DGQ9Nkr5hjK https://plus.google.com/101378268367730737515/posts/DGQ9Nkr5... In the fourth comment he explains some of his design choices: One of those factors I mentioned above was making sure the board was "replicable". This adds a number of constraints, such as: * The price cannot include any subsidies (otherwise people could not recreate the board at close to the same cost) * The parts must have a long product life cycle (this eliminates some of the other chips that we might have considered) and be readily available (otherwise there would be shortages in supply and people wouldn't be able to source the parts to make their own) * Maker and hacker friendly meant including access to a number of buses and other interfaces, which also limited our part selection as well as impacting cost. There is a fairly lengthy story here, which I'm happy to share with anyone interested. All in all, I think we managed to come up with a very capable board that will allow people to tweak it and hack it and expand it while providing strong performance (especially in terms of I/O) and a decent price point. More on that as information becomes available... Edit: To the best of my knowledge Intel has never focused on releasing designs that an individual can build/modify on their own. To me this represents a very exciting change in Intel's attitude toward "the little guy." Further, to anyone looking to build their own hardware similar to the Raspbery Pi, good luck trying to get Broadcom to talk to you, let alone give you a BSP or sell you chips. Their NDA process/requirements is/are obscene...
- pgeorgi 13y agoFor a real world story on (not) interacting with Broadcom (and AMD, who don't make a very good impression in that story either), read Jens' second comment on http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/2463/ http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/2463/ (Feb 21). I'm just not sure if Intel's process is really better for small customers (but you probably end up in the "small" tier faster than with Broadcom)
- benjamincburns 13y ago> just not sure if Intel's process is really better for small customers It depends on what you're buying, but for SoC processors and especially chipsets, it's not so great. And re: "who's small" - yeah, I think ~1M units annually is still "small" to Intel. However, some of their memory products (NOR and EEPROM come to mind) are very attainable for smaller customers.
- ck2 13y ago$200 for an atom board? Hyperthreading on an Atom? This would have been interesting a decade ago.
- gamebit07 13y agoCould someone gift it to RMS? :)
- wmf 13y agoHe'll just complain about the blobs.
- jff 13y agoUEFI? Closed the fucking tab, we're done here.
- yuhong 13y agoHuh?
- synchronise 13y agoIt was mentioned in this article that the Atom SoC uses a PowerVR based GMA600 graphics core. http://liliputing.com/2013/07/intels-minnowboard-open-source-low-power-dev-board-ships-for-199.html http://liliputing.com/2013/07/intels-minnowboard-open-source... Would someone be able to confirm this, because if it's the case then there might not be as much Linux support, especially for 3D acceleration, for this board.
- mylorse 13y agoHow are these different than AMD Fusion boards already out there in the market, with x86-64 and virtualization?
- CPAhem 13y agoSince you can already get full ITX atom boards for around $60 on ebay, this makes little sense to me. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=atom+motherboard+itx&_sop=15 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=atom+motherboar...
- CamperBob2 13y ago1 GHz? 32-bit CPU? $200? Really? Who exactly is the intended audience for this board?
- astrodust 13y agoSuckers.
- zw123456 13y agoThe datasheet does not have any power consumption info. How big does the PS have to be? Otherwise it could be a useful board, $200 is a little steep now-a-days. The APC is $100, the RPi is $40 etc.
- godgod 13y agoComes fully loaded with NSA backdoor.