That looks like a very impressive piece of kit. I was planning to get a Hawkboard Lite for a project, but might wait for this to become available instead, if the price is decent. 8 times the RAM!
The different amount of RAM is the last think to notice here. The OMAP L138 on the hawkboard is an ARM9 (+ C674xDSP) at 375/456MHz, the OMAP4 of the pandaboard is a dual core Cortex-A9 at 1GHz.
They are completely in two different class. I too hope for the price.
The different amount of RAM is the last think to notice here.
That depends mainly on the use you have in mind. For my purposes, the Hawkboard's CPU would probably be fine. But yeah, the Pandaboard is quite a beast - twice the computing power of an iPad, if I'm not mistaken. (not counting the DSP)
The A9 is readily 25% faster per clock than the A8 for scalar integer operations. Scalar floating-point is 5-10x faster depending on the exact operations. Vector instructions are mostly the same or slower than A8 due to lack of the limited dual-issue present in A8. I have yet to run a proper benchmark to compare the difference in vector performance in realistic situations.
Well, I wonder if it would be suitable as some kind of low-power all-in-one home server (file sharing, irc in screen, not much more), network router and jukebox and movie player. In theory, specs are ok for that purpose, but from the remark "if you need more than 1GB, you're probably doing it wrong", it seems that, hm, I'd be doing it wrong, because 1GB isn't exactly a lot of memory and it'd be wise to put there more.
(And of course, USB might not be the ideal bus to connect a lot of disk space.)
1GB is 1GB of RAM. It doesn't seem to have onboard ROM, but SD slot surely will support up to 32GB. And it has 10/100 Ethernet besides USB, though latter is probably suitable enough to "connect a lot of disk space".
I know, but 1GB of RAM isn't that lot if I want at least reasonably fast file sharing (especially if the primary storage would be the harddisks via USB), run some network services and even some desktops apps via networked X11, which is roughly what I want (so I'm asking if this is the 'doing it wrong' case).
Only time you would run into issues is if you were using something like ZFS that keeps an in memory ARC cache. If you want to run X11 apps, just get a linux computer.
thanks! unfortunately it says as I feared: Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 Desktop PC - Black (40813AU) cannot be shipped to the selected address. (BTW: most things are OK for us with Amazon.)
What I meant was that I don't think PandaBoard itself is meant to ship for your customers, but to allow you to prototype your ideas, and evaluate the hardware needs of your product, so that you can then build your own hardware which you ship to your customers.
And that's why I said that dev kit price is not that much of an issue, as it does not directly affect the price of the hardware you are going to ship.
edit: from their FAQ:
Is PandaBoard a end product or can I utilize it in my end product?
PandaBoard is a development platform! It is not an end product nor do we recommend directly using it in an end product. We encourage you to leverage open & low cost PandaBoard to explore, prototype your software & hardware design and venture into creating your own OMAP4430 based product.
It's hard to figure out what problems a board like this solves. If you want a cheap file server just buy an Atom board w/ a passive heat-sink. If you want to play around w/ "physical computing" and drive sensors, the Arduino ecosystem is much more open and vibrant.
And IIRC although the BeagleBoard had a nice GPU, it wasn't programmable without signing an NDA.
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They are completely in two different class. I too hope for the price.
That depends mainly on the use you have in mind. For my purposes, the Hawkboard's CPU would probably be fine. But yeah, the Pandaboard is quite a beast - twice the computing power of an iPad, if I'm not mistaken. (not counting the DSP)
The board is 4"x4.5", but I couldn't find thickness, weight or power consumption. Some specs at bottom of: http://www.omappedia.org/wiki/PandaBoard_Early_Adopter_Progr...
(And of course, USB might not be the ideal bus to connect a lot of disk space.)
USB2.0 will push 480Mb/sec which is probably sufficient for streaming content.
My wireless router has 64MB of ram and is capable of running as a NAS device if you plug a USB enclosure into it.
I got a Lenovo q150 for $200 and replaced the disk with the consumer intel 40gb sad for another $100. It is tiny, quiet, and consumes 17 watts.
Any idea how to get it in Australia? Lenovo's au site doesn't list it; and I guess there'd be power-supply (and maybe IP?) issues.
I got it from Amazon. Can you order from Amazon? This is what I got: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003SCI59K
EDIT: The one I have isn't an nvidia ION-based machine.
Only thing I got was that early adopters will get some at the end of October.
Usually, one gravitates toward something inferior shipping(BeagleBoard XM in this case) to something superior, which is unavailable.
What happens if you develop a product and then you find out that the hardware cost pushes it out of the price point for your target demograpic?
And that's why I said that dev kit price is not that much of an issue, as it does not directly affect the price of the hardware you are going to ship.
edit: from their FAQ:
Is PandaBoard a end product or can I utilize it in my end product?
PandaBoard is a development platform! It is not an end product nor do we recommend directly using it in an end product. We encourage you to leverage open & low cost PandaBoard to explore, prototype your software & hardware design and venture into creating your own OMAP4430 based product.
And IIRC although the BeagleBoard had a nice GPU, it wasn't programmable without signing an NDA.