Intel’s Minnowboard

About a year ago Labrigger covered the Raspberry Pi, a single board computer. In some ways, it’s like a high-powered Arduino, but really, it’s a miniature PC. Albeit, a PC that uses an ARM processor, like many tablet computers (and other single board computers like the BeagleBoard). How about a single board computer based on a standard Intel CPU? For that, there is Intel’s recently released MinnowBoard (shown above). It’s based off of an older Atom CPU, and is very expensive ($199) compared to the Raspberry Pi ($25), but it’s still fairly inexpensive, and may be an interesting option.

The main advantage right now is that it’s all x86-based. Thus, many standards already work with it: SATA2, PCI Express, etc. It’s I/O is faster than many other options right now, and includes Gigabit ethernet.

One hopes that the price-to-performance will improve over time. And it probably will, at least in part because anyone can make one and sell it. Although there are other options for small x86 systems, what is different about the MinnowBoard is that it’s open hardware as much as the Arduino is (anyone can build one and sell it, all the required information are freely available*). Such is not the case for the Raspberry Pi, which is pretty open, and uses free software, but RS and element13 are the only ones that can sell them.

* The source code for the GPU isn’t available, but the binaries are, so although it’s not completely open, there’s still nothing stopping someone of making their own and trying to compete on price. Since one would still need to buy Intel chips, Intel might well be happy to let them do so. Perhaps they just want to get the ball rolling.

(via)