Pandaboard Is Here
 

http://pandaboard.org/
The Panda Board is here and it is only 174 dollars! For 174 dollars you can't go wrong.
1ghz Dual Core OMAP4430 with the PowerVR SGX540 which can do stuff like 1080p encoding and decoding. The device has 1gb of ram. For connectivity you got HDMI out, USB ports, Wifi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, and a memory card reader. You could do stuff like run Ubuntu, Android, Angstrom, and Mer. The only problem is those damned close sourced drivers. Still 174 bucks

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

It doesn't appear to me from your link that the Panda Board IS here or anywhere. I saw something inviting anyone to join an "early adapter" program. If my project was among the winners, I would get a Panda Board at the end of the month.

Did you see something specific about how long it would take me to get the Panda Board after I paid for it?

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

Ship Date Estimate
(mm/dd/yyyy)
11/21/2010

... or so the digikey site says (subject to change, blah blah)

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

Oops sorry about that. I found out that it is coming very soon. It will come in Early November according to Armdevices http://armdevices.net/2010/10/21/pan...eased-for-174/. However this should be a pretty snazzy development device despite Imagination's stupid closed source 3D Driver policy.

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

And when it arrives get ready to install Meego.
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/OMAP4_Panda

Maybe this thread should be moved under "Development" as the Pandaboard is not really a competitor.

Am really hoping that Nokia will bring out a 5 inch tablet soon.

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

This think looks fantastic, it would definitely be a cool investment to be one of the first using the next generation OMAP device. Hell I'd even contemplate picking up one of these to screw around with and then for a Car PC build if they were more mainstream.

Can't help but think ARM is almost alongside x86 in terms of usage and definitely can't wait to see some of these things up and running.

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

I was thinking the same thing! It's just amazing how far ARM has come (or how stalled X86 has become) over the last few years.

Would it be possible to dd a Maemo image onto a properly formatted SD card for the pandaboard to boot off of, or do the u-boot and Linux kernel always need to be built by hand?

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

You are joking, right?

Do you know that intel has a 6 core 3.33 GHz CPU? And that each of these cores can do twice as much as an A9 core does per cycle, making the i7 about 20 times as fast as a dual core Cortex-A9. This is the usual ratio between top of the line x86 and ARM for the last 15 years.

Dual core 1GHz SoCs are nothing new, actually. MIPS had those in 2002, so ARM still has a long way to go even to catch up with MIPS architecture, let alone X86.

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

I don't think anyone was implying that ARM is faster then X86, but for day to day computing it would be unthinkable even 2 years ago that you could rely solely on an ARM based PC. Even if you used an ARM device, you would only last a few hours before running back to your PC to hotsync or view web video or do any signifigant PC gaming.

But now, I see Maemo/Meego, the iOS iPad, and (soon) the QNX powered Blackberry Tablet, and several other cosumer electronics devices providing for many people's daily email, web browsing, and personnel computing needs.

Many of these people (myself included) can go for weeks now without powering on my full desktop PC.

Re: Pandaboard Is Here
 

Who said anything about benchmarking, I was simply referring to ARM being capable of doing anything x86 can do (in terms of regular user usage) as the above poster has stated. And I didn't say this model was equivalent, I stated they were getting up there with x86 for the regular user.

Well, really I feel confident with ARM mostly for the position they started at. Intel has started as a big power hungry lunker and has shrunk from it, whereas ARM has started small and built up. In the end I can't help but think ARM will win such a race in the long run.