New kid on the block the pcDuino ...

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Actually, about a billion industrial computers might argue with that assessment.

I don't disagree with any of what you said, it's just been my experience that when you start talking about industrial computing you either have a very expensive custom industrial board that just happens to have enough passing resemblance to a PC to be able to run windows.. Or, you have a cheap commodity PC with a card in it that likely costs many times more than the PC itself.

(In my line, this could often take the form of something like a GPIB card connected to a bit of equipment worth several millions of times the cost of the PC).

So I'd suggest that, while you're correct, you've also went way past the point of an Atom based PC that costs less than a Sabre-Lite.

John Beetem wrote:

 

The MarsBoard looks interesting: Allwinner A10, 1GB DDR, 4GB NAND Flash, SD card, 10/100 Ethernet, Micro HDMI, SATA, 2 USB host, 1 USB OTG, 140 expansion pins on 2mm connectors.

Seemingly the marsboard and cubieboard are logically very close - no idea if they're physically identical enough with regards to expansion header pinouts.

But back to Morgaines question, can I get one delivered tomorrow ?  No.

Their 'free shipping' is 10-30 days to the UK, possibly faster for between $24.09 and $41.85 depending on which of the five options you pick and 2-4 days being the best. Ok, we don't quite double the cost of the board to get it here, but close.

$45 BBB vs $49 marsboard ?  close enough that I'd not care. but I can get a BBB delivered tomorrow for $45 because they're available locally. Marsboard at $90 and a week to get here is a different decision altogether

selsinork wrote:

 

So I'd suggest that, while you're correct, you've also went way past the point of an Atom based PC that costs less than a Sabre-Lite.

Intel isn't predisposed to making CPUs cheap, so you're probably right that prices are going to be at the upper end of what the embedded market will bear.  However, ARM is applying immense pressure there, and Intel doesn't have too many options --- they'll have to  make Atom prices acceptable or they might as well abandon the embedded market altogether.  There's no point bringing a device to market at a price where it won't sell.

I think that they're going to make the price acceptable, even if only marginally so.  Here is some evidence that they realize their predicament in the embedded space and are prepared to price their embedded CPUs less outrageously than is usual in their other markets --- the open hardware Minnowboard, expected release in July 2013.

The price is not yet fixed, other than "less than US$200", but I rather doubt that it's going to be $199 because the market wouldn't take that too kindly in these "Pi days", and they know it.  Also, the board provides gigabit Ethernet, SATA, PCIe, GPIO, CAN, I2C and SPI, a combined feature set that is quite uncommon in the ARM ecosystem at present so the spec isn't unreasonable.  It's quite likely to be a better candidate for some applications than Sabre-Lite, depending on price, particularly when good networking is required.

Atom isn't the only game in embedded x86 town though, as I mentioned earlier.  I expect AMD and Via to respond as well, and others.  There's quite a number of smaller x86 players in this space as well.  I don't expect embedded x86 to disappear just because these are great days for ARM.  It'll respond and adapt.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

 

Intel isn't predisposed to making CPUs cheap, so you're probably right that prices are going to be at the upper end of what the embedded market will bear. 

Well you can get an atom based board for around 50 quid today. The catch is that it won't have all those useful IO options, you probably get VGA, 10/100 network and a pci slot.  But is it just a cheap PC, economies of scale and all that.

I did a quick google for PCI CAN & I2C cards, I forget which way round, but something like $499 for CAN and 200 euros for I2C. Both found pretty much exclusively in the embedded/industrial sorts of sites - no economies of scale, silly prices.

Looking at your minnowboard, that feature set could be copied verbatim from sabre-lite, apart from it's a single core.  So it needs to be a lot less than $199. Sill there are all sorts of advantages to being in familiar x86 territory - just being able to build/debug the code on your normal PC then copy it over is a surprisingly useful thing.

I already have a couple of Geode embedded systems and the catch is that they're not quite enough like an ordinary PC. So you end up compiling special versions of things specifically for them, they're also twice the cost of that Atom board, slower than the Pi etc.  So outside some niche uses there's no particular advantage.

selsinork wrote:

 

Looking at your minnowboard, that feature set could be copied verbatim from sabre-lite, apart from it's a single core.  So it needs to be a lot less than $199.

The Minnowboard offers gigabit Ethernet, Sabre-Lite only 100Mbps.

That factor of 10 can make a colossal difference in a network-intensive application, and can place the Sabre-Lite totally out of the picture.  Indeed, it's pretty bizarre I think that a new i.MX6 board pitched at a fairly high price point should choose not to provide gigabit when the SoC supports it, especially when the designers chose the quad core SoC which is the top of the range device.  The design choices don't seem to be consistent..

Also, since Wandboard offers gigabit Ethernet even in their cheap Solo version, the incremental BOM cost of gigabit clearly cannot be much, reinforcing the oddity of the choice in Sabre-Lite.

The end result of this is that if the Minnowboard were to be released at the same price as Sabre-Lite, I'd choose the Atom board without hesitation because I consider networking so important.  The only question in my mind is how much higher the price could be before I decide it's too much.  Even then though, my money wouldn't be spent on the Sabre-Lite.  Instead, I'd grit my teeth and order a Wandboard from Texas.

Although I accept that not everyone feels the same, for me the attraction of gigabit is immense.  All of my current machines use gigabit NICs with the exception of the ARM boards, and I want to correct that.  Even my main Internet link is faster than 100Mbps, although not by much (120Mbps).

For a specific application, the slower network speed might not matter of course, as the requirements dictate what is satisfactory and what isn't.  But when buying a general purpose prototyping board with no specific application in mind, over 100 quid for 100 meg LAN is just not good enough for 2013! .

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

The Minnowboard offers gigabit Ethernet, Sabre-Lite only 100Mbps.

No, SL does Gigabit too. I just logged into one of mine to check.

I agree that 100Mb is no longer good enough, and I'll point out that there's an errata for the iMX6 that means you'll not get gigabit throughput (approx 400MB/s aggregate IIRC), and that's going to apply to the wandboard or anything else with an iMX6. At least until it's fixed, but we have no way of knowing when or even if that'll happen. There have been improvements in more recent versions of the chip, see http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/

selsinork wrote:

 

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

The Minnowboard offers gigabit Ethernet, Sabre-Lite only 100Mbps.

No, SL does Gigabit too. I just logged into one of mine to check.

Arghhh!!!!!  Entirely my fault.  The Ethernet speeds are quoted (very oddly) as "10/100/Gb", and my mind parsed that as some kind of typo and noted that "1000" was not mentioned.  It's entirely my fault for not adhering to the principle of "Be flexible in what you read but strict in what you write".

I will point out to marketting copy writers though that "10/100/Gb" is at the very least dimensionally incorrect, and you're writing for engineers.

Cool, so Sabre-Lite does gigabit.  That puts a completely different perspective on it, for me.  Let me re-evaluate.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

The Ethernet speeds are quoted (very oddly) as "10/100/Gb",

Oh... Where did you read that.. I may just have to return mine since it can't do 10Gb or 100Gb

selsinork wrote:

 

There have been improvements in more recent versions of the chip, see http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/

That site is awesome --- measurement and numbers are the essense of engineering, everything else is wishful thinking and guesswork.  And yes, I'm looking forward to updated tapeouts.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

That site is awesome

If you do decide on the iMX6 route - SL in particular - then the boundary devices blog is a goldmine of useful information.

I tried to post links to all of the stuff I could find in the helpfully named "element 14 development kit for iMX 6Quad" area here http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-board_computers/sabrelite?view=discussions although you have about as much chance of finding it yourself as finding the BBB discussions area...

I'm still hoping to see someome produce a simple BBB / cubieboard style device with an iMX6 on it.