Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
The Best... RH Numbers Reg Hardware PC Week The Raspberry Pi – if you can get your hands on one – isn't the only small, inexpensive ARM computer around these days. There are quite a few options with varying speeds and price points. So here we take up ARMs with a full review of the ARMini – uniquely British offering that is …
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@Gordan - Re: Why not ShivaPlug etc
Yes, I am sure you can attach a USB display controller to a plug-server, but that is still not coming with a built-in display adapter. Secondarily, the MIMO USB screens you cite are quite a lot more expensive than the entire plug computer, which makes a mockery of the "inexpensive" part.
You can use almost any kind of computer for almost any kind of role, but it's not a great idea to use a server as a desktop - it's expensive & performance is poor. Similarly, something like a RasPi or BeagleBoard is not a great server, as it has no native Ethernet (it's running over USB) or SATA.
It is generally best to use the right device for the job.
I'd be happy to do a roundup of inexpensive plug servers, but the cited devices are mostly a couple of years old now so it's no longer news. Part of the point of this article was to highlight that the RasPi was not the only device of its type, but equally to highlight how it is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives. A ShivaPlug is not an alternative to a RasPi and nor is a 2010 Tosh kinda-sorta-netbook.
And thirdly, there are limits to the length of this sort of piece. There isn't room to include every even-vaguely-comparable device that is aimed at a different role but happens to use the same CPU. This was about *desktop computers*. Not notebooks, netbooks, servers, tablets or phones. Desktops. *Just* desktops. No battery, no built-in screen, no onboard keyboard and trackpad, but display & sound ports. Desktops.
OK? :¬)
hella expensive
Some of these little ARM comupters are hella expensive. I built an Atom based media center recently with a dual core chip, 4GB RAM, 1TB HDD, BlueRay, Win7, WiFi, TV Recording, remote control, wireless keyboard & mouse and a much nicer case than that ARMini all for under £300. So why pay double that for something with much lower capabilities?
Re: hella expensive
agreed. If you cut corners you can get an almost like for like fusion board + ram + case + storage for less than £150. Use an open-elec XBMC and you have a decent fusion (or ion) media center.
Toshiba AC100
HardReg has also covered the Toshiba AC100 before:
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
... And whereas it /is/ possible to put another OS on it, not all the hardware is supported, there are significant caveats and it is *not* easy:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/TEGRA/AC100
So I would not rate it as a suitable device for someone wanting to just play.
Furthermore, it's a 2+ year old device; I am not sure if they are even available new any more.
Re: Toshiba AC100 fate
I loved the case, but never heard of anyone who configured it into something useful.
I was wondering if it is possible to replace the mainboard with a RasPi?
Re: Toshiba AC100
Sorry, Liam, but all the hardware IS supported, and has been for a year or so. I have everything working on mine.
There are plenty of AC100 available on eBay and Amazon. The age of it is irrelevant - it is still among the highest spec ARM machines you can get, and undoubtedly the best value one by far.
Re: Toshiba AC100 fate
Dude, google the AC100 upgrades (screen, SSD, cooling/OC-ing). All the hardware is supported and the community support for most ARM distros is excellent.
Re: Toshiba AC100 on ebay
Toshiba AC100: Buy It Now EUR 306.12 -- $711.89 (3 items, the 306.12 one is the cheapest)
Raspberry Pi: Buy It Now EUR 140.00 -- GBP 145 (2 items plus 3 auctions).
I wouldn't dare to say that "there are plenty of AC100 available" but maybe if you are ready to spend several years on ebay waiting for occasional AC100 bargain this would look different...
Re: Toshiba AC100 on ebay
You aren't looking hard enough, or you're looking in the wrong country. On eBay.co.uk, they are readily available for £160 new, usually about £100-£110 used.
@Irongut
No, today, ARM cannot compete against x86 kit on price. But it hands x86 its backside on a plate when it comes to performance/Watt.
I am hoping that Raspberry Pi will catalyse a new generation of very-low-cost ARM systems.
Once a suitably low-power display is available, say from Pixel Qi or using e-ink, this enables the possibility of capable, flexible solar-powered ARM computers running FOSS OSs which could transform the lives of billions in the developing world.
Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
Re: @Irongut
> Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
Except a honking great battery means lots of weight, which doesn't fly well with most consumers.
However, a Transformer-style setup would be great, with extra battery in the keyboard.
I'd like to see more "add to your x86 setup" systems. Pop them inside your x86 case and hook up your disks to them for always-on file serving via ethernet and run thunderbolt for native disk-speed access for the local x86 host. Could the RPi graphics system be re-purposed for RAID operations?
A cotton-candy style setup would be fun. AMD could build it into their graphics cards and sell them to intel customers... "Do you really need to power up your i7 PC?"
It seems that the PCIe format could provide power supply, negate the need for a case, provide SATA cable-length access to mass storage etc.
It's hard to dislodge incumbants such as intel, I suspect the way to succeed is to offer extra services rather than compete head-on.
"It’s not entirely clear to me why the Beagleboard is so expensive. Somebody in that Beagleboard value chain has got to be making a pile of money – I mean, $175 for a Pandaboard or $100 for a Beagleboard? Somebody’s got to be amassing a pile of cash there, because that’s a $10 chip in that device. I don’t know why they’re so expensive."
Someone's been reading too much Dr. Seuss.
Three more:
1. I don' think you mentioned the "PandaBoard", which is a newer T.I. OMAP board similar in most ways to the various BeagleBoards but significantly faster.
2. The Freescale i.MX53 "Quick Start" board is physically similar to the Panda and Beagle, based on a single-core Coretex A8; its main differentiating feature is that it has SATA.
3. The "OpenRD Ultimate" is based on a Marvell chip, similar to the various "plug" computers, but does have a VGA output.
TrimSLICE - my favourirt
Been using this for 6 months and think the comments here under play it.
High performance ARM with Nvidia Tegra2, industrial grade and so small when you consider its power. We ve been developing a digital signage application on a 22" multitouch TFT with TrimSLICE and Android 4.0. Really cool piece of kit
Oh and i notice you said its from the guys who made the linuxtop. Actually its not. its by the guys who make the equally cool FitPC family whose IntensePC i'm about to buy (i7 ivybridge, fanless, really small). We buy though their UK partner at www.fit-pc.co.uk
Re: TrimSLICE - my favourirt
TrimSlice is, indeed, quite nice, but no way is it worth 2.5x more than an AC100.
Great read, Liam! And most of them will fit in an Xmas stocking! :) Ric
Filthy Pictures!!
Erm... Don't mean to be a moaning minnie but why do you go to the trub of including nice detailed pics with your article, but can't be bothered to actually *clean* the kit first? Do you think the manufacturers will be super chuffed at seeing their product offered up to the public looking like some ancient 1980s-era artifact freshly dragged out of the attic?
MKV player ?
The Sumvision's Cyclone Micro 2 MKV player which is available for under £30 is a cheap alternative box if you can replace the builtin firmware.
Some of these pique my interest...
...but I watch a lot of anime, and what with the recent transition to Hi10P from h.264 by fansubbers (since they like to use new things), the whole purpose of me buying one of these is pointless since they can't handle it.
256MB RAM is not much for running a modern graphical Linux desktop
I keep seeing this comment here on the Reg. It kind of bugs me to read that given that the PS3 only has 256Mb of main memory and it's completely capable of running Linux + X/Windows. OK, so there is a slight proviso in that large compile tasks sometimes need just a little bit more swap space, often borrowed from unused video memory, but you could just allocate an equivalent amount of disk-based swap and everything's copacetic.
So--256Mb--it may not be enough for everybody, but it's definitely enough for Linux + X/Windows.
Re: 256MB RAM
256MB and even 512MB is not enough if you run WinXP in kvm (1GB and x86 with VME are necessary for smooth run). Without virtualization the main RAM consumer typically is firefox -- 380MB with 20 tabs open...
Re: 256MB RAM
WinXP? What on earth are you talking about? You do realize this is ARM machines we are talking about, right? You can't run x86 code in KVM on ARM. You'd have to emulate x86 using qemu, which is too slow for any real purpose (it is too slow the other way around, too, i.e. if you are emulating ARM on x86).
510MB of usable RAM is reasonably comfortable on my AC100 for Firefox and other usual desktop applications. 256MB definitely wouldn't be. Midori tends to use a little less memory than FF to begin with but it seems to be more leaky and eventually it gets worse the FF, plus it's JS support still breaks on a few websites. Chromium is probably the way forward for stability and memory footprint.
Re: 256MB RAM is not much for running a modern graphical Linux desktop
Yes, but is it sufficient for Linux + Xorg + Firefox? Firefox 10 takes 110MB of RAM to load to a blank page on my AC100. On the R-Pi, 64MB gets eaten by the frame buffer, so you have 192MB in total to play with, which means that you have 82MB for the kernel + Xorg + desktop/window manager. That is somewhat on the ambitions side these days.
Sadly, the days when we could comfortably run X, OpenLook and Mosaic in 16MB of RAM (I was doing so on my Sun 3 series machines, which, I might add, ran in higher screen resolutions than most machines sold today) are long gone.
Re: 256MB RAM
Yes I know about kvm/qemu/bochs and x86/ARM. But I need virtualization for my job, and have some knowledge about its memory requirements. Regarding the virtualizing x86 on ARM, I didn't try that yet, but it _may_ still be faster than constantly-swapping-WinXP-with-10-minutes-to-lauch-HPOVSD on 512MB x86 Linux system.
No competition.
The article starts with:
"The Raspberry Pi – if you can get your hands on one – isn't the only small, inexpensive ARM computer around these days."
Pity the article didn't mention any ARM computers remotely as cheap as the raspberry pi.
Now the main problem here is incompatibility
Each one of those boxes needs a custom prepared Version of Linux. You can't just install Debian or Gentoo on any of those unless the distributions are modified for that particular box.
What the PC has done right in that respect is to be operating system neutral. Your BIOS includes a tiny piece of code loading the bootloader from disk, as well as routines to access and enumerate what hardware you have. This way you can have any operating system you want on your PC, and it'll simply work. If it doesn't have special drivers for your hardware, it can simply use the routines provided in the BIOS. If it doesn't know what hardware you have, it can simply look it up.
This is what's missing in the ARM world. A standard "firmware", perhaps based on OpenFirmware or something. Or perhaps something rather more minimalistic. A table of the hardware in ROM, and some primitive routines to access the most important hardware (network, display, input) in its most primitive way as well as a routine to load the bootloader from the mass storage device.
Re: Now the main problem here is incompatibility
Not true. You only need a machine specific kernel (which will come with the machine anyway). The standard userspace will work fine. For example if you want to run RedSleeve or Fedora, just extract the rootfs to your media with the kernel that came with the board, and it should just work. Once your kernel is booting, everything else is very much generic and interchangeable.
Re: Now the main problem here is incompatibility
Yes, but what if I need special feature X like special DVB-drivers? Or what if my userland requires special kernel features?
Re: Now the main problem here is incompatibility
Same as you would do on any other distro - you rebuild the kernel to include them. Most ARM board vendors will provide a kernel that has most features compiled as modules, similar to what x86 distro vendors do.
Re: you rebuild the kernel to include them
DD-WRT, anyone? Some kernels build, some doesn't (OpenWRT even builds on MacOS X, if you mount buildroot on case-sensitive FS). You are at mercy of Some Vendor here. My advice is to only use H/W which has kernel genuinely packaged by Debian or demand complete source and build environment from The Vendor.
missing hardware
I want one. Any one of these, but when they toss a second G/e port in there.
Household firewall is currently a 17 year old "slim" desktop running on a usb stick. It was painful enough getting the old carp to boot off USB but now its down to a stick of ram, a cpu, a dual port nic and a usb key.
I could happily replace it tomorrow with one of these.
Re: missing hardware
DreamPlug, GuruPlug and Compulab's SBC-A510 (u-ATX form factor!) all have dual gigabit ethernet ports.
Ras Pii
The Raspberry Pi is often touted as the basis of a great, cheap media player. It has a puny CPU, but it's good enough for a UI, and its GPU has hardware decode acceleration for most common video formats.
Unfortunately they only provide (blob) drivers for accelerating H264. So if you want to play live terrestrial DVB (still mainly MEPG2) via a USB tuner, a physical DVD (MPEG2) via a USB DVD drive, or one of your old XVid/Divx (MPEG4) movies or ISOs (MPEG2) then you're stuffed. The GPU can't do it without the drivers being supplied, and the CPU isn't fast enough for software decode.
The Foundation *really* needs to get that sorted out. There needs to be a "plus pack" of drivers that allow access to the GPUs ability to decode all of these things in hardware.
Re: Ras Pi
MPEG2 you are correct as there are no drivers since paying for a licence was too expensive-- Xvid defintely not as I've happily played some XVids on it with little problem. XviD is MPEG-4 ASP / MPEG-4 part 2 (H263) so it is hardware accelerated on the Pi. Same goes for DivX but I've not tried it so cannot say for sure. WMV, MPEG2, MPEG1, AVS, VP6, VP7 and RealVideo are not supported - but who cares I always encode into H264 anyway.
The foundation have spoken about releasing a 'more powerful' version in the future - who knows they may see that a media streamer is a good market and pay for the MPEG2 licence for that bit of hardware.
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