VIA bakes a fruitier Rock cake to rival the Brit Raspberry Pi Computer electronics biz VIA has updated its Raspberry Pi rival APC - a micro-motherboard its maker calls a “bicycle for your mind” - which it brought to market last May. The new board sports a new processor, more flash memory, better video output and, VIA said, more expansion options. VIA APC Rock Rock'n'ruler: The new VIA …
Remember that the first APC was sold at $49 Android PC in July 2012, although that version is still available its gained speed and memory etc and is now $79 or $99 with 'book' case ... so expect a $199 version next year 8-(
Meanwhile the Raspberry Pi 'Model B' rev 2 doubled the memory of rev 1 and is still £30 inc VAT+delivery.
I'm all for competition bar one thing. Raspberry Pi is a charity organisation. They saw a gap in the very low end of the market and plugged it with a cheap board with proceeds heading towards charity teaching people about somputer basics.
All these other companies who saw the success and now want a slice of the Pi are just out to make a profit for themselves. I don't care if it's twice as powerful and at the same cost as the Pi, I'm still getting the Pi because I'd rather support a charity than a conglomerate.
Well one idea would be to have simple standards for simple hardware. For example to have a common USB controller like in the PC as well as a common serial port and SD-card. Then you'd have some table in your ROM pointing to the addresses and Interrupts of those devices.
The problem with all those little ARM devices is that you waste so much time having to port and maintain your kernel on each one of those. And even if you have a ported kernel, it's a pain to use another userland with it.
It's like back in the home computer age where you might have had 20 different 6502-based computers, each one with its own hardware, but the same CPU. Hypothetically you could have just added a some routines into ROM, so you could have built platform independent code. The Z80 and the 8086 world on the other hand agreed on their own platforms. The only thing you needed to port CP/M for was the amount of memory you had. DOS didn't even need that and you could just pop it onto any "PC-compatible" computer, provided it had a BIOS.
> The Z80 and the 8086 world on the other hand agreed on their own platforms.
No they didn't. There were at least as many variations on 8080, 8085, Z80 and 8086 platforms as those for 6502. Both in terms of hardware design and operating systems.
> The only thing you needed to port CP/M for was the amount of memory you had.
What complete nonsense. You obviously never worked with CP/M. The BDOS and CCP were identical for each different machine but the porting to specific hardware was done by writing an appropriate BIOS* to support the hardware. DRI provided an example BIOS.
> DOS didn't even need that and you could just pop it onto any "PC-compatible" computer, provided it had a BIOS.
... provided it had an IBM PC compatible ROM BIOS.
Otherwise, such as for S100 based boxes, or Wang PCs or DEC Rainbows or Apricot PCs or dozens of others, the manufacturer had to develop a loadable BIOS that provided the device independence - just as they did for CP/M.
In fact MS-DOS was initally based on the structure of CP/M and also had a loadable BIOS even when run on an IBM PC compatible with a ROM BIOS. The MS-DOS one was a stub that converted the calls that DOS made into ROM BIOS interrupts. It was only with MS-DOS 5.0 that this became totally dependent on an IBM ROM BIOS and no longer could run on other hardware.
* BIOS = Basic Input Output System.
The original APC is okay, it has some issues that are quite annoying, like the limited Android OS without the official play market (available with a hack but doesn't work perfectly), limited output on HDMI (720) and kinda just generally not as great as it first seems.
With the number of cheap android sticks and boxes out there right now, APCs offering is too little too late.
An mk808 is less than half the price, runs a newer version of android and is WAY more powerful.
I'd never heard of it, but the link you gave puts the mk808 at $58.99, which isn't "less than half the price" of either the Rock ($79) or Paper ($99).
Now the ODROID-U2, on the other hand, costs $89 (*), has quad core clockable to 2GHz (base 1.7GHz) and 2Gb of RAM. Also runs Jelly Bean and Linaro Ubuntu (no accelerated X yet, though it's expected in a few weeks). Its sibling product, the ODROID-X2 is very similar, except that it costs $135 and has a whole lot more ports.
(*) as with a lot of these boards, power supply, cabling, flash drive and shipping aren't included. A full U2 ends up costing about $150 (including a hefty $40 shipping fee from Korea), plus local customs clearance and VAT which brings it to something closer to $190. Definitely pricey compared to a Pi (which comes to around €72 all told), but the U2/X2 are are at least 12 times more powerful in my tests (thanks to 4x cores, 2x speed, step up from ARMv6 to ARMv7). So while the Pi definitely wins out on price/system, the ODROIDs definitely win out on performance/price IMO.
It seems bizarre to me that VIA believe people want to pay more than double the cost of a RasPi for something that's only fractionally faster. Both are essentially base model Android phones with no touchscreen, no cell interface, no battery, and a few cheap sockets, but at least the RasPi's only $35 for the equivalent model. I don't think the extra $44 for the VIA's VGA socket's good value!
I'm sure VIA has seen a market for this, because it's not that useful a reference design for anything that isn't being done better elsewhere, but I'm blowed if I can see it. If their sales volumes make it into four figures I'd be surprised.
So the RPi is a base model Android phone? Hmm, let's see.
As you say, no touchscreen, no cell interface, no battery.
On the other hand, LAN interface, 2 x USB Type "A" i/fs, micro SD card I/f, analogue video, 5V power socket in non-obvious location for a phone, GPIO pins, HDMI...
I would think there comes a point where you don't mod a phone card to make it into an RPi, you design from scratch. And I think that's what happened.
>So the RPi is a base model Android phone? Hmm, let's see.
No the RPi is a very cheap Linux PC
This is just an Android phone without the screen/phone
If I want a cheap Linux PC to play with I get an RPi
If I want the identical hardware that a million other people have and are hacking on - I get an RPi
If I want a cheap Android to play with I get a $50 tablet or a $50 Android-on-a-stick
I can't see why I would buy this
Texas Instruments makes an ARM-based with 2x GigE ports and a crypto-accelerator for $199. It also has a touch-screen and some other goodies (no video-out though).
http://www.ti.com/tool/tmdssk3358
I've been using a couple of these for firewalls and VPN gateways for remote sites and built a very simple GTK-based UI for the office staff that just kicks off a couple of simple scripts.
Hmm this is tempting as it runs andriod unlike the rasberry pi
And yes I own a rasberry pi that I originally bought to watch videos till I found out that it sucked at that(EVERY video format I tried had video, and audio sync issues past 480p AVI's), then I had hopes of andriod from broadcom as it was announced on their main page which never materialized.
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