BLACK FRIDAY (Ebay) sale of brand new Intel processor development board device is a total bust. "Funds are being returned to your PayPal account due to demand exceeding supply". Vendor says he put a quantity cap on the deal that didn't work right and Ebone actually took in 10x more orders than he can supply at that price.It has been a long slow road searching and looking for my next computing device. It has had some bumps in the road to be sure .....
ARM had to grow up, a lot it had to grow up, It still hasn't grown up enough.
Intel had to get theatened, get competitive for features, get competitive in their pricing and now actually go compete and beat on features at the lower price levels (finally !!!),
Standards had to develop that were supported in a wide spread fashion.Well, the time has arrived finally and I have actually done gone and tried to buy one of them there new fangle computery thangs for my Christmas present "from everybody".
It is a dual core INTEL chipset believe it or not, at 3 gigahertz per core backed up with two (2) 3000k on-chip caches,
two separate caches, 3000k for each of the two cores.
Why the per core separate pipeline caches? They claim it can THEORETICALLY do fully separate hyper style multi-threading, assuming your OS actually really supports such (many don't really and never have, it is pretty much unheard of in the hand-held world).
So really, this is a sort of "vapor feature" to me at this point in time. The only time Linux would ever try to use this feature is if you were doing two massive calculation threads in two open windows at the same exact time, something which I will certainly never do.
Look for Intel's pet OS Tizen to be the first one to really be able to "do it" for real .....
And, shipping included the whole thing cost me only $80 (special Black Friday free shipping pricing which has now ended)And will be able to run my favorite form of Linux, Linux Mint -- Mate version, with the device being fully supported by the distro itself from this next upcoming LTS version going on forward out into the future. Yeaaaaaaa !!!
Now that is a bloody miracle, something supported by the distro itself.
Bad news is that it is a bit of an energy hog, at 65w measured in the old fashioned non Intel max full loaded draw method, so it isn't going to make any battery powered device really happy for more than a few hours at most at full tilt -- but mine will always be plugged into wall socket power all the time anyway so that really doesn't hurt my feelings for much.
If you like the "averaged over time" current draw method that Intel prefers to report in, then it is a 25w processor. ( ha !! )
I/O on the device is really good, with like 4 readily accessible full sized USB 2.0s ports, a SATA connection, a HDMI/DVI and a VGA+ port.
VGA+ is supported, it is a bloody miracle to all be found in a device for only $80.
Most of the new ARM based development boards bottom out at $90 -- plus the shipping cost all the way from China --- and they don't have VGA and they don't break 2 ghz on the processor cores either. They might have quad core though, but the current crop of Android OSs don't use the quad cores very well, much less them 8 core versions.
GPU is Intel, so don't get overly excited about any super fast game playing and all that sort of stuff. Intel does do graphics, but is generally considered "competent and so-so" which is the best general description going for a Intel GPU.
Still, the Intel graphics GPU is supported by 4 gigabytes of memory so it shouldn't be too poky and stuttery (I hope). Shared video memory doesn't scare me for much, as games use the GPU and calculations use the CPU and there are few things that do both at the same time at full bore levels.
So, I bought mine through Ebay, and it will arrive inside of 10 days supposedly.
It will require some fiddling with binary blob drivers to get it all set up right, but what is that compared to getting everything I ever wanted in a device for only $80 shipped?
.....
Merry Christmas to me, Merry Christmas to me, Mistletoe and toe jam, Merry Christmas to me.===========================
Now, did I actually manage to meet my "triple up on the old white box for under $100" goals?
Yes, the old white box only had a single CPU core at 1 ghz, so a dual core at 3 ghz per core kicks that in the butt by 4x or better. And even if the video memory is shared with the CPU cores in some fashion it still has 4 gigabytes available vs the old white box that only came with 512 meg of video memory and 512 meg of systems memory (upgraded to a gig and a half over the course of the intervening years).
So CPU/graphics memory is a 4x as well, 4x on both the amount and the memory speed as well.
The Cost Ratio between the two devices is a whopping 0.036363636
$80/$2,200 or the new device only costs 3.63% of what the old one did.
Energy ratio between the two devices is a considerable 0.10
25w/250w or the new devices only uses 10% of the power used by the old one (and yes, I am being optimistic and using Intel's methodology).
Cost/Power ratio between the two devices is like ($2,200/1 ghz) / ($80/3ghz) or 82.5 times better ......
progress, she comes .... hey, it will be even better next year when you do it.
And I hope by then Ebay and its vendors have their act together much much better.