Applied Micro XC-1 Server Development Board (Mustang) is Now Available to Developers for $895

64-bit ARM server boards such as Applied Micro XC-1 Mustang and AMD Opteron A1100 development kit have been available since the beginning of the year, but only to selected companies, and at a price of several thousand dollars per board. Applied Micro is now offering their X-Gene based XC-1 development board to individual developers for $895, or about ~40% discount to the $1495 company now have to pay for the board. It may also be available from distributors (part number: EV-883208-X1-PRB-1). XC-1 board (codenamed Mustang) technical specifications: SoC – Applied Micro X-GeneAPM883208-X1 8-core ARM 64-bit @ 1.6 GHz System Memory – 2x DDR3 UDIMM memory slots up fitted with 2x 4GB sticks (8 GB), upgradable to 16GB Storage – 1x 128Mbit SPI NOR Flash for booting, 1x SATA 3 ports, SD card slot, 1024Kb and 256Kb I2C EEPROM Connectivity – 2x Gigagit port (SGMII), 10 GbE SFP+ cage, 1x Gigabit […]

Unboxing of Ugoos UM3 Android and Ubuntu ARM mini PC

Ugoos UM3 is another minic PC powered by Rockchip RK3288 SoC with 8GB storage, 2GB RAM. It has Wi-Fi, but no Ethernet, so it looks like the offspring between a full-sized TV box and an HDMI stick. The company sent me a sample for evaluation pre-loaded with a dual boot image with Android 4.4 & Ubuntu 14.10. I’ll start by unboxing, and opening the device, before testing the dual boot image another day. Ugoos UM3 Unboxing The company sent me the device via DHL in a package for RK3066 / RK3188 devices, but I guess end-users will get an update package that will probably look similar. I was surprised how tiny the device was when I first took it out of the box, and with a black body and red cover, it’s probably the cutest too. It comes with a 5V/2A power supply and corresponding USB to micro USB cable, […]

Compulab Utilite2 is a Snapdragon 600 Powered mini PC Running Android 4.4 or Ubuntu 14.04

Compulab Utilite is a family of mini PC based on Freescale i.MX6 processors that can run either Android or Ubuntu, and was launched in 2013. The company has now introduced the second generation of Utilite computer with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad core Krait 300 processor, with 2GB RAM, eMMC and mSATA storage, and various network connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, and Cellular. Utilite2 will be 30% smaller than the original Utilite computer, and twice the performance of the Utilite Pro with I.MX6 quad.  There are two models: Utilite2 4GB, Utilite2 SSD, with the latter adding a 32 GB SSD. Apart from that both models share the same specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064 quad-core Krait 300 @ 1.7GHz with Adreno 320 GPU compliant with OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 / 3.0 and OpenCL System Memory – 2GB DDR3-1066 Storage – 4GB eMMC, mSATA socket (mini-PCie form-factor, […]

Preliminary Ubuntu Image for Tronsmart Draco AW80 Octa-core mini PC

Tronsmart Draco AW80 is an Allwinner A80 based mini PC pre-loaded with Android 4.4. A preliminary Ubuntu image is now available for the device. It’s still a little buggy, but you can access LXDE desktop on an HDMI TV, Ethernet is working, and web browsing is apparently working nicely. Known bugs include FAT32 partitions are read-only, wireless mouse and keyboard are not working (USB versions are OK), shutdown does not work, the user interface is not as snappy as in Android, and YouTube video playback is choppy. The last two issues could be related to the lack of VPU and GPU drivers providing video hardware decoding, and 2D/3D hardware acceleration respectively. The good news is that the company working on Draco AW80 got the GPU drivers from Imagination, and an updated image could be available with hardware acceleration. I’m not sure sure about VPU support, which is extremely important if […]

Linaro 14.11 Release with Kernel 3.18, Android 5.0, & Ubuntu Utopic. Debian 8.0 Gets ARM64 Port

Linaro 14.11 has been released with Linux kernel 3.18-rc5 (baseline), Linux 3.10.61 & 3.14.25 (LSK, same versions as last month), and Android 4.4.2, 4.4.4, and for the first time Android 5.0 Lollipop. There’s also been some news with regards to Linux desktop distributions, as Ubuntu baseline has been upgraded to Utopic (14.10), and Debian 8.0 (Jessie) will officially support ARM64 with 93% of packages built as of November 5th. Android Lollipop images are said to be built for TC2, Juno, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and FVP models, but I could not find the images. Finally, it’s the first time I’ve noticed Hisilicon X5HD2 development board with a dual core Cortex A9 processor, but apparently it’s the same as Hi3716cv200. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.18-rc5-2014.11 updated GATOR to version 5.20 updated topic from Qualcomm LT (include IFC6410 board support) updated integration-linaro-vexpress64 topic by ARM LT (FVP […]

Firefly-RK3288 Development Board in Mass Production, Selling for $140

Firefly-RK3288 development board has been an interesting, yet confusing story, at least to me. We’ve first heard about the Firefly board on July, but I was privately told in September that the board would only be sold in China by a T-Chip sales person, only to see it become available for $189 on Ebay, as well as on Taobao a few days later. But those first boards may have only been engineering sample, or more likely from a limited trial runs, as the company has now announced mass production had started. Let’s refresh our memory with the specifications: SoC – Rockchip 3288 quad core ARM Cortex A12 / A17 up to 1.8 GHz with Mali-T764 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 /3.0, and OpenCL 1.1 System Memory – 2G DDR3 Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot Video Output HDMI 2.0 up to 3840×2160@60p VGA out (D-SUB connector) Dual MIPI, Dual LVDS and and […]

Dual Boot Ubuntu 14.10 / Android 4.4 Image Released for Ugoos UT3

There has been several Ubuntu images released for Rockchip RK3288 based devices, even dual boot Android / Ubuntu images, first thanks to Ian Morrison who published instructions to install Linux on RK3288 devices based on the work done by T-Firefly team, then Nagrace released a preliminary dual boot Android / Ubuntu for HPH NT-V6, Open Hour Chameleon can boot either Android or Lubuntu from an SD card, and more recently Ugoos released a dual boot Ubuntu 14.10 / Android 4.4 image for their Ugoos UT3 mini PC, as well as a demo video. Three images are now available for Ugoos UT3: Dual boot (Android 4.4.2 – Ubuntu 14.10) – ut3_dualboot_0.1t.rar Ubuntu 14.10 only – ut3_ubuntu14.10_v0.1.rar Android 4.4.2 only – ut3_2.0.4.zip As a side note, I love mega.co.nz links as the download speed usually maxes out my Internet connection bandwidth. There are two files and one folder in the dual boot rar file: […]

Imp Computer is an Ubuntu 14.04 mini PC Based on ODROID-U3 Development Board (Crowdfunding)

Hardkernel ODROID-U3 is a development board powered by Samsung Exynos 4412 quad core Cortex A9 processor that’s both small and cost effective at $59, not including required storage and shipping. An Israeli start-up named Imp Computer has now launched a mini PC of the same name, based on ODROID-U3 board, and running Lintux Ubuntu 14.04 with Cinnamon based Imp Desktop environment, and various pre-installed software packages like Chrome and Firefox web browsers, Kodi/XBMC, etc.., and somehow Microsoft Office with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are also listed, which does not seem right on an ARM Linux machine, but they are apparently using Microsoft Office Online to achieve this feast. Imp computer specifications: SoC – Samsung Exynos 4412 Prime @ 1.7 Ghz with ARM Mali-400MP4 GPU @ 440MHz System Memory – 2GB @ 880MHz Storage – 8 or 16 GB internal storage (micro SD card) USB – 3x USB 2.0 Host […]

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