Wandboards
#1
I found these two boards:

Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 Single/Dual core
512MB/1GB RAM
microSD card slots (two)
HDMI and audio jacks(3,5 and optical s/pdif)
!!! SATA connector!!!!
USB, serial and Ethernet ports
Wandboard Dual includes 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth
GPIO pins
an EDM connector

the GPU is over twice as fast as NVidia Tegra 2 (90MT/s) and over 5 times faster than Mali 400 (30 Mt/s). 5 times is exactly the performance improvement announced earlier for Mali T-604

1080p video playback at 350 mW

Details of boards:
http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details

And the price: f***ing unbelievable: 69$ and 89$
Big Grin
What do you say? Tongue


Softwares (Ubuntu, Linux Angstrom and Android) won’t be available until mid-November when Freescale lifts the non-disclosure agreement on its i.MX6 software.
Shipping starts in the middle of November 2012 when the Freescale i.MX6 Cortex-A9 is made public available for the general public

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#2
Quote:Given the fact that the Wandboard processor is the Freescale i.MX6 which is currently still under NDA the sourcecode and software cannot be made public available YET. We however will post the full sourcecode for all projects as soon as the processor is being launched and the NDA's are being lifted.
Sounds great!
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#3
"We currently use the software proivded by the Freescale team as a basis. It's our idea to provide an initial support package for the Wandboard and let the community carry it into the OpenEmbedded tree and so forth."
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#4
Any ideas where one could get a decent case for these babies? Looks very good to me! :-)
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#5
git://git.linaro.org/bsp/freescale/linux-linaro.git

The branches for different kernel versions will be named like below:
lt-3.2-imx6
And so on, the corresponding branches with debian packaging are named as:
lt-3.2-imx6-ubuntu

Hardware Accelerated Graphics
Due to boot performance issue, the graphics kernel driver has been built as a module.

Hardware Accelerated Video
The video codecs from Freescale along with the gstreamer plugins are currently packaged in the private PPA until the freely redistribution issue could be solved.

iMX53 has good support, documentation, I hope iMX6 will be open enough for XBMC not as the chinese products.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site...QSB&fpsp=1
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#6
no SATA and no USB 3.0 according to their forums:
http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/forum...RDJBcFkcAJ
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#7
Sigh, not only there's no sata, but duallite and solo have not vivante GC2000 GPU and 1080p60 L264 decode, but just vivante GC880 (less than 1/4 of the GC2000 performances) and 1080p30 D1 decode.....

so Gpu is just slightly faster than mali400 (35Mtri/sec vs 30) and still less than half a Tegra2 (source: multimedia under http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site...MX6DL&fr=g )
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#8
(2012-10-09, 22:06)mtpiu Wrote: Sigh, not only there's no sata, but duallite and solo have not vivante GC2000 GPU and 1080p60 L264 decode, but just vivante GC880 (less than 1/4 of the GC2000 performances) and 1080p30 D1 decode.....

so Gpu is just slightly faster than mali400 (35Mtri/sec vs 30) and still less than half a Tegra2 (source: multimedia under http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site...MX6DL&fr=g )
So, in other words: "this isn't the board we're looking for"?
I gather it's got potential to perform much better than the MALI400, but not given the sorts of tasks typically performed under XBMC usage?
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#9
(2012-10-09, 22:41)FeloniusMonkey Wrote:
(2012-10-09, 22:06)mtpiu Wrote: Sigh, not only there's no sata, but duallite and solo have not vivante GC2000 GPU and 1080p60 L264 decode, but just vivante GC880 (less than 1/4 of the GC2000 performances) and 1080p30 D1 decode.....

so Gpu is just slightly faster than mali400 (35Mtri/sec vs 30) and still less than half a Tegra2 (source: multimedia under http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site...MX6DL&fr=g )
So, in other words: "this isn't the board we're looking for"?
I gather it's got potential to perform much better than the MALI400, but not given the sorts of tasks typically performed under XBMC usage?

I didn't say that, just GPU is not 5 times faster than a10 (that's freescale Mx6 Dual, not dual-lite), HD video transcoding likely can't be performed realtime (1080p30 likely means that full capacity is used for decode....) no way to decode 3D (need 1080p60).
This board is still good but not really for gpu, only for cpu performances (dual-lite version, solo version is again..... similar to a10).
The sata will not be there in the first revisions of the board.
When the board will use dual (and not dual-lite) or quad version of the freescale processor, we'll have what's described in the first post (2 times the performances of Tegra2)..... not before

The major differences may be linux drivers?
Actually I'm swearing in what this board is different from am-logic ones, maybe for video encoding....
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#10
Good explanation! Just curious if everyone reading this thread is in a similar frame of mind as myself: Waiting for a nicely-packaged, sub-$100, USB-stick-sized, ARM-based computer that has open drivers (for hardware acceleration, mainly), will support 1080p without a stutter, and will grab enough developer attention to get its own Linux build, and therefore run XBMC without a hitch? I was optimistic that this wandboard would be it-- albeit, a little larger than USB-stick-sized, but still $100-ish. Just waiting for that "holy grail" of hardware to arise from the dust, so I can outfit all the rooms in my house with it.
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#11
Hum, I think the wandboard still may be your object, or you can check j1nx blog at http://www.j1nx.nl/

-for the smart tv box which has an enclosure and should be able to do almost all what you ask ( I heard linux drivers are almost there, but still haven't heard of any xbmc port.... )
-and/or for the smart tv stick

Keep in mind that, if linux is a priority like for me, it's better to wait to see real code and real linux tests (someting learnt from the a10 experience).
Also sooner or later something with 5x the gpu power of the mali 400 will come in the market (actually Sabre Lite board it's a real quad Freescale i.MX6 with 1 gbram and should have a non-wifi version for about $199... ), so get what you see you can be satisfied with for your needings or wait for more.....
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#12
As I see Kernel is released for MX6, said with multimedia drivers:
MPEG4/H263/H264/VC1/MPEG2/AVS/MJPEG/VP8 decode and H263/MPEG4/H264/MJPEG encoder.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/05/v...lopment%29
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#13
(2012-11-05, 13:11)pszab Wrote: As I see Kernel is released for MX6, said with multimedia drivers:
MPEG4/H263/H264/VC1/MPEG2/AVS/MJPEG/VP8 decode and H263/MPEG4/H264/MJPEG encoder.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/05/v...lopment%29
This is great news. Can't wait to start seeing some pre-fab systems!
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#14
Opps
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/18/f...lopment%29
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#15
(2012-11-18, 14:14)pszab Wrote: Opps
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/18/f...lopment%29
What does opps mean?
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