
Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199 - Baustin
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9241234/Intel_39_s_first_39_open_source_PC_39_on_sale_for_199
======
benjamincburns
For some of you scratching your head about why this board is the way it is,
check out this Google+ thread from Darren Hart:

[https://plus.google.com/101378268367730737515/posts/DGQ9Nkr5...](https://plus.google.com/101378268367730737515/posts/DGQ9Nkr5hjK)

In the fourth comment he explains some of his design choices:

    
    
      One of those factors I mentioned above was making sure the
      board was "replicable". This adds a number of constraints,
      such as:
    
      * The price cannot include any subsidies (otherwise people
      could not recreate the board at close to the same cost)
      * The parts must have a long product life cycle (this
      eliminates some of the other chips that we might have
      considered) and be readily available (otherwise there would be
      shortages in supply and people wouldn't be able to source the
      parts to make their own)
      * Maker and hacker friendly meant including access to a number
      of buses and other interfaces, which also limited our part
      selection as well as impacting cost.
    
      There is a fairly lengthy story here, which I'm happy to share
      with anyone interested. All in all, I think we managed to come
      up with a very capable board that will allow people to tweak
      it and hack it and expand it while providing strong
      performance (especially in terms of I/O) and a decent price
      point. More on that as information becomes available...﻿
    

Edit:

To the best of my knowledge Intel has _never_ focused on releasing designs
that an individual can build/modify on their own. To me this represents a
_very_ exciting change in Intel's attitude toward "the little guy." Further,
to anyone looking to build their own hardware similar to the Raspbery Pi, good
luck trying to get Broadcom to talk to you, let alone give you a BSP or sell
you chips. Their NDA process/requirements is/are obscene...

~~~
pgeorgi
For a real world story on (not) interacting with Broadcom (and AMD, who don't
make a very good impression in that story either), read Jens' second comment
on
[http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/2463/](http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/2463/)
(Feb 21).

I'm just not sure if Intel's process is really better for small customers (but
you probably end up in the "small" tier faster than with Broadcom)

~~~
benjamincburns
> just not sure if Intel's process is really better for small customers

It depends on what you're buying, but for SoC processors and especially
chipsets, it's not so great. And re: "who's small" \- yeah, I think ~1M units
annually is still "small" to Intel.

However, some of their memory products (NOR and EEPROM come to mind) are very
attainable for smaller customers.

------
benjamincburns
This is exactly the type of marketing effort Intel needs in order to steal the
embedded systems market back from ARM. As an embedded systems hacker who
normally works on projects with budgets well under $10m, Intel has never
really been on my radar. They're incredibly unapproachable until you're a
bigger OEM, and chances are if you've started from scratch you're already used
to (and tooled for) designing for ARM.

Creating an open platform around Atom makes Intel much, much more
approachable.

With regard to price, I'm not discouraged _at all_. $200 is well within my
personal budget, and I've got a vision-heavy robotics project in mind that I'd
love to use this for.

Why not use an Raspberry Pi or a more powerful ARMv7 SBC? ARM software support
is getting better every day, but the vast, vast majority of software is still
written for x86. As examples, libBLAS, LAPACK, libav, OpenCV - all of these
were written and optimized for x86 MMX, then SSE*, first. Their performance on
ARMv7 has come a long way very quickly, but ARM performance is a secondary
goal for a lot of these types of projects.

Shit, how well does Matlab or Octave run on ARM? I know more than a few people
who'd salivate at the chance to write sensing/control code in Octave and run
it on a $200 SBC...

~~~
wolf550e
I don't know, but I guess HPC-type packages don't optimize for Atom. They
optimize for the performance oriented micro-architectures.

------
pgeorgi
So far their firmware isn't open source. Tianocore isn't useful on real x86
hardware without hardware initialization code (which Tiano doesn't provide).

Let's see if an Intel group manages to coerce the chipset group to release
those "precious" (but in reality, very boring) details on memory
initialization to the world.

So far I'm doubtful, even if it's "just" for Atom.

[edit: In fact, their website ([http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-
features/](http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/)) states "All
software will be provided in image and Open Source form (with binary elements
per IP restrictions)". That exception _will_ cover Platform Initialization
code...]

~~~
benjamincburns
I think internally this is a huge [1] experiment for Intel. They're saying "is
doing the work to support the low-volume 'little guy' going to do anything for
our high-volume sales?"

I have a feeling were it up to the people leading the project, the init code
would be made available. However Intel as a company is only going to take so
much risk in support of this experiment. I have a feeling that init code and
firmware for softloaded peripherals will be "business as usual" for quite a
while.

That said, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If this is successful and if
customers are very vocal about not wanting "half-assed" open systems, it
_might_ eventually get there.

1: Actually, in terms of resources I'm sure it's tiny. In terms of culture on
the other hand...

~~~
pgeorgi
I'm involved in the open source firmware struggle with Intel for a number of
years now. There are Intel customers with solid business cases, but it
actually got worse in the last few years.

~~~
benjamincburns
Can you say more? What's made it worse recently? I was witness to some
struggle between GumStix and Intel/Marvell back around when Marvell bought the
XScale processor line, but I've been out of touch with Intel on this issue
since then. However I've seen countless peripheral silicon manufacturers
maintain strangleholds on their softloaded firmware... Though with things like
wireless chipsets and DSP algorithms, it's arguable there's real IP there
worth protecting.

------
ChuckMcM
Sort of like the Pandaboard. Not as many GPIOs though.

Interesting that Intel is dipping its toe in here, At one level it validates
the ARM SoC market that is percolating around the embedded space but its also
typical in that this doesn't put any of the 'good stuff' Intel could put out
there into the market.

Perhaps most interesting has been the continued fraying around the
windows/intel empire, what with Microsoft offering an ARM version of Windows
on the RT and Intel building clearly not PC compatible motherboards.

------
jzawodn
Wow, is it just me or is Intel missing the market on this one? The price is
about 4x too high for what you get (compared to other ARM based boards) and
the size is a little big as well.

Who is this really aimed at, anyway?

~~~
Arnor
Apparently their market is developers who don't own computers:

> However, the MinnowBoard is still cheaper than most PCs and could appeal to
> developers looking to write and test commercial applications before they're
> deployed in servers, embedded devices and other computers.

I'm baffled as to why anyone would purchase this board. Raspberry Pi[1]
destroys it on price/value so _will_ Parallella[2]. Why not wait a couple
months and get a super computer![3]

[1] [http://www.raspberrypi.org/](http://www.raspberrypi.org/) [2]
[http://www.parallella.org/](http://www.parallella.org/) [3] Why do I think
anyone here needs these links?

~~~
walshemj
lets be honest the number of "developers" who can't afford a proper PC is
trivial in the USA just buy a newish pc second hand one ebay.

~~~
astrodust
You could probably find a computer better than this in the trash, some old
Pentium 4 with 2GB of memory.

~~~
Someone
Unless you want something more power efficient.
[http://www.minnowboard.org/static/pdfs/Getting%20Started%20w...](http://www.minnowboard.org/static/pdfs/Getting%20Started%20with%20the%20Minnowboard.pdf)
says this runs from 5V, 2.5A. That's 12.5W. Quite a lot for mobile, but a
Pentium 4 CPU alone will use at least four times that
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_figures#Pentium_4)),
for a < 2GHz variant.

------
jjindev
It's interesting, just yesterday I scanned the low cost system boards looking
for one with SATA. I was wondering if I should replace the old PCs I use as
filestores with something smaller, lower power, that could just run linux and
rsync for me.

This does it ... but as others have said, the price is not really attractive
compared to a used pc. I don't fault the design team for this. It looks like a
great little board ... but probably for strategic reasons Intel would rather
have us continue with those old pcs, rather than risk cannibalization of low-
end pcs.

Update: I think I was slow to see the embedded focus of this board and it's
IO. So of course it is priced against that world, and not the world of low-end
or used PCs.

~~~
joshu
[http://www.bigboardlist.com/](http://www.bigboardlist.com/) (note that this
is my project)

Cubieboard and Wandboard Quad both have SATA.

~~~
jjindev
Excellent, thank you.

FWIW also, comparing that $200 pricepoint, Newegg recently had a Lenovo server
Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GH Dual-Core; 4GB RAM; DVD ROM, no-disk, no-os, for
$250. (reputed backdoor at no extra cost!)

Update: I just went to techbargains and searched "server", that one was
recently expired. When I'm in shopping mode I just keep an eye on a couple
such shopping sites to see what comes by.

~~~
joshu
Please add links for that!

I'm actually thinking of building a hadoop cluster at home so something cheap
would be nice.

Foxconn has cheapo machines on newegg as well.

A while ago I bought a Fujitsu P180 and it was a lot of machine for the price
but the prices went way up.

------
cottonseed
I couldn't find the schematics or design files for the board.

~~~
zenlinux
Project member here. The hardware design files will be released in about a
week.

------
mylorse
How are these different than AMD Fusion boards already out there in the
market, with x86-64 and virtualization?

------
ck2
$200 for an atom board? Hyperthreading on an Atom?

This would have been interesting a decade ago.

------
dholowiski
ONE ethernet port. Why won't anyone give us nerds TWO ethernet ports??

~~~
tinco
It apparently has a free PCIexpress lane, so I think we can go nuts with the
expansions :D

------
synchronise
It was mentioned in this article that the Atom SoC uses a PowerVR based GMA600
graphics core. [http://liliputing.com/2013/07/intels-minnowboard-open-
source...](http://liliputing.com/2013/07/intels-minnowboard-open-source-low-
power-dev-board-ships-for-199.html)

Would someone be able to confirm this, because if it's the case then there
might not be as much Linux support, especially for 3D acceleration, for this
board.

------
vanderZwan
How is performance per watt? I mean, that's mainly what makes older Atom
boards interesting, isn't it?

~~~
mtgx
Older Atoms had about 10W TDP.

------
CPAhem
Since you can already get full ITX atom boards for around $60 on ebay, this
makes little sense to me.

[http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=atom+motherboar...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=atom+motherboard+itx&_sop=15)

------
zw123456
The datasheet does not have any power consumption info. How big does the PS
have to be? Otherwise it could be a useful board, $200 is a little steep now-
a-days. The APC is $100, the RPi is $40 etc.

------
knodi
$199 seem a little high.

------
CamperBob2
1 GHz?

32-bit CPU?

$200?

Really?

Who exactly is the intended audience for this board?

~~~
astrodust
Suckers.

------
gamebit07
Could someone gift it to RMS? :)

~~~
wmf
He'll just complain about the blobs.

------
jff
UEFI? Closed the fucking tab, we're done here.

~~~
yuhong
Huh?

------
andyl
You can already get a 4x4 Intel NUC machine on amazon for ~$150 with case and
mounting bracket. They are capable machines.

NUC with haswell processors (less wattage) coming this fall - price TBD.

~~~
zenlinux
Project member here. I was disappointed with the way the PCWorld article
described it as an "open source PC". MinnowBoard is really an open hardware
embedded platform. If you're looking for a small form factor PC, the NUC is
definitely the way to go. MinnowBoard is for embedded applications or product
development where interfacing with custom hardware (whether I2C sensors, or
custom FPGAs through PCIe, etc) is needed.

~~~
chj
I can't believe you guys price it at 199$, totally unacceptable as embedded
platform. at 1/4 of the price, there are plenty of ARM solutions. Why even
bother?

~~~
benjamincburns
It depends on what you're doing. If you're making an internet toaster, go buy
an arduino. If you're doing anything CPU intensive, or if you're not familiar
with embedded systems tooling, cross-compilation, Yocto or similar build
systems, Atom >> ARM.

I'll _very_ happily pay $200 for this.

~~~
sigkill
Honest question, no snark - Why not gut out an elcheapo laptop's mainboard
(Atom or AMD Brazos) and dedicate a usb port to an Arduino or something. You
get the power of x86 along with the expandability (i.e. GPIO, SPI, I2C, etc)
of a microcontroller chip.

~~~
benjamincburns
I've done sort of what you suggest professionally on projects where design
decisions are driven largely by per-unit cost. If the SoCs that do
_everything_ you need aren't cheap/available, go with the best-fit main
microprocessor to handle the heavy lifting, and one or two cheap micros to
fill in the missing pieces. It's also a good approach for when a part of your
solution needs good strict real-time software.

However for low-volume and/or personal projects, dev cost/time often trumps
hardware cost and heterogeneous systems have a whole host of secondary
challenges. Specific to your recommendation, it's a more complicated power
architecture, more components to enclose, more tooling to worry about
(software and hardware), and I have to worry about how to synchronize and
communicate between the SBC and the micro/arduino.

It's worth an extra $100+ to be able to focus my limited free time on solving
the problem I want to solve rather than on "shaving yaks."

~~~
sigkill
Ah got it. Thanks. I didn't think power would play a significant role, but if
it does then I can see why.

~~~
benjamincburns
It all depends. Are you running off batteries, or wall power? Does your system
have idle time that it can take advantage of for power savings? Were the
boards in question designed with features to allow for low-power sleep, etc?
Are you working with analog? Do your boards have low noise supplies, or do
they expect a low noise input source? Are you doing any high current or high
voltage switching? Is power-coupled noise an issue? Are we doing any switching
of mains power? Is safety an issue? Should we use isolated supplies? If so,
how much isolation do we need?

Software folks, myself included, tend to drastically underestimate the
complexity of power design...

~~~
vonmoltke
There is a reason an entire branch of electrical engineering is devoted to it.
A branch I am considering going back to.

