

Tiny $45 cubic mini-PC runs Android and Linux - deviceguru
http://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-cubic-mini-pc-runs-android-and-linux-on-freescale-arm-cpu/

======
X-Istence
The downside is that the ethernet controller is run over USB. This is what
kills performance drastically on the raspberry pi as well. USB is simply not a
good protocol to run high speed network traffic over with low latency. The
protocol is extremely chatty!

~~~
makomk
Are you sure about that? The block diagram shows an Ethernet PHY connected
directly to the SoC, and it appears the i.MX6 has a built-in Ethernet
controller.

~~~
X-Istence
I am going off the bottom of the page
([http://cubox-i.com](http://cubox-i.com)), where it says it is limited to 470
Mb/sec due to internal busses.

470 Mb/sec sounds too similar to USB 2 to not be USB 2.

\--

Actually did the right thing and looked at the datasheets involved:
[http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/IMX6DQ...](http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/IMX6DQCEC.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Data%20Sheets&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation)

and

[http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.p...](http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Errata&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation)

This seems to be an internal limitation of the bus. It is not run over USB!
This means it will most likely reach that 400 Mbps claimed in the errata:

Quote:

ERR004512 ENET: 1 Gb Ethernet MAC (ENET) system limitation Description: The
theoretical maximum performance of 1 Gbps ENET is limited to 470 Mbps (total
for Tx and Rx). The actual measured performance in optimized environment is up
to 400 Mbps. Projected Impact: Minor. Limitation of ENET throughput to around
400 Mbps. ENET remains fully compatible to 1Gb standard in terms of protocol
and physical signaling.

~~~
digikata
If you want to really move network packets in embedded computing environments,
you need a processor oriented a little differently, the iMX6 is an embedded
multimedia processor, and for my 2cents, it's architected to do that job
pretty nicely. There's trade between power savings and a faster peripheral
bus. The Gigabit ethernet running at those specs I'm guessing pushes streaming
video nicely (I'm guessing sized for about enough bandwidth for a compressed
1080p 60fps stream with a little bit of margin).

~~~
X-Istence
It's still a limiting factor, especially for someone trying to build a media
server out of it for example like some people were already considering home
NAS's...

------
angusgr
Freescale i.MX6 is a really nice platform. Shame it hasn't gotten broader
traction, I think because it is moderately more expensive than its
competition.

Since May I've been using an imx6 based gk802 ($70 quad core "Android TV"
stick) as a personal server (email, RSS, VPN, etc.) Has worked really nicely
considering. (Blog post about installing debian on it:
[http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-
gk8...](http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-
gk802-android-tv-quad-core-arm-minipc/) )

~~~
voltagex_
Don't Freescale have a bad reputation for not being particularly open?

~~~
angusgr
I haven't tried any of their other products, but the iMX6 has a very large
detailed technical manual (publicly available, not under NDA) and their Linux
kernel trees are updated in public via git (presumably not everything is
public but it's a lot more transparent than the occasional tarball source drop
approach), plus they have people involved in yocto development. Better than
many/most of the ARM SoC manufacturers.

The only undocumented/secret squirrel business AFAIK is the Vivante GPU. And
that's universal across ARM Soc GPUs, sadly.

~~~
joezydeco
Here's the i.MX6 documentation and file dump:

[http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co...](http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX6Q&nodeId=018rH3ZrDRB24A&fpsp=1&tab=Documentation_Tab)

The TRM is also here:
[http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/IMX6DQ...](http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/IMX6DQRM.pdf?fpsp=1)
, all 7000+ pages of it.

I've built the Linux kernel and Android AOSP/ICS directly from their git repos
and it all runs just fine. You can ask support questions on
[http://imxcommunity.org](http://imxcommunity.org) but the response you get
will be sporadic. Your best bet at getting answers is to be a real customer
and get an FAE to help you out. But otherwise I've never had a problem with a
lack of "openness" from Freescale.

~~~
voltagex_
Thank you, this is fantastic!

------
IgorPartola
Just learned about these today. The nice thing about the Is that they have
crypto instructions on the chip and outperform the Raspberry Pi 40 to 1 when
using OpenSSL (at least according to benchmarks). With the price point cheaper
than the RPi (comes with a case, flash, etc.) these may have just won me over.

See
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=38411&p=39...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=38411&p=396499)

~~~
rwg
Looks like there's a (power gated!) hardware random number generator, too. It
uses ring oscillators, so it's not going to pump out hundreds of megabytes per
second like RdRand, but it's enough to at least throw a few kilobits of
randomish data into Linux's random device at boot time before turning off to
save power.

------
deadfish
I am keen to set up an emulation box to play MAME - Gamecube or greater. I am
not very knowledgeable on hardware... do you think this or the ODROID-XU would
be better suited to the job? My understanding is that most emulators rely
predominately on the CPU rather then the GPU, unlike most PC games.

[http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...](http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G137510300620)

------
mintplant
The BeagleBone Black [1] is also $45.

[1]
[http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black](http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black)

~~~
dspillett
That is without case though IIRC, where this unit is being sold as a complete
little "desktop" unit.

------
Someone
Anybody know or dare to guess how warm this thing gets? All I could find is
that it needs a 5V@2A power supply, but it doesn't tell how much of that is
overprovisioned for e.g. powering USB devices. If most of that is converted to
heat inside that box, I guess it gets hot (that's 10W in a package slightly
larger than an eighth of the volume and a quarter of the area of a light bulb)

~~~
justincormack
The original one does not get noticeably hot. I think there is some thermal
dissipation in the case, like a chunk of heatsink.

~~~
icambron
Happy to be wrong about this, but I wouldn't think that thermal dissipation
_in the case_ would make the case less hot. Where does the heat go?

~~~
grannyg00se
If the whole case is sinking heat, that's a relatively decent amount of
surface area to dissipate it. If the heat was a problem it would be pretty
simple to add additional surface area. The fact that they have not done so
would suggest to me that the heat situation is just fine.

~~~
Someone
That's my worry :-) _just_ fine, or fine by a wide margin? If this thing
dissipates 5W as is (without powering USB devices), I would think it gets
fairly warm. 2 inch = 5 cm, so area will be 150 cm^2, or 0.015 m^2, or about
300W/m^2 = one third of summer sunshine, radiating out of what looks like a
plastic enclosure.

------
Uberphallus
Well, as a not completely satisfied owner of:

eSata Sheevaplug: currently NAS, no video, soft floating point.

Raspberry Pi B/512: was a music server but the built-in audio is extremely
crappy, unbalanced GPU/CPU power (damn you, DTS tracks), now sitting in a
corner.

Cubieboard: (current music server, stable, faster than RPi but no video
hardware acceleration in linux).

I just bought this in without much thinking. I hope now I can run XMBC and
have hardware acceleration for video directly in Linux.

As some other said, Freescale is much more open than the ones I listed above.

~~~
Ecio78
Isn't Raspberry PI's gpu acceleration supported on XBMC (with the right driver
and/or dedicated distro?)

~~~
Uberphallus
Yes, but most HD content is delivered with DTS audio, and the CPU chokes hard
on that. So either you output directly via HDMI passthrough(which in my case
means a long ass cable from the projector to the speakers) or reencode.

Also, even if HDMI audio works for you, XBMC interface is sluggish in the RPi.
I'd check anything else for serious XBMC use.

~~~
Ecio78
I knew there were problems with some audio ouput, but I had read about the
possibility of passthrough - in my case it will be ok. I suppose the CPU
"choking" is only present when trying to let the RPi transcode the audio,
right?

I have a 2012 Panasonic Plasma TV and the integrated media player is so-so:
i.e. it doesn't support external srt subtitles when playing mp4 or mkv files,
so I have to remux them in mkv with subs in order to play them, and I was
thinking about getting a RPi (and also changing my Seagate Dockstar
tranmission/minidlna system with 2 or more disks NAS)

~~~
Uberphallus
In that case I think RPi can fit your needs, though the GUI will feel slow
anyway.

~~~
fian
Were you using a Class 10 SD card? The preinstalled SD cards you could buy
with Raspbian from places like element14 are really slow. Swap in a class 10
and XMBC becomes much more responsive.

~~~
Uberphallus
Class 10, but it's not the issue, as XFCE + XBMC isn't even close to swapping
in the 512MB model. It's more matter of CPU hogging on XBMC code (you can see
it using ~20% idling).

------
aray
Feature set is similar to the (non-enclosed) Sabre Lite development platform
for the Freescale iMX6 processors:
[http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-
bo...](http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-
board_computers/sabrelite?CMP=KNC-USA-SADK-FSL-SABRELITE)

What strikes me is that this is similar, but $130 (as opposed to $180 for the
iMX6 Quad dev board).

~~~
joezydeco
Knocking off a ton of connectors and cutting the PCB size down will do that.
The Element14/Boundary board has a _lot_ more signal lines broken out to
connectors, as a good development board should.

------
x0054
I think MK808 is a much better deal at the same price.

~~~
friism
No SATA though...

~~~
x0054
That's true, the IO performance is nothing to write home about. But the CPU /
GPU is really good. The only Linux I got working on it is Kali Linux. But
Ubuntu is also available. I think a SOC with dual SATA for raid would be
really cool for a small server.

~~~
Ecio78
Many "low-cost" (80-150$) 1 or 2-bay NAS (seagate, netgear, dlink, zyxel
etc..) can be "hacked" and the OS can be substituted with Linux. The
difference is that they don't have a video output, and I think the CPUs should
be more limited (many have Marvell Kirkwood 800mhz-1.5ghz), but they are
designed for NAS usage so multiple SATA ports, eventually gigabit ethernet
etc..

Having said that, probably the best home NAS could be built out of an HP
Microserver N54L: 250$ for an Amd Turion "small" server that supports up to
8GB of RAM (16GB sometimes), it has 4 (non-hot-swappable) disk slots (but
there are guys who have installed more using 2.5 disks and the dvdrom slot).

there are plenty of forums and sites showing how to do it, the only downside
is that it is bigger (but 4 slots) and it consumes more power

EDIT: I'm still deciding which way to go in order to substitute my old Seagate
Dockstar running Debian (and with a single old 2.5 disk attached to one of the
USB ports)

~~~
rjsw
The HP Microservers also have ECC RAM, Marvell Kirkwood based servers don't.

------
fragsworth
Extremely off-topic, but did the missing advertisement on the right really
catch your eye? More than an actual advertisement would?

"Companies serving the Embedded Linux Market are invited to advertise here"

It was the first thing I read on the page. Am I the only one?

~~~
Miyamoto
Are you left handed?

------
bdcravens
_Operating system — ships with optional Android 4.2.2 microSD card; supports
Android and Linux_

Pedantic, I know, but title sounds like you get a device that dual-boots into
Android and Linux. By "optional", I presume that means at added cost. By
"supports", I think that means you're on your own as to distro (though I
suspect a device-specific distro would come out in short order). The $45
version only ships with 512mb RAM - I run servers without windowing
environment in that space all the time, but perhaps one of the smarter Linux
gurus can comment as to suitability for running XBMC, etc?

~~~
brokenparser
No, it would be pedantic to point out that Android uses a Linux kernel. So it
really says "supports Linux and Linux", good to know it supports Linux besides
supporting Linux. Don't even think of running anything other than Linux!

~~~
marcosdumay
Lots of devices come with an Android distro that has a custom kernel for
supporting the device. Those ones can not run a GNU/Linux distro, so
manufacturers will tell you they don't support Linux.

No, it's not technically correct, but communicates the point quite well.

------
hdsjulian
I'm still looking for the optimal device to connect to my HiFi and TV. I used
to have a Fit-Pc2 but unfortunately it comes with a GMA500 chipset, for which
there aren't proper Linux drivers.

So what I want is: \- something that is actually available in Germany \-
Fanless \- At least 2 USB ports (4 would be better), so I can add external
HDDs as well as a DAC for good sound output \- Fast enough to run XBMC and
similar stuff (no, Raspi doesn't do that trick) \- WiFi \- HDMI

Optimal would be: \- an IR interface for remote controls \- Ethernet \- eSata
\- An internal Hard Drive

Any hints? Prices below 99 USD would be nice :)

------
ajtaylor
Will something like this run OpenELEC? There is a Raspberry Pi build for ARM,
but the download page [1] says it's specific to the RP. I saw things like the
Xtreamer Ultra but it's way out of my budget. Up to a couple hundred dollars
is acceptable, but I don't need a full mini-PC. Low power and quiet is far
more important to me than say a core i5 CPU.

[1] [http://www.openelec.tv/index.php/get-
openelec/download](http://www.openelec.tv/index.php/get-openelec/download)

~~~
DannyBee
They run something _like_ openelec (IE XBMC based). Geexbox is usually what
supports these things.

I use a mini-pc (a little asus eeepc box with a "who cares" intel cpu in it
and a nvidia gt620m running openelec). The reason is actually simple: A lot of
the embedded processors are much more finicky in terms of hardware decode.

I used to run geexbox on a TI OMAP4460, and it worked wonderfully, right until
you hit a track with DTS or DTS-MA audio, and then because it was not hardware
supported, it fell right down and couldn't even play at 3fps. Maybe with XBMC
now having a new audio engine (This was in the XBMC 11 days) the world is
different.

The hardware decoders were also not quite as resilient to restart and had
occasionally random failures compared to the nvidia chipset , which were very
annoying when watching movies. I have _never_ had this happen on anything in
the nvidia/amd/intel world, and anything that can't be hardware decoded, the
intel can absolutely handle.

Given the very low idle state of the newer haswell chips, unless you had a
strong desire to not be intel based, i'd see if i could find a mobile
motherboard and run openelec on a 15w TDP mobile haswell (or at worst, an itx
motherboard and core i3 haswell).

Basically, these boxes are fun if you want to futz, but just aren't really
"living room ready" unless you have a very fixed set of source video/audio.

~~~
voltagex_
I've gone with the WDTV series for my media needs - the earlier gens were very
hackable but they've turned on codesigning in the latest WDTV Live Media hub
range. They're not bad and play everything I throw at them (Sigmatek decoders,
afaicr)

~~~
weirdcat
I'm using an older WDTV LIVE and indeed, I never had issues with decoding
stuff. The downside is that it's somewhat limited, e.g. I cannot adjust audio
sync which sometimes gets quite annoying. Being able to jump 30s (and such)
back and forth instead of "analog" rewinding and fast-forwarding would be nice
as well.

I'm still waiting for a device that handles XBMC well, is responsive, has an
optical audio output and offers DTS pass-through -- apparently there's no such
thing. Lack of support for DTS/DD 5.1 pass-through is the main problem; last
time I checked Minix seemed to be close, but not there yet.

------
Pxtl
The market of these kinds of devices is booming... I'm constantly surprised
that no major Android company (or Google itself) has invested in this kind of
device.

~~~
RamiK
Google's Chromecast:
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast)

~~~
ClayM
Unfortunately the Chromecast is so locked down you can't compare them.

------
Osiris
I've been looking around for a device that can run Netflix + Pandora + XBMC
but so far each device I've found has some compromise or another.

~~~
kelvin0
I am one of the early backers of the OUYA, and I can confirm XBMC and Netflix
work great (don't know for Pandora).

The only issue I have with the OUYA is the weak Wifi support in XBMC, which
forces you to: A) link the device via ethernet B) Copy files via a USB
connection to OUYA

~~~
duked
I also was an early backer of the OUYA and couldn't run a decent netflix
version. I side loaded a netflix apk from a tablet version and the result was
really poor (low res and impossible navigation). Do they finally have an
"official" version of netflix ?

------
s_baby
The I2Ultra model could make a promising NAS with its gigabit ethernet and
SATA II.

------
dlhavema
a new one of these little computer in a box things seem to be popping up every
couple weeks, are they selling that well to warrant so many companies making
so many varieties?

~~~
ollybee
Is there a good website for keeping track of these ARM SoC PC's ? I'd like to
see at a glance what is currently available and detailed spec of the chipsets.

~~~
ytjohn
I haven't seen such a site, but the two sites I follow for these type of
devices are:

[http://www.cnx-software.com/](http://www.cnx-software.com/)
[http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc](http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc)

They do reviews on most of these devices. I have two mk802s that I'm trying to
setup as a sort of custom monitoring devices. This probably sounds like a form
of pen testing (and it is similar) but I'm working on having one of these
power up, search out open wifi networks, connect, then vpn into my server and
start posting stats.

Among other things I do managed wifi. In the past, I've had to setup some sort
of pre-configured desktop or laptop on site to do something like this. I'd
like to improve on that (and a < $50 price point is nice) by dropping one of
these off and letting it do the work automatically. I can do some access point
monitoring remotely (ping, ssh, https, number of clients), but doing a
speedtest and signal strength pretty much needs a device on premise.

~~~
Ecio78
+1 for CNX Software, you can find a mix of news, deals and reviews about
embedded devices and I think it has been around for some years

------
nodata
Something with pure dual gigabit ethernet please! (not over usb)

~~~
RamiK
CompuLab's Utilite Standard has that: [http://utilite-
computer.com/web/utilite-models](http://utilite-computer.com/web/utilite-
models)

~~~
voltagex_
I had a FitPC!

Do these have the same problem as the other Freescale and Marvel Armada based
boards that the GigE is hanging off USB2?

------
frozenport
I have seen too many of the same thing to be supportive of this project. I see
nothing here that hasn't been done, and still very little market, target
application or vision.

------
jheriko
but can i put windows 8 on it? :P

