The guys over at BeagleBoard created an integrated chipset including CPU and graphics processing for as little as $149. With this small thingie you could do gorgeous stuff while using very little room. It'd be perfect for a Car-PC, for example. And for only $23 you even get a transparent housing for that little fella. And there's effort to port and maintain ffmpeg for this platform, making it quite multi-media-enabled.
This is probably as cool as Bug Labs wants to be. At least hardware-wise... a raw chipset is not quite as cool as a BUG, is it?
Ouch. The current Bug uses an ARM11, but the Beagle Board uses an ARM Cortex-A8, which is about 1.6X faster when running at the *same* clock rate, due to the Cortex-A8 being super-scalar with 95% accurate branch prediction.
ReplyDeleteThe OMAP3530 also has a fully-programmable DSP and a 3D graphics accelerator capable of 10 million polygons per second.
So, the core SoC (chipset) is far higher performance. Bug is neat for their form-factor and rapid-development software infrastructure.
I'm involved with the Beagle Board project, but I happen to also be a fan of the Bug Labs concept.