Imagination surfs on open source hard wave
The low-power development board is squarely designed to tackle advanced graphics, video and audio, with a range of connectivity options for IoT applications.
“Although the board offers a compelling multimedia package which includes PowerVR graphics and a dedicated video engine, we see this being used mainly for IoT, wearable, mobile, home automation and casual gaming purposes (in that order of importance)” wrote us Alexandru Voica, the company’s press relations’ officer.
Available for pre-order, the MIPS Creator CI20 micro-computer (measuring 90x95mm) runs Linux and Android and caters a wide range of applications and projects, ranging from home automation and gaming to wireless multimedia streaming. It incorporates an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC which includes a 1.2GHz dual core MIPS32 processor and Imagination PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The CI20 board provides comprehensive connectivity, multimedia capabilities with dedicated video hardware for low power 1080p decoding at 30 fps, and substantial RAM and flash (1GB DDR3 memory, 4GB flash memory and an SD card expansion slot). The board is preloaded with Debian7, and other Linux distributions will be available, including Gentoo and Yocto, as well as a version of Debian 7 that complies with the principles of the Free Software Foundation. Users can also install the latest version of Android v4.4.
The first boards where originally introduced in August 2014 through a limited promotional giveaway for university students, developers, hobbyists and partners. Apparently, manufacturer Imagination was inundated with enquiries leading to an official launch, with the CI20 available to pre-order at USD 65, with units available at the end of January 2015.
If you were to compare it with other open-source boards, you could look at Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, but Voica insists “the really neat thing about this microcomputer though is that we have integrated 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 on the board and we also have on-board memory. This means that all developers need to buy is one board and then they are good to go (no separate SD card is required, no separate Wi-Fi or Bluetooth modules etc.).
Creator CI20 also includes FlowCloud support for application development focused on the Internet of things (IoT). The IoT platform from Imagination enables users to construct solutions for a wide range of applications, including security, personal and professional health monitoring, energy management, cloud-based systems for content delivery and much more.
Pre-order yours now at https://store.imgtec.com/
Related articles:
China’s quest for ‘MIPS in wearable’
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
