When Imagination Technologies first announced their developer program for MIPS Creator CI20 board, they did not disclose the price, but based on the specifications I estimated that a decent price would be $70 o $80. The company has now announced broad availability of the board, which can be pre-ordered for just $65 or 50 GBP depending on the continent you live in, with shipping scheduled for the end of January 2015.
This development board is based on Ingenic JZ4780 dual core MIPS processor with 1GB DDR3, 8GB flash, and features an HDMI output up to 1080p, Audio in and out, a Fast Ethernet RJ45 port, a Wireless module with Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi, an IR receiver, and expansion headers.
Several projects have already been ported by developers who got their free board a few months, ago including XBMC/Kodi, several games such as Spiral Episode 1, and beside Android 4.4 and Debian 7 officially supported by Imagination, operating systems have also been ported to MIPS Creator CI20 with NetBSD, Express Logic ThreadX RTOS, and Haiku inspired from the defunct BeOS.
XBMC 13.2 is not based on the Android version, but based on Debian, as the last blog update posted at the end of October, mentions the OpenGL ES user interface runs smoothly (30 fps @ 1080p resolution), but FFmpeg/Libav were crashing at the time, so video could not be played. Hopefully this is fixed. At least that means that 2D/3D graphics acceleration is working in Linux.
Hardware and software documentation, as well as Debian 7, Android 4.4, and other distributions images and source code are available on MIPS Creator CI20 Wiki. You can also go directly to MIPS github account to get the source code for Linux, U-Boot, mplayer, and others.
If you live in North America, you can pre-order the board for $65, and people living in the European Union or the United Kingdom can purchase it for 50 GBP on the UK store. If you feel lucky, three boards will be given away on a Rafflecopter draw embedded on Imagination Technologies blog post.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Hah, I knew those have the PoverVR in them, SGX540 with binary blob, no thanks.
The JZ4780, like the JZ4775, has a X2D GPU for 2D graphics with free drivers. Also a simple framebuffer with HDMI support is available.
The main problem i see is that the 3.0.8 kernel does not bring a good performance. Also a toolchain that support mxu ASE is needed to improve performance, but there are toolchains that have support for that ASE out there.
http://rhombus-tech.net/ingenic/jz4775/
ftp://grids.be/mirror/ftp.ingenic.cn/SOC/JZ4775/
ftp://grids.be/mirror/ftp.ingenic.cn/SOC/JZ4780/
With kernel 3.16 the overall performance is better, mainly NAND and ethernet:
https://github.com/ZubairLK/CI20_linux
More information can be found in the elinux CI20 wiki.
@José Vázquez
Yeah… IMO not worth the hassle… With an multicore MIPS64 cluster it might.
MIPS Creator CI40 is coming http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/a-new-creator-is-coming-soon
Not that many details yet, but it will be for “IoT applications” with two interAptiv cores, 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.1. No GPU, so it will be for headless applications, and the board also have an Ethernet port, and lots of headers.
No USB, no PWM?
Poky Linux / Yocto Project for MIPS Creator CI20 (meta-jz-mips):
Instructions: http://elinux.org/Build_Poky_with_the_Yocto_Project_for_CI20
Video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAQo3sKRUv8