Intel Education Tablets Come with a Temperature Probe, a Magnification Lens

Intel has recently announced 2 educational Android 4.x tablets: The 10″ Intel Education Tablet powered by Intel Atom Z2460, and the 7″ Intel Education Tablet based on the newer Intel Atom Z2420. Beside standard features such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, dual cameras, etc…, the tablets also come with items such as a temperature probe, and a snap-on magnification lenses for experimentation, as well as a educational software. The table below adapted from LinuxGizmos lists both tablets’ specifications side-by-side. 10.1″ model 7″ model Processor Intel single-core Atom Z2460 (“Medfield”) @ 1.6GHz Intel single-core Atom Z2420 (“Lexington”) @ 1.2GHz RAM 1G LPDDR2 Flash 16GB eMMC 8GB eMMC + microSD slot Display 1280 x 800 capacitive 5-point touch TFT LCD (16:10) with stylus 1024 x 600 multitouch TFT LCD (16:9) with optional stylus Wireless 802.11b/g/n; Bluetooth 2.1 EDR 802.11b/g/n; Bluetooth 3.0 (optional) Camera 2MP rear; 0.3MP front USB 1x micro USB 2.0 (Type B) […]

GizmoSphere vs Minnowboard – AMD and Intel x86 Embedded Boards Comparison

The Gizmo Explorer Kit is an embedded kit based on a development board powered by AMD G-Series G-T40E dual core APU that’s available since the beginning of the year. The Minnowboard is another new x86 embedded board, but this time based on Intel Atom E640 processor. Both cost $199, so a side-by-side comparison might be useful,and GizmoSphere team released a comparison table for both board, and is offering free shipping for the week with “Sharkweek2013”. Let’s have a look. The company only provided the table in image format, so I’ll reproduce it “as is” below, and see if there may be some correction or addition afterwards, the table has been designed by one of the competitors. The parts in yellow are supposed to highlight advantages of the GizmoShpere against the Minnowboard, but they conveniently “forgot” to highlight advantages of the Minnowboard. [Update 13/08/2013 – Gizmo guys have updated their table […]

LinuxCon North America 2013 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2013 will take place on September 16 – 18, 2013 in New Orleans, LA. The event will be co-located with several other conferences: the Linux Plumbers Conference, the Xen Project User Summit, the OpenDaylight Mini-Summit, the Gluster Workshop 2013, the UEFI Plugfest, the Linux Wireless Summit, the Linux Security Summit, and CloudOpen 2013. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, and legal, operations, and developers related sessions as well as tutorials and workshops. There will be around 150 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ve gone through developer sessions and selected one for each time period. Monday, September 16 10:35 – 11:25 – UEFI and Linux by Kirk Bresniker, HP UEFI has become ubiquitous on the PC client systems and is coming up on servers and ARM-based systems, it is becoming the converged firmware infrastructure. UEFI Secure Boot feature has attracted a lot of attention from […]

Android 4.3 x86 Test Image Is Now Available For Tablets and Netbooks

Android-x86 project has been working on porting Android OS to Intel and AMD Desktop PC and Laptop, and just about a week after Android 4.3 has been released in AOSP, the project’s team has already managed to provide an Android 4.3 x86 test image for desktop and laptop, probably helped by the recent push by Intel to have Android device powered by x86 processor. The test build (20130725) is based on Android 4.3 release (Jelly Bean-MR2 branch), and they’ve modified parts of the code to make it work with x86, especially on x86 tablets and netbooks. What’s impressive is that most of features appear to work, and they’ve almost managed to add some additional features. The key features in this release are Upgrade to the latest kernel 3.10.2 to support more drivers. Upgrade Mesa OpenGL ES library to 9.2-devel branch to support hardware acceleration for AMD Radeon and Intel chipsets (not […]

MINIX MINI HD PC Based on Intel Atom D2550 Sells for $119

MINIX MINI HD PC is a barebone x86 computer without RAM or hard disk that has been announced last year, and it has just come to my attention that the system sells for just $119 on Geekbuying (excluding shipping), so once you add (up to 4GB) DDR3 RAM, and a SATA hard drive, you may have a basic x86 Linux or Windows system for about $200. MINIX MINI HD PC specifications: CPU – Intel dual-core (4 threads) D2550 processor @ 1.86GHz Chipset – Intel NM10 GPU – Intel GMA 3600 Series System Memory – 2x 1.5V DDR3 @ 800/1066MHz SO-DIMM sockets supporting up to 4GB of system memory (GeekBuying reports that “8GB (4GB x 2) memory is supported unofficially, stability will not be guaranteed by Intel”) BIOS – 1 x 16Mbit flash with AMI BIOS. Supports Plug & Play, Advanced Power Management ACPI, STR, CPU temperature, Fan speed, System Voltage […]

$199 Minnowboard is an Open Source Embedded Board Powered By Intel Atom E640 Processor

Minnowboard is a development board designed by Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, powered by Intel Atom E640 processor @ 1GHz with 1GB RAM, SATA2 and Gigabit Ethernet support, and several embedded I/O such as SPI, I2C and CAN, and that ships with Angstrom Linux distribution. Minnoboard Specifications: Processor –  Intel Atom E640 @ 1GHz (32bit) Chipset – EG20T Intel Platform Controller Hub GPU – Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 600 System Memory – 1 GB DDR2 RAM Storage – 4 MB SPI Flash (for Firmware),  micro SD card slot and SATA Video Output – SDVO to DVI (over HDMI connector) Audio –  1/8″ (3.5mm??) jack line Input and Output I/O: 1x SATA2 3Gb/sec 2x USB host ports + 1x micro USB device 1x Serial debug via Serial (UART 0) to USB conversion (mini-USB-B port) 10/100/1000 Ethernet PCI Express Expansions: 8x Buffered GPIO pins 2x GPIO controlled LEDs 4x GPIO […]

Tizen Shows Up in Smartphones, Ultrabooks, and Cars

I’ve seen a lot of tweets about Tizen in the last fews days, mainly because Tizen Conference 2013 just took place. First there’s been Tizen 2.1 SDK release, and few demos have surfaced,  showcasing Tizen in their target devices: smartphones, tablets,smart TVs, laptops, and In-vehicle infotainment devices. Beside all the work done, the companies behind the project will also offer $4 million to developers who publish apps on Tizen store. There will be 9 categories. The best 3 games will get $200,000 each, and the best apps in the other 6 categories $120,000 each. Tizen App Challenge will start on June 3, 2013, and you can see details for this program here. Let’s see the demos. First Tizen in Samsung developer smartphone running Qt 5.1, and the usual Qt5 Cinematic Experience demo, as well as 2 others apps, both super smooth. (via TizenExperts). You can find more information in Qt […]

Intel Takes on ARM with Silvermont Microarchitecture for Low Power SoCs

Intel has launched Silvermont, a new microarchitecture for low power SoC targeting smartphones, tablets, and servers in data centers. Silvermont SoC will be manufactured using 22nm Tri-Gate SoC process, and the company claims 3x times more peak performance than current generation Atom processors, or 5 times less power consumption at the same performance level. Silvermont will be used in Bay Trail, Avoton,  and Merrifield processors: Intel’s quad-core “Bay Trail” SoC is scheduled for Q4 2013 tablets, and variants of the “Bay Trail” platform will also be used in market segments including entry laptop and desktop computers. Intel’s “Merrifield” is scheduled to ship to customers by the end of this year, and actual smartphones will show up in 2014. Intel’s “Avoton” will be used in low power microservers, and provide full server product capability that customers require including 64-bit, integrated fabric, error code correction, Intel virtualization technologies and software compatibility. Intel […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC