Other options in this space (far more expensive! but similar ARM on a board style)
http://gumstix.com/store/catalog/index.php (although sadly they don't seem to carry the basix/connex, which are the same kind of power class as this)
The board he's built would have lower BoM cost than either of those. And if he's manufacturing them in similar quantities then maybe he can get the cost down.
If he's looking at production runs of similar numbers to wireless routers then I think $25 is completely believable, as cheap end wireless routers approach that cost new now.
[1] http://s.dealextreme.com/search/wm8505
For now, the Trimslice is pretty exciting (and shipping, and of course in a very different world)
Thanks for the pointer to the Mini2440 -- i haven't seen that one yet.
The FriendlyARM stuff looks damn cool--thanks to the grandparent for pointing this stuff out!
I don't know, I mean presumably he's thinking OLPC-esque. I could see this being at least as popular as the WM8505/VT8500 devices just on price (price having being those devices _only_ selling point), and then the education angle picking up some more bulk deals with education departments.
is he really going to contract out to a chinese factory?
Does anyone not contract out to a Chinese factory of some kind, these days?
For now, the Trimslice is pretty exciting
That is exciting, I hadn't seen those before! Thanks for the link.
Of course, as you say that is a "different world". The Trimslice is four-generations of ARM along the line, in x86 spec equivalents it's a Pentium III compared to a Core 2 Duo.
Cheaper, lower power consumption, and almost the same processing power. It works for me, sure I can't use proprietary software, or something like dropbox that requires a proprietary daemon, but I don't really miss it much. At first you notice but as you use it more, you come to realize that you really didn't need it.
Sorry if this was a huge wall of text, I am responding via my phone.
I meant the analogy the other way. That the USB stick computer is the Pentium 3 equivalent and the Trimslice is "four generations along the line", something like the Core 2 Duo.
Believe me, I'm extremely excited about the performance/costs power nexus of these new ARM cores. :). And well jealous of your Cortex-A8 build farm.
(I did get at least one thing wrong in my reply, which is I somehow thought the USB stick computer was ARM9 not ARM11. So it's only 3 generations of ARM before the Cortex A-9, and that's disregarding all the other lesser-used ARM cores that came between.)
PS Please don't make sweeping statements like There are probably other things incorrect in your comment, that's just plain rude.
And pretty much any game that runs on an iPhone could run on an ARM desktop. Off the top of my head, popular "mainstream" games that I can think of would be Street Fighter 4, Mirror's Edge, I'm sure there are more, I just happen to have those 2 installed on my iPhone. ARM machines can also run Android, as long as you are willing to put in the kernel work, and most companies do these days.
The EfikaMX has a "desktop" version as well as a netbook version. They are both almost identical, although the netbook version doesn't have any video out. It also runs off of a 3 cell battery, and gets somewhere in the range of 6-8 hours of solid usage, not just sitting there almost suspended. They(i.MX515) pack the AMD(ATI)z430 3D unit, which runs at 133MHz (the i.MX535 version will run at 200MHz); This is also known as a Qualcomm Adreno, although the Adreno uses a z180 instead of z160 for the 2D unit, not sure if it uses something other than the z430 for 3D. The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz.
I'm not sure what graphics card will come with the ARM11, but if it does 1080p and OpenGL ES 2.0, then I'd guess that it's a Mali. I could definitely be wrong, but really, at 25 dollars, even if you only played with it every once in a while, it's probably worth it. And if they do a buy one give one like OLPC did, I'd definitely order a minimum of 4. I hope they are able to, and I'll be watching closely.
There is much more to a GPU than simply clock speed. Since modern GPUs do everything with programmable shader units, the number of units acting in parallel makes a big difference, as well as the efficiency of the units (cycles per instruction). Many mobile GPUs' shader units can be counted on one hand[1], while a modern AMD or nVidia GPU has hundreds (though the different architectures make a direct comparison of numbers almost meaningless).
[1] I had a hard time finding exact specs last time I looked, but I seem to remember reading about one popular SoC whose GPU had in the neighborhood of 4 pixel shader units.