Does The Single Board Processor Hold The Key To Low Cost - Blog

The world is riding the smartphone wave. Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy series and Xperia Neo will surely ring a bell as they are household names today. A telecommunications device strictly meant for verbal exchange over great distances has come from a rudimentary transmitter-receiver assembly to being what it is today ? capable of stunning tasks; sleek and small, it carries capabilities of the fastest PC that existed three years ago. There is advent of other devices too like tablets and one of its kind Galaxy note 2 which boast of superb computing capabilities. People know the devices and their capabilities but many of us never wonder what is inside the sleek slender body of the gadget and more importantly the power it holds within.

You may have heard of processing speeds and GHz and dual cores and multi-cores while picking out a phone for yourself and wondered what it means for a user. Well, devices work on the primitive principle of the computer ? they have an input unit (keypad/touch screen), a processor (which has the speed and the cores) and the output (screen itself), though innovation and development has made it starkly different from what PCs look like. Processors are the core of a device. Some examples are iPhones A6 (1.3 GHz), Samsung?s snapdragon and ARM cortex (1 and 1.5 GHz) and Sony Xperia?s single/dual core ARMv7. (I?ll cut the technical stuff now and move on to the point I want to make)

Phones are basically single board computers with pre-installed operating systems, softwares and firmwares. The same genre of processors that I mentioned above, are being used by engineers around the world for development and research; for stunningly creative purposes and for ridiculously cheap costs. The resulting applications are? ingenious and give an insight into what the technology has come to today and how being just a little more vigilant can help them utilize and appreciate the marvel of embedded engineering that is a handheld device. Raspberry Pi ? a charity developer association based in the UK has developed a ?credit card? sized single board computer that plugs into a monitor/TV and a keyboard, and works just like a computer (well for most non nerd purposes).

The Raspberry Pi has a 700?MHz ARM1176JZF-S core, an open GL GPU unit (it can play high definition video), 512 MB RAM and USB 2.0, HDMI port, SD card slot for memory extension, Ethernet and possibly every other on board peripheral that a laptop has (barring Bluetooth and wi-fi ? which can be added on). The OS platform can be anything ranging from Android to embedded linux. That is not even the best part. The company is a charity organization. They have a niche target (their motto is ? a computer for everybody?. They target schools and envision children learning programming on their own ingenious devices so they focus on innovation and not on marketing. This is still not the best part. The device comes for $25 (yes, you read it right!).

If this device starts shipping to India, it can give the grossly unsuccessful Aakash tablet a run for its money. Schools could have fully touchscreen boards with video capabilities. Small businesses can adapt to the mobile revolution better with lesser capital and technology will become pervasive where it?s not so much currently. The government can implement technology in its operations and without the ?getting used to technology? delay. Cheap and faster computing would be available to households and mobile data exchange will have a completely new definition.

Open source developers are taking initiatives in this direction with projects springing up on Kickstarter which claim to manufacture processors with ambitious processing capabilities. Parallela ? a supercomputer for everyone, is a similar concept which aims to put 64 cores on silicon by 2014 (the highest right now is 48 by Intel ? claiming an 80 core processor in the pipeline).

First, it was the PC, second the smartphone and now the world is set for a new technological revolution called the single board computer. Companies like Texas instruments, Cypress semiconductors, ARM holdings, and almost every other company involved with computers and its peripherals in investing heavily in the segment. With a little bit of effort and ingenuity on the part of the users, this ?can lead to a world scenario which would be a spitting image of a Speilberg sci-fi movie.

Image Source | Theiia, BBC, Oxford blogs & Documentally

Prakhar

Writer | Musician | Basket-baller | Engineer | Dreamer || No greater God than your passion. No drug more intoxicating than Music.

Source: http://www.watblog.com/2012/11/02/does-the-single-board-processor-hold-the-key-to-low-cost-computing-in-a-post-pc-era/

long island serial killer wizard of oz jeff green aortic aneurysm minnesota timberwolves jr martinez melasma