Trim-Slice: Dual-Core ARM Tegra 2 Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trim-Slice: Dual-Core ARM Tegra 2 Desktop

The Trim-Slice from CompuLab is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 nettop based on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform. In this article are our first Ubuntu benchmarks of this low power, fan-less desktop with comparative figures to Intel's older platforms and the OMAP4660-based dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 PandaBoard ES.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16918

[curaga]

Michael, other sources on the net say it gets hot. Can you measure how hot?

[[Knuckles]]

I hope that in a future article you can talk a little about 3D support and hardware video decoding.
Many devices such as this one tend to fall short on that department: they could do this, and that, and the other, but in reality the drivers aren't up-to-date/the sdk is unavailable/you're stuck with only an old linux or userland version.

[gururise]

Michael,

Thank you for these recent great ARM reviews! Could you please include power consumption for these ARM systems in your tests? It can be as simple as measuring from the wall plug.

Also, its very interesting that this Tegra 2 box beat out the Pandaboard with a "theoretically" better processor running at 20% higher speed with NEON extensions, and they managed this on an Ubuntu 11.04 distro with an older kernel.

Trim-Slice must have backported some ARM optimizations from the newer kernels to achieve this. I'd really like to see a comparison of both the Pandaboard (omap) and Trim-Slice (tegra) running on the latest Linux 3.2 kernel. That would make for a very interesting comparison.

[jannis]

Another interesting project to look at for small/tiny "desktops" is the "Rapsberry Pi"-board. It's more like the Panda-Board since it doesn't feature a case but comes with Linux pre-installed. It comes in two different configurations (RAM and with or w/o Ethernet) and is equipped with an Broadcom BCM2835 (ARM11, 700MHz).
Not to be ordered yet but will be out in some weeks.

@Michael: According to their blog, the guys will be/are in Las Vegas, too: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/495
Maybe you want to arrange a meeting

[Cyborg16]

Cool. When do we start seeing netbooks with these processors? What about a sixteen core 4GB device? Shouldn't have too high a power envelope...

[Micket]

What the hell is the "Line-out; Video-in" connector?

[Nobu]

From teh pdf:

Video input

The Trim-Slice video input is implemented on the additional pin
of the line-out audio jack. Use the 3.5mm to RCA adapter
included in this package and a standard RCA cable to connect
the Trim-Slice to an external analog video source.

[cynyr]

purpose/market

Okay, I keep looking at these ARM boards off and on and keep asking myself what would I do with it.

1. File Server, no go not enough SATA ports or an expansion slot.
2. HTPC, Not enough grunt to get 1080P or even 720P done. No flash so not Hulu, or youtube. Running full linux, so no netflix.
3. Desktop for grandma/kids, no flash as it is arm + linux based, no way to play those cheep games from the bin at bestbuy.

Does the arm world have something like PCI-E or even PCI? How about a way to get more than 4 SATA ports and Dual GbE Lan that isn't via USB2.0?

Anyways, could someone explain to me what I would do with a Trim-Slice/Pandaboard ES? Looks fun to play with and maybe it would work nice for a kitchen/embeded computer, but I'm just not getting it.

[wizard69]

Thanks for the continued ARM reporting!

The more that is see of thee ARM based systems the more I realize Apple was right to go this route for iPad. It is impressive that this hardware is beating Intel fairly consistently on an OS where the support isn't exactly the best.