VIA Launches Its Own ARM Development Board

The latest company now offering low-cost ARM development boards for pushing their platform to ARM Linux and Android developers is VIA Technologies. VIA claims their new Springboard platform is "the fast path from prototype to production" and only costs $100 USD, but the specifications aren't all that impressive.

The VIA Springboard has a VAB-600 PCB that is a 10 x 7.2 cm Pico-ITX board with an 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The 2D/3D graphics are via a "built-in graphics engine" capable of doing OpenGL ES 2.0 and multi-standard video decoding but the specifics are scarce. With the 800MHz Cortex-A9 SoC is 1GB of DDR3 video memory, an onboard 4GB eMMC flash chip, 10/100 Ethernet, VIA VT1603A audio, USB 2.0 connectivity, and if spending $30 more there is a WiFi adapter. VIA says the Springboard will be supported by Linux and Android.

The VIA Springboard with an 800MHz Cortex-A9 and just 1GB of RAM isn't all that impressive from a hardware perspective. There's been numerous ARM development boards out with better cost ratios. For those after ARM Linux performance, the ODROID-XU is phenomenal with a Samsung Exynos Octa with being a quad-core Cortex-A15 and quad-core Cortex-A7 while having 2GB of RAM and selling for just $170 USD. There's also the PandaBoard ES, BeagleBoard, and other ARM development boards that offer better cost-for-performance ratios or those caring about the overall cost there is the Raspberry Pi.

More details on VIA's new Linux/Android development board can be found from VIASpringBoard.com.