
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.
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