[Arm-netbook] small exynos5 pc (ARM Cortex A15, 2gb RAM)

[luke.leighton]

[cc to arm-netbook and debian-arm, please bear in mind arm-netbook is
subscriber-only]

this is just to let people know that i had a fascinating conversation
with insignal's director, today.  insignal do the
http:/arndaleboard.org/ which is the developer board containing the
Exynos5 ARM Cortex A15 SoC.  he mentioned that they've been madly busy
getting the arndaleboard ready, working very very hard, so are going a
little easier on themselves before releasing the source code etc.
which kinda makes sense and explains the dec2012 release of the linux
kernel source etc.

but, the very interesting thing he mentioned was their plans to do a
$99 PC using the same CPU Board.  as it would have SATA and so on as
well as 2gb of RAM i get the impression that they could well be
overwhelmed with enquiries and orders, just from the free software
community alone, so as a community can i please encourage people to
take it easy on them and let them do the official announcements etc.
so that, apart from anything, they can focus!

the reason why i'm mentioning it on here, unofficially, is to gather
some informal input as to whether people would be interested in such a
device before contacting insignal again; what sort of features, uses
etc. what would people be prepared to pay for an initial run of 100 to
200 units as a test-run, and so on.

so - have at it! very exciting to finally have *early* contact with an
ODM who clearly loves free software, has the contacts and the
expertise to get access to cutting-edge processors.

l.

p.s. for those people who have been following arm-netbooks /
rhombus-tech, i promised to help insignal out with this mini PC
project, which they're already committed to: if that works out well,
they will look at doing an EOMA-68 CPU Card next year.  its maximum
speed when used as an EOMA-68 CPU Card would have to be ramped down a
bit to say 1ghz but hey that's ok.

p.p.s. the Exynos 5 at full speed and with all the other peripherals,
DDR3 RAM and so on, would be around the 5 watt mark.