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

[peter green]

luke.leighton wrote:
>
> 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.
My main interest would be as a buildbox due to the relatively powerful 
(by arm standards) CPU and large (by arm standards) ammount of memory. 
For such uses i'd much preffer boxes that can be stacked on a shelf to a 
devboard that requires be to supply my own mounting and protection.

On the hardware side for this use Native SATA is a big thing. Native 
ethernet would be great too but I dunno if that is ruled out by the CPU 
card design*. Having the SATA hard drive inside would be my preference 
but if it has to be in an ESATA case that isn't a showstopper.

On the software side i'd want to see good support for debian/ubuntu. IMO 
android is fine for phones and tablets but it was never really designed 
to be a desktop OS.

>   what would people be prepared to pay for an initial run of 100 to
> 200 units as a test-run, and so on.
>   
I was already considering the arndaleboard at it's current price of 
arround $300 shipped, if you can offer the same core hadware and 
critical interfaces in a more conviniant form factor at the same price 
i'd probablly buy one for my personal use and depending on what else 
comes on the market between now and then quite possiblly a stack of them 
for raspbian.

*I find it strange that the CPU document available for download from the 
seller's site mentions built in ethernet but the arndaleboard doesn't 
use it instead using a USB hub with ethernet chip can you shed any light 
on this?